For my sixteen-year-old daughter getting dressed requires the right fit, hair, face. She possesses piles of clothes, practically collects beauty and hair products. She can rate mascara. “Face masks are soothing,” she says.
She didn’t learn this from me. I’m a wash hair rarely, never blow dry, “no mascara since my twenties and barely then” gal. But she learned this from me as I learn it from her. None of us truly escapes this; by 2025, the global beauty industry is expected to produce revenues of over 700 billion dollars.
Does every brand of clothing has its own sizing?
Recently, when we were hanging out while she looked for jean shorts online, she wanted to know why pants are sized so differently. She pointed out there isn’t one true size for each size?
I shrugged. Who hasn’t wondered why this brand sizes me this way and that brand that way? I exercised a lot of restraint by not spitting out the first two words that came into my head, which were capitalism and patriarchy.
Later, I remembered making this discovery, less specific memory than some amalgamation of teen me in a dressing room trying to shimmy into jeans, hopefully with a size that didn’t make me feel horribly horrible about myself (read: fat). Certain details from various dressing rooms mesh into one: the claustrophobia-inducing patch of worn carpet cordoned off by flimsy curtains. Only the mirrors were large.
Societal, social and personal pressures converge in dressing rooms
So much converged in those dressing room moments; hours poring over glossy magazines filled with television characters and pop stars, all those conversations with peers, and offhanded remarks from parents, plus strangers’ stares. To want to look a certain way in a society that wants people especially those in female bodies to look certain way is learned over so much time that it’s basically impossible to unlearn.
I am much older than my daughter. I know that I can break any self-imposed fashion rule I might have created and still be just fine. I know, especially the older I get, that nobody’s really looking at me. Except me. I am looking at me as she is looking at herself.
I wonder how and what message to convey to my daughter
This has rendered me very confused as to what I could tell her or what I could model for her that might help her to navigate a world where admittedly the mirror took steroids and put us under a microscope all the time. I don’t want to tell her not to care because she does care. I want to help her, and me, care in ways that feel make us feel good about the real people we see, the real people we are.
I’ve bought into and then critiqued and then bought into beauty culture countless times. Although we’re told we shouldn’t fear aging, we’re also told we should age gracefully. I covered my greys in my thirties until a blend of boredom, thriftiness, and environmentalism boiled over in my forties and I stopped.
I stopped covering my grays in my forties
It probably would have looked better to blend in the grey and the dark hair as highlights, but I couldn’t bear any more fuss. When I let the grey trickle down in real time, I felt defiant and liberated.
Aesthetics played a role in my choice to go grey, too. As my skin tone changed, I thought there was an increasingly stark mismatch between skin tone and the dyed, darker than my “natural” brown. I thought the discrepancy made me look older.
In our culture, as a woman, looking younger means looking better. At times, silver is “in” and at other times, most times, it is not. I can say it’s just my hair. But nothing is “just” my anything, which I try to remember when I want to tell my daughter not to worry about some aspect of her looks.
She is worrying about her looks. To tell her not to care isn’t useful. To tell her she looks better x way than y way isn’t useful, either. To beat up on myself in front of her is bad modeling. To beat up on myself away from her is probably just as bad.
I can’t tell my daughter not to care about her looks because that’s not realistic
There’s no dumping of a truth like, the beauty industry is making money off our insecurities that’s going to make her no longer care about her appearance or her skin any more than it’s stopped me from caring. I can’t name one person who does not care.
I keep interrogating myself about why I get focused on my self-identified flaws and how can I remain in an honest conversation with myself and others about feeling trapped inside these cultural expectations. I don’t want to say too much to my daughter; saying too much as a mom is rarely a good idea. But I do toss critiques of the culture in sparingly.
Mostly, I affirm her—and her beauty—to the moon and back.
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