I just read on a website called “American Conservative” the following bizarre statement:
A growing obsession with physical beauty has shaped our culture, fostered by images, art, and media.
Given that Americans are known throughout the world as people who don’t care about how they look, I have got to wonder what possessed this blogger to say something so patently idiotic.
It was only after living in the US for a few years that I learned that it’s OK to cross the street and pop into the convenience store for a pint of milk without changing into “street clothes” and putting on makeup. For somebody of my origins, living among Americans is both disturbing and liberating. One can wear anything at all, and not only does nobody make nasty comments, but you are guaranteed to get compliments. Because everybody cares a lot more about being nice than about beauty.
I can’t think of a single culture where physical beauty is less important than in the US. In Latin America, the numbers of very young kids with plastic surgery is sky-rocketing. A friend from Venezuela said she barely met anybody under 25 during the recent trip home who hadn’t been operated or wasn’t saving for an operation. In my culture, things are even worse.
Clarissa's Blog 
RE operations, is it beauty those people are after or some kind of Look, which is “in”? I sometimes see pieces of Russian “Let’s Get Married” and the enhanced by surgery lips and breasts look doesn’t seem beautiful to me. Often, it’s extremely vulgar, mimicry of sexual arousal (full lips) look, which supposedly attracts a certain kind of men and puts off many others. Are Latin Americans different in this regard, looking more tasteful?
In Israel people are like in US rather than Russia, I am glad to say. Many young people are naturally good looking and have no need for make up anyway. In general, in my family women used make up very rarely, so I have never paid much attention to it. Applying moisturizing creams, especially in Israeli climate, seems like a good idea, but things like lipstick and eyeshadow are optional. The one thing I am going to use and am already looking with sadness to this day is coloring white hair. My grandmother never did it since her hair stayed black till death, but I got other genes. 😦
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A bit off-topic, but what’s the deal with colouring white hair? First Clarissa, and now you, do seem to speak rather mournfully of the subject. I can understand the fun of changing the colour of one’s hair, but seeing people speak of it as a necessity once one’s hair begins showing white seems very strange.
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Ugh, hair! Right now N and I are in the midst of talks on the subject of my hair that are similar to the default talks in US government: they go on forever and never lead anywhere.
I suddenly developed quite a lot of grey hairs. So I feel like I need to color it. But I really really don’t want to do it. And N doesn’t want me to do it either. I keep hoping he will convince me to color it but he is refusing.
Since my hair is not dark, the grey hairs are not recognizable as such but I know they are there. And the knowledge daunts me.
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It’s precisely this framing of the subject in terms of need that I don’t understand. I’m beginning to get grey hair too (the women in my family go grey early, and get fully white hair in their mid-thirties) and all I plan for it is to start using all the silly colour dyes I can’t use on my dark hair without bleaching it if I get bored of having black&white hair and decide I’d rather have it black&lime green or something. But this is having fun with it, rather than needing to cover it up. Seriously, Clarissa, if you keep hoping N will convince you to do something you don’t want to do, maybe you just shouldn’t do it.
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This is a terrific idea! I will do this when I start to go gray too. (Takes a while in my family, though. It’s decades away for me.)
(I love the way white streaks on black or dark brown hair look, too, though.)
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Wanted to ask when you began paying attention to make up and why. Was it because your mother used it or influence of classmates or only your own love of it?
In general, if you’re interested to post about it, what is your ideal of human beauty, both for men and women and why, if it was influenced by society too? I suppose, each person has one and people supposedly use make up since they think it helps to reach this ideal. Or are there different, more important reasons? My question isn’t only about make up, but much wider.
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No, my mother isn’t into makeup a whole lot. She sometimes remembers to put on some mascara but that’s about it. But people in our country are mean. One would go outside and receive nasty stares and critical comments about one’s appearance every 10 feet. There were days when I couldn’t force myself to leave the house at all because I didn’t want to face people. One gets neurotic about one’s appearance after a while of this.
One of the reasons I never travel back to Ukraine is because I don’t see a reason to subject myself to all this rudeness and nastiness. My sister traveled back there several years ago and was seriously traumatized. She had emigrated as a child and didn’t really remember what people were like.
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White Zimbabwe is a bit like that. Pretty rude people commenting on your physical appearance. I don’t think they realize how low that makes them look.
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Last comment for now: once a man, who lived for years in Europe, came to the Russian program, and he was more attracted to a woman, who looked more “natural”, probably because of living in Europe too for a while and leaving some Russian habits behind. The attraction was instant, before she said a word. Of course, one may say he would’ve been attracted to her in make up too, but I think a huge part of attraction is feeling you’re “on the same wavelength” with another person, and people sense it already from the first glance.
Wouldn’t call using little make up as not caring about beauty, but rather I see it as having another standard of beauty. There are several of them in the world, after all.
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What you are describing isn’t really attraction. If presence or absence of makeup influences it, that isn’t attraction.
To give an example, N is the only person in the world who can wear flip flops and not make me shudder in horror. 🙂 And I have a profound aesthetic and ideological aversion to flip flops.
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US folk are really freaked out about beauty. They seem to be very suspicious of it – there’s an association of beauty with shallowness that makes no sense to me. The most beautiful people I’ve ever seen were old enough to grow a deep and very interesting personality, which glowed from behind their facial features, turning them from pretty to I’d-gladly-shout-your-name-on-the-last-battlefield-of-my-life beautiful*. There’s this weird body/soul dichotomy that pretends beauty is either physical and therefore not meaning anything, or mental/emotional and therefore the equivalent of “she’s a very nice person” as spoken of a person the speaker feels guilty about finding entirely unattractive. Bloody Puritans have to ruin everything, I guess.
*And if you think you can’t see someone’s personality well enough to realize there’s this amount of depth to it in 1 minute of interacting with a non-tired, non-defensive, non-extremely-bored someone – not well enough to explore all the deep bits, of course, but enough to realize they’re there – I’d say you’re from the US 😛
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Apologies in advance for any weird grammar or syntax – my doctor is finally allowing me to eat, drink and be merry, so I’m really not in the sort of mindset where English and Romanian are separate languages with separate rules and styles 😛
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Are you OK? Were you sick?
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Oh, I’m perfectly fine now. Had an episode of gastritis, was not allowed to eat anything heavy or spicy or drink anything alcoholic for a month. Thankfully, the prohibitions wore off just before my boyfriend’s birthday party.
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Yup. I totally agree with that. This is how things are for USA people. Also the melding of personality with facial features is very, very possible, especially as one gets older. That is what has happened to me.
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Yes, almost everyone is cute when they’re 20, but it’s when they get older that many people become boring and some people become extremely beautiful. Passion leaves marks on the face.
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I wasn’t so cute at the age of 20, really. I have much improved. In fact, recently, since I have begun cutting my own hair, I have improved even more.
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My hair regulates its own length. It never gets longer than a certain length even if I don’t cut it for several years.
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Mine doesn’t get too long, but these days the hair dressers charge way too much and don’t really do a good job, so I have hairdressing scissors, and I layer the front part and then I find I can turn my head upside down and give it a circular trip and after that take the thinning scissors to it and create long layers. In all, this effect suits me much more than the tailored look that hairdressers try to achieve, which is hard to upkeep.
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I agree completely. We have a saying in my country that by 40 everybody gets the face they deserve. 🙂
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@Clarissa:
That’s cool!
I’m not sure if mine is like that or not. I haven’t cut it for a long time — I’ve lost count of the years — and most of the time it doesn’t seem to be growing but sometimes I’ll notice it doing something it’s never done before, like brushing the backs of my thighs, and then I’ll realize, oh, it is still growing.
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So I’m American and I think this is really romantic.
But I totally recognize what you’re saying about how Americans talk about beauty, too.
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Conservatives are turning against the emphasis on physical appearance, since they feel that women can dominate men too easily on this basis.
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I disagree. Americans care much less about dressing properly, which to me is not the same thing as not caring about physical beauty.
The state in which I live in illustrates this very well. People will go to the gym and exercise, wax and tan and dye their hair. Botox is popular, as well as implants. But they will go to dinner in short shorts and a tank top. Or they’ll pop in a convenience store with no shoes and not wear a shirt even though they are miles from the beach.
What is fashionable is deliberately ugly, uglifying or sloppy. It’s the kind of look that doesn’t age well.
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Yes — you are supposed to be beautiful, but casual. I am not sure why so many are so opposed to wearing nice-looking clothing on the daily, but dressing in unflattering, aesthetically weak ways seems to be almost a religious value. Perhaps it has something to do with the idea of not having to dress well to show status. Notice how persons of color do not dress down in the same way, as much — cannot afford the risk. (Is this why so many white people let themselves go / dress in rags to the degree they do? Because of not being among those absolutely required to try to show some tone in their appearance? I am not sure about that but it is a hypothesis that occurs to me now.)
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Have you ever written about how you met N? Suppose he had been wearing flip-flops when you met him? Would you have just dismissed him?
When you love someone, you find him or her attractive regardless of what they are wearing, or if they’ve brushed their hair, but before you get to that stage there has to be some spark so you want to get to know them better, and some of that comes from how they look. This all seemed so much easier when I was younger!
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You are so right! I realized that what I felt for N was true love when he wore this very bright green shirt and I still thought he was beautiful. 🙂
The flip flops, though, I don’t know. I’m very neurotic about them. 🙂
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