before I understood what the point of this ritual really was.
Now I know that adornment is a natural instinct. All over the world, men and women alike invest in beauty rituals to make themselves more attractive. In the Serengeti, Masai warriors spend days decking themselves out in tribal gear, adorning themselves from head to toe with vibrantly coloured jewellery and clothing. They paint their faces and plait their hair in elaborate weaves. Some of this decoration serves as an indicator of each man’s position in the tribe, and some is simply for beauty’s sake – but in either case, the goal is to stand out from the crowd and attract a woman. It can take a warrior and a companion a week to apply the embellishments. A week! That’s a pretty significant amount of time for a man who’s also in charge of keeping his family’s livestock – and his family – safe from predators.
Why am I talking about the beauty rituals of men in a book meant for women? Because they help us understand that the desire to look beautiful, the drive to stand out, isn’t restricted by age or culture or gender. In fact, it’s not even restricted to humans. Animals also possess an instinct for visual attraction, as with the infamous peacock, the spirit animal of my earliest makeup attempts. Richly hued flowers flirt with insects who might spread their pollen near and far. Wanton trees and vines entice animals with beautiful, ripe fruit so the seeds can be dispersed. All of us, from birds to bees to humans, are hopelessly attracted to bright, shiny colours, which is why nature uses them to such great effect.
In the animal and plant kingdoms, beauty is an evolutionary imperative, but when it comes to humans, it is about so much more. Clothing and adornment and makeup can be part of a personal narrative, can be about belonging, about blending in, or about standing out. Beauty is an instinct we all share, but our definitions of what is beautiful and our expectations for ourselves and others are shaped, in part, by cultural and social values.
Throughout our lives, we are exposed to ideas about what beauty is, how important it is, and what we can do to make ourselves more beautiful. When we are young we are receptive to those ideas almost without realizing it.
THAT YOUTHFUL GLOW
When my sister and I were fifteen-year-olds painting on hot-pink lips and sparkly blue eyes in an attempt to look older, we were oblivious to the fact that most women actually apply makeup to look younger. When it comes to fifteen-year-olds, nature is in the habit of generously handing out rounded cheeks still plump with baby fat, bodies unaffected by gravity, and shiny, silky hair. Of course, as self-conscious teenagers, we never would have thought of ourselves as beautiful.
In fact, few women seem to fully recognize the attributes they possess when they possess them. I think we’ve all had the experience of looking at a picture that was taken ten years ago and thinking, “Wow! I was so young and pretty back then. But I know I didn’t feel that way when the picture was taken. Why didn’t I realize how great I looked?” The truth is that you didn’t appreciate how great you looked then because you weren’t thinking about where you were on your journey through life. That moment when you thought you looked “old”, when you were twenty-five or maybe thirty-five, is the same moment you are experiencing right now, when you are both the oldest you have ever been and the youngest you will ever be. And in ten years, when you look at a photo of yourself that was taken today, you will notice how young you look, and wonder why you didn’t realize it then. It’s just what we do.
When you possessed those attributes of youth, you also probably didn’t think about the fact that that they wouldn’t last forever. You probably couldn’t imagine that one day you would notice that your skin wasn’t as smooth as it used to be, or that the hair on your head was becoming less lustrous, or that random hairs were cropping up in strange places. You couldn’t possibly envision that your body would find itself on the losing end of gravity at some point. But there comes a time in all our lives when we become aware that we are starting to age. We find our first grey hair or notice laughter lines in the mirror that seem to have appeared overnight. And at that moment you might ask yourself: What the hell is going on?!
Well, dear female friend, what is happening to you is also happening to every living organism on the planet, because all living creatures age. The process can take one day, as in the case of the mayfly, or as long as 250 years, as with giant land tortoises. As soon as we are sexually mature enough to reproduce, ageing happens to us all. With each day that goes by, imperceptible changes are taking place within our cells, and as the decades accumulate, those changes begin to show up as streaks of grey, and as wrinkles, and in a lot of other superficial ways.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF ANTI-AGEING TREATMENTS
The desire to be forever young is not a modern-day preoccupation – just ask Ponce de León. Anti-ageing procedures have been around for millennia. Some are gross. Some are weird. Some rely, ironically, on dead people. And some, even more ironically, will actually kill you. Here’s a brief history of the anti-ageing industry.
Circa 70 BCE:
Cleopatra reputedly enjoyed facial masks made of readily available crocodile poop from the Nile.
Ancient Egyptians:
Used eye pencils made of lead, a heavy metal linked to skin diseases, infertility, and death.
Ancient Greeks:
Sought youthful skin through application of white face cream laced with, you guessed it, lead.
Ancient Romans:
Relied on the ammonia in urine to whiten their teeth.
1513:
Ponce de León set out to find the fountain of youth. Ended up in Florida (currently the state with the highest percentage of elderly people in the United States) instead.
Circa 1600:
In the kingdom of Hungary, Countess Elizabeth Bathory reportedly bathe in the blood of virgins to maintain her youthful glow, giving rise to centuries of vampire legends.
15th-19th century:
Europeans learned nothing from the fall of Rome and sought fairer complexions by using poisonous creams made of lead – because dying young is a great way to stay young forever.
1905:
Surgeons began to offer skin-tightening procedures whereby they made a couple of facial incisions at the side of the face and tugged the skin back. Voilà: the facelift was born. The first textbook on the subject was published a year later in Chicago.
1906:
Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, which said that Americans must stop putting poisons (like lead) on their faces.
1992:
Botox was introduced as a treatment for brow wrinkles, and we began to inject poison into our faces instead of simply applying it on our faces.
2010s:
A predilection for exotically sourced face masks emerged, a throwback to Cleopatra’s reptile-excrement treatments. Bee venom and placenta
