- Miss Piggy
I'm a redhead.
Who knew? I certainly didn't. Up until recently, I hadn't seen my natural hair colour in fifteen years. From the first, tentative streaks of pink as a teenager, to the bleach blonde bob that was my trademark for half a decade, I've been dying my hair: both in the sense that it was dyed, and in the sense that I had killed it. Long, short, white, grey (by accident), red, fluorescent orange (by accident), brown, black, fringe, crop, bob: I have done it all. All, that is, but leave it alone. I'm nearly thirty years old, and I've just discovered that the mean boys at school were all absolutely correct and I am, in fact, ginger. Or auburn, if you're going to be kind (and they weren't). Which I suppose explains all the freckles.
Beauty causes great internal conflict for me. The shy, introverted, bookworm part of me finds beauty and the concept of it uncomfortable: finds the idea of chasing it, or bowing down to social expectations of it essentially dull, stupid and shallow. Judging the internal by the external - making any kind of evaluation based on our packaging - leaves me vaguely angry and self-righteous. There are things to be doing other than checking our nails and extending our eyelashes, after all, and the cerebral part of me finds oohing and aaahing over lipstick a little nauseating and inexplicable. That part of me would far rather read Dickens than Cosmopolitan; refuses, categorically, to wear make up if I'm just going shopping, and is happy to wear the same pair of army trousers for a week. The girls - the kind who judge the world and everybody in it by how pretty or how handsome they are - make me sick and bored and anxious. And the boys who like those kind of girls? They make me even more so. Which is all totally understandable: I wore knee length jumpers for my entire teen years, spent so much time buried in books I didn't see my own face from week to week, and my cerebral, shy mother used to tell me as a child that washing up liquid was "all I needed for my hair" and that she didn't "believe" in moisturiser (as if it was some kind of fairy, or Santa Claus).
The other part of me, though - the creative part, predominantly - tends to fall more towards the concept of personal beauty as one of the highest forms of art, and on that I'm more like my father. As Oscar Wilde claimed: "To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances." When nothing, really, matters - when life is so transient, and so short, and none of us really know what the point of it is - there is an ugliness and stupidity in ignoring what beauty already exists, or in not trying to find it or create it or augment it wherever possible. For if we can write beauty, and we can paint it, and we can sing it, and we can carve it, why the hell should we not embody it as well? How can the world be a beautiful place if the people in it are not becoming part of that? And in painting ourselves, are not women finding a creative outlet for self expression prohibited, by society, to most men? Are they not taking back a little of the creativity that they've been denied for centuries? Is it not, in that sense, the purest concept of feminism? Is beauty, then, not to be celebrated and treasured and protected just as a poem is, or a story, or a song: more so, in fact, because it is more natural and more temporary?
And that part of me - the part of me prone to making daisy chains and putting them in my hair - is the part that very much enjoys reading Cosmopolitan and painting my eyes with green metallics and reading the ingredients on fifteen bottles of moisturisers and discussing the best way to apply foundation. That part of me finds it incredibly offensive that my intelligence can be called into question in any way at all because I find skincare interesting, or because I know how to apply mascara properly. That my in depth knowledge of King Lear can in anyway be undermined by the fact that I enjoy dipping my fingers into sparkly eyeshadows now and then; that my ability to hold a coherent argument can be questioned because I like looking at shoes. And that part of me is also the part of me that develops girl-crushes on beautiful women constantly, and tends to fall horribly in love with horrible, beautiful men, and values beauty - all kinds of beauty - far more than it should be valued. Because I sometimes mistake beauty, in all of my love for it, as something than runs deeper than it does.
Beauty, for women, is hard. I'm sure it's hard for men too - what with all the daily shaving they have to do - but it's harder for women. We value ourselves by it more, and we are valued for it more. We have been brought up to both chase it and reject it: to prize it immensely, both for ourselves and as the means of Catching A Man And Having A Family, and yet also to fear it, because of what it often implies about our intelligence and what it will one day say about us when it goes. And it's a balancing trick all women have to try and perfect: being pretty, and being interesting, and yet not minding too much that one day we'll be neither.
The key, of course, is to work on both at the same time: to be beautiful where you can see it, and to be beautiful where you can't. To understand and love your own unique brand of it - the thing you bring to the world that nobody else does - without making it everything. Being able to rely upon the beauty we can't see. To be capable of enjoying external beauty, and loving it, but still retaining the ability to walk away from it when we have to, and hold on to what's inside.
Because red hair, blonde hair, dark hair, short hair, long hair, no hair, we should all be able to walk away from the outside kind of beauty. For there's only one thing we can all be sure of:
One day, it is going to walk away from us.
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