Beauty

I am a woman. What don't I know about beauty? I have breathed in its instruction since I was a little girl, twirling in my mother's favorite dancing dress, hearing, "Oh, so sweet." I have absorbed the guidelines for beauty from my culture to include painting black around my eyes, and red on my cheeks and lips, but not the reverse. My ears are full of the praises and ridicules of those who abide by our group guidelines, and the faults of the unfortunates who weren't born with some measure of beauty. As if that were possible.

Martin Luther talked about the alien dignity of people, the automatic value a person holds simply by existing. We seem to understand the intrinsic value of someone who has had a tragic accident and loses mobility. But a person with a quirky or awkward gait, we allow no mercy. Our culture sees beauty in conformity, and anything that does not conform is deformity.

What are these group guidelines to beauty? They tend to be conflicting. To be beautiful, we must disallow hair to grow where it will. However, we also need to make sure that hair will grow where it has decided it won't. A few years ago, a pierced ear disaster was when the holes enlarged. Now, we try to enlarge the holes by inserting larger and larger grommets, like the people we used to gawk at in pictures from the National Geographic. While we don't (yet) see a spatula-shaped lower lip as luscious, or a neck distended by stacked rings as elegant, great wind-whistling holes in our ears are to be desired.

To be considered attractive, we slather ourselves either with stuff to make our skin darker, or with stuff to keep us from getting darker. We cut our hair to help it grow out. For cosmetic reasons, we try to eat less than we need, while much of the world is trying to get just enough, for non-cosmetic reasons. Conflicting as our rules are, no one wins. If our group guidelines were made to define beauty, they only serve now to shame us. Shame is an ugly thing.

I have spent many years being confused by our ideas of beauty. But now that I am an aging woman, I can see where beauty rests. Those who are fully themselves, unapologetic and laughing, these are the beautiful people. The person who lives in confidence of his or her own value, alien dignity, is as lovely as the trees and the stars. The simple beauty of enthusiasm is a universal cosmetic, lighting all shades of skin and levels of income with a rightness that makes our ideas sing like a sympathetic violin.

I asked my friend which of the following expressions best summed up beauty: "If the house needs painting, paint it," or, "A woman is beautiful in proportion to the amount of makeup she can afford to leave alone." His answer was that the two ideas aren't mutually exclusive. Which put me right back in the spot of having to decide for myself how much of the real me will be exposed. I prefer seeing people as they are, without much artifice. I have decided that the reason everyone says "Aah" when the girl from Ipanema goes walking is because she is herself.