Suzy Says

My stepmother had her eyelashes permed. Despite being about as vain and silly as they come, I had never hard of this particular frivolity. Here’s how she describes the result: “My eyelashes look just like a baby doll – amazingly long black and curved.” Sounds kind of weird. I mean, does a girl really want to look like a baby doll? Or any kind of doll?

It reminded me of seeing a sign in the window of a salon recently for permanent make-up. According to the sign, you could have permanent eyeliner, eyebrow color, and lip color. The first thing I thought of was, do you really want only one lip color or eyeliner color for the rest of your life? I wear different lipsticks with different outfits, and though I rarely wear eyeliner, I don’t wear the same color when I do. Maybe you could put lipstick over the permanent color as you do over your natural lip color, though.

And how insecure would you have to be to have your face tattooed in a semblance of make-up? Seems like the kind of thing we find quaint and odd in back issues of National Geographic, doesn’t it? I can’t help but wonder how well it wears. Ordinary tattoos don’t usually look that great after 20 years or more.

I guess we all have our vanities. I have been semi-considering getting botox for the lines on my forehead. I have had them since I was 20 or so, and they are likely the result of lifting my eyebrows in disdain so often. They aren’t much worse than they have always been, but when a girl gets to be 40 she starts to worry about such things. My niece, who is half my age, tells me that botox is just the latest thing in a long line of stupid, dangerous beauty treatments, like people applying arsenic to their skin to whiten it in Elizabethan times, or putting belladonna drops in their eyes so they’d look big and black, or plucking their hairlines so their foreheads would look higher. While beauty standards have clearly changed in the past 400 years, the lure of a lineless youthful look is still hard to resist.

But perhaps it would be a slippery slope, and I’d become a cosmetic surgery junkie, just another California stereotype when we already have so many. I should take to heart my stepmother’s remark about a certain television star who was at the spa with her earlier this month and has had so much cosmetic surgery done that “without make-up, her face is positively grey.” Maybe she hasn’t heard about permanent make-up.