The Ugly Duckling: a personal fairytale

Vanity and devilry, better known as "makeup" and "fashion."
Photo by Shannon (but editing by Moi).

And now a tale about a certain young girl's battle with the fearsome beasts known as Makeup and Fashion. Let’s get the facts straight:

1. I was the first of my sisters to grow up (aka I’m the oldest kid in the fam). Which means I faced the makeup/fashion battle alone.
2. Also, I grew up in the MECCA, so naturally I assumed that makeup and fashion were very worldly things that only vain supermodels were concerned about.
3. Plus I grew up watching movies about girls who were too busy being tomboys to care about blow-drying their hair or plucking their eyebrows. And yet they all managed to turn out beautiful! (I call it “The Curse of the Movie Star”)

So add all that up and you get one teenage girl who thinks that if you just eat healthy, brush your hair, and try to match your shoes with your shirt, you wouldn’t need to worry about makeup or fashion. Naively she assumes that the natural is the most beautiful. *sigh* What adorable ignorance.

Well, the hormones struck and my hair texture changed without informing me, and all of a sudden I was sticking out like a sore thumb from all my classmates. And because I’d shunned makeup during the preteen years (the years when it’s appropriate to overdue the eye-shadow and the body glitter), I found myself in high school, severely lacking in the makeup/fashion skills and unable to perform the necessary experiments to gain competency. It was a tough situation.

[WARNING:  rambling rant/tangent ahead] Seriously, I didn’t figure out how to tame my mane until I was a senior in high school.  In fact, I didn't even realize I had curly hair until 10th grade! Which is ironic considering that I look like Shirley Temple these days. And let me tell you: working with curly hair is way different from working with straight hair (i.e. brushing = death for curls). So, basically, I was a duckling-who-thought-she-was-a-swanling, and consequently looked nothing like a swan or a duck. Not so awesome.

Anyways … like I said, I didn’t have any older sisters to point me in the right direction, and all my girlfriends were pretty much tomboys suffering from Movie Star Curse, so they weren’t much help either. Plus with this curly haired thing going on, any hair advice I did get wasn’t much help. Now I’m sure my Mom tried to step in and help, but I was pretty dead-set on not messing with something as silly as makeup or fashion.  But I couldn’t help noticing how pretty the other girls looked and how not-pretty I looked. So underneath all my blustering “no-nonsense” was a creeping embarrassment and fear about makeup and fashion, which only fueled my refusals for help.

And right about then, my younger sisters hit the teen years. Somehow (probably a result of observing my bad example) they had managed to dive right into the whole fashion/makeup realm, and they got real good at it. And, boom, they were beautiful. Plus they both got taller than me. Which means not only was I the most immature-looking sister (with regards to hair/clothes), but I also was the shortest sister. So naturally people began to assume that I was the 13 yr old (rather than the 17 yr old). I cannot tell you how much that ate at me. Still eats at me. DAH!!

Anywho, the fact that my younger sisters knew more about makeup than I did wasn’t exactly an incentive to ask them for help. So I was in quite the quandary.  A spinning top of vanity, self-doubt, and fear - and whispies that would not lie flat no matter how hard I brushed, and always stuck out over my ears, making me look like an elf. And not a cute elf either. More like Alberta Einstein.

Meanwhile I was getting frustrated with the MECCA. It seemed to preach that you didn’t need fashion or makeup to be beautiful. And yet at the same time, even MECCAite women dressed fashionably and with makeup, and they seemed to expect me to do the same! The strange thing was, I didn’t consider those ladies vain or silly for dressing nice or wearing makeup. I thought them beautiful! And I didn’t like what I saw in the mirror. Call it cultural conditioning or social pressures or whatever, but I desperately wished to be fashionable and made up. Like those ladies. But it didn’t line up with my understanding of God and His plan and I was adamant that I would not be a hypocrite. I think maybe I could define most of my teenage angst in this specific tension: rejecting the non-MECCAite culture, while feeling an inherent pull towards it (sort of like the gravitational pull that a planet exerts on a moon), and being unable to reconcile that tension.

Well thank goodness a certain MECCAite magazine (Brio, woot-woot) stepped in and set me straight. I was reading an article about how to avoid a bad school photo. There were three types of photos/characters being discussed: 

• One was “The Slob,” a girl who didn’t brush her hair or use any makeup and was basically greased lightning. Which obviously didn’t apply to me because I brushed my hair and washed my face each night, duh.
• And then there was “The Flirt” who was wearing an entire bottle of mascara as well as some very bright lipstick. And I obviously wasn’t in any danger of overdoing my lipstick (or even owning lipstick for that matter), so it didn’t apply either.
• And then there was the third picture: “The … ….” Shoot, I don’t remember her name. Well, essentially she was “The Good Girl Who Got It Right.” But when I read her commentary, I was shocked to find Brio ENCOURAGING good Christian girls TO WEAR MAKEUP!!! And not just a little cover-up, but blush and eye shadow! Which fall a little lower on the totem pole of “make-up essentials” in my humble opinion.

In other words, they were instructing girls to wear more than just the basics. Also, I found fashion – GASP- articles in other Brio magazines!!! (unfortunately my mags were from the 90’s so I couldn’t utilize any of the advice - ironic, no?)

Anywho, I was dumbfounded. Train wreck. In my mind.

Here – in print – was a full out admission of what I’d been suspecting all along. And, honestly, I was relieved. Because, like I said, I felt a very hard pull towards makeup and fashion. I sensed it was a critical part of my becoming a young woman, and in spite of my beliefs about it, I was aching to go. Which caused a lot of inner turmoil because I couldn’t reconcile that desire with the Christian ideal: the naturally beautiful/modest girl who didn’t wear makeup and gave no consideration for the rest of the culture defined as “pretty.” Except now, with this Brio article, I had the truth.

Although I still didn’t really understand how playing along with society’s current makeup/fashion trends honored God, I figured that if Brio was flat-out instructing on it, it must be condonable. Maybe it was one of those things that’s not God’s ideal, but is just a result of living in a fallen world. As they say, “If the barn needs painting, paint the barn.” And so I decided makeovers and manicures were no longer a No-Fly Zone.

Please note that I didn’t immediately throw out all my rules about modesty, self-respect, and health. The only thing I threw out was the idea that it’s wrong to be concerned about how you look compared to the rest of society. Now, several years later, I’ve come to realize that personal upkeep is actually an opportunity to “manage the earth,” and to create with the Creator. It’s an opportunity for artistry and worship - it’s stewardship on a very personal level.

And as far as looking towards pop culture for inspiration goes, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is extremely natural (aka God-ordained) to participate in a larger community of people. And community begets culture. Therefore, it is acceptable – honorable even – to engage in culture.  Dressing in (relatively) current fashions is an expression of mutual understanding and solidarity with others.  It lets people know that you're aware of the world around you and that you have respect for the community at large.  Which signals that people can trust you, that you're coherent and tracking.  Which encourages good things like communication and community.  And true, sometimes you can't commune with the zeitgeist, because it violates standards of modesty/self-respect/health.  But hopefully you're fluent enough to communicate why you can't commune.

This story doesn’t end with the ugly duckling growing up and discovering that she’s a beautiful swan. Instead, the story ends with an ugly duckling realizing that she has permission to grow up and try to become a beautiful swan.  That the pursuit of physical "secular" beauty is not a forbidden forest.  And eventually the ugly duckling realizes that she’s actually just a duck and not a swan.  But she’s ok with that, because she’s having too much fun figuring out how to work her God-given color tones.

Plus she just bought some sparkly brown eyeliner that she’s really excited about.  :D