Le Monde du Beaute

Yeah, I took a year of French in high school and it has really served me well, even though the French would probably disagree... But just in case you are not at all familiar with the language, the title of my blog is the World of Beauty.

If you ask me, the so-called beauty industry is whack! On TV, on one channel you have a woman bemoaning the fact that her hair is too curly and frizzy so she bought the thingamajig that irons her hair (and btw if you order now, you get the nose hair clipper with automatic defroster in a corinthian leather holder that clips to your belt). If you flick the channel you will see another woman saying that her hair is too straight and flat and Esteban (or is that the guy that sells guitar lessons?) is selling her a product that will get her hair looking like Slash from Guns'n'Roses except you can see her eyes.

I confess that I cannot come across one of those beauty informercials because I will sit there transfixed for hours, staring at the before-and-after pictures and listening to their crap and wondering how, just how, I have managed to live for 52 years without hair extensions for $29.99. How have I managed to get by?

One of my favorites is Adrianne Arpel, who must be like 80 years old by now but still wears mini-skirts, has collagen (fish) lips and sells her line of products for the Mature Woman (read: women who need to spackle their faces before they even put foundation on). She sells a kit, and I'm kidding you not here, that has well over 20 assorted creams, cremes, balms, spackles, lotions, gels, and "treatments." Actually, instead of investing in all that stuff (which comes with a cute woven raffia tote and weekend bag, hmmmm???) what would help some women would be electroshock treatments. That would really straighten us out. Then we wouldn't even watch these dumb infomercials. We would snap out of it, we would.

I'm a mature woman, but I can't see myself wearing all that stuff or paying beaucoup bucks for it (see my French kicking in again? It just flows out of me....). Most of the time, when I look at the before and after pics I feel badly for the woman in the "after" picture. In the before picture, she looked like a normal, nice person with maybe some dark shadows under her eyes. In the after picture she looks like someone from the old tv show "Dark Shadows." She doesn't even LOOK LIKE HERSELF and Adrianne has colored in her lips all crooked and stuff! Pathetic.

Ladies, ladies, the best thing is to be natural, which does not mean to look like you have a half-inch of putty on your face and to wear a lip color of such fuschia tone that does not exist in nature, or it does but only on exotic orchids, not on real lips. Which brings me to another related subject: If I was a man, I would not want to kiss a chick with gobs of gloss on her lips, that is just icky (well, just the thought of kissing a chick would be icky for me). And yet women spend a lot of dough on gloss and stuff like that... It's not kissable, it's YUCKY.

If you think about it, people are just big gobs of cells and hair with some nail thrown in. We are not meant to be artificial, we are meant to be gobs of cells and hair. We are not meant to be attractive, we are meant to imbibe enough alcohol to forget the fact that we are gobs of cells and hair and find the other person temporarily "do-able" so we can reproduce, have babies and raise them and be done with it. But unless you are horribly disfigured, and even if you are, whoever loves you will love you whether or not your hair looks like Axl Rose, or in spite of the fact that it does. You can't HIDE behind the microns of Bare Essentuals (they really spell it that way), or behind the creams and the horrible royal blue eye shadow that is supposed to make you look "dramatic" but instead winds up making you look like "crap warmed over."

AND being a mature woman, I don't think women my age or older (Yeah, Adrianne, that totally includes YOU) should aspire to look or act "young." We should act and yes, look, our ages. Maybe brush our hair neatly, maybe use a little lipstick in a natural color, maybe use some mascara, you know, accent whatever we have left that looks ok, always be clean and neat and smell good (that is always a big plus), but not the gobs of makeup or the collagen lips that makes all the women that have had the procedure look like they belong to the same genus of fish.

Wysiwyg, that is always the best way...