Mirror mirror - personal beauty

Who's the fairest of them all? This personal eassy takes a clear look at how America's images still define, shape--and distort us

In Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye, a little dark-skinned girl, her hair short and nappy, looks in the mirror and longs for blue eyes. She is a Black child called ugly to her face and behind her back, devalued, unloved, sexually abused, longing to be physically transformed. Blue eyes symbolize all that she is told she is not, all that she does not have. If she had blue eyes, she'd be thought beautiful, like the dolls with the pretty dresses and bows. Her hair would be long and silky if she had blue eyes. She'd be loved and happy like the children in the storybooks. Were this a fairy tale with one of those they-lived-happily-ever-after endings, the people around her would be transformed, suddenly able to see her beauty and their own. But it is not. Black does not become beautiful, the white goddess of beauty continues to reign and a little girl is forever lost.

Every time I read The Bluest Eye, I weep for that little girl lost in a world of pain and for all the women who carry pieces and parts of that little girl buried somewhere in their spirits. For who among us has not at some point in time succumbed to the propaganda, looked in a mirror and felt ourselves to be wanting? Wanting because our skin was too dark, or our noses too wide or our hips too large, or because our hair wouldn't grow and never blew in the wind, or just because we never seemed to measure up. And how many of us can honestly say that somewhere, sometime we, too, have not made a big fuss over one child's "good looks" while ignoring another? How many times have you heard someone--maybe yourself--say, "What a homely child, I hope she grows out of it"? We say "Black is beautiful," or we used to, before we began to war with one another. Funny how we still end up adhering to a standard that too often merely dips Barbie in light chocolate. And more times than not we take our cues from self-styled arbiters who use a Eurocentric standard, one that by design is meant to leave most women wanting. And most especially those women who look like you and me--whose coloring owes nothing to the sun, tube or bottle, whose hair kinks rather than waves, whose eyes aren't blue.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all? America's mirror screams back blondie: Rapunzel, Cinderella, Marilyn Monroe, Christie Brinkley, Diane Sawyer, Michelle Pfeiffer... Oh yes, sometimes the look changes as those who are styled arbiters decree brunettes, exotics or ethnics the latest "in" look. But no matter that they may sing the praises of voluptuous this year or dark sultry the next, the objects of beauty are always overwhelmingly white. And as the ambitious so-so singer named Madonna knew when she reached for the bleach and peroxide, blonde is still considered the apogee.

And where America's wordsmiths will rhapsodize over the beauty of the late artist Georgia O'Keefe's wizened face, Barbra Streisand's or Angelica Huston's big nose, Lauren Hutton's gap-toothed smile, and work feverishly if they must to find some attribute to exalt or praise in one of their own, rarely do they see or acknowledge as beauty that which we possess. When they do decree a Black woman beautiful, nine times out of ten she conforms to the white aesthetic. Take a close look at the women who are selected as models. Black but not really Black: cafe au lait, not black coffee; pouty rather than full-lipped; a bit of butt but not too much.

Despite all the talk about the ways in which the American beauty standard automatically negates all who are not European, we get sucked in even when we think we're standing pure. We afrocentrize by wearing dreadlocks, twists, cornrows, but still there's the desire to have shake-your-head hair that moves and flips and flies. So we end up buying hair by the pound in order to achieve the desired effect while being ethnically correct. And yet another generation is programmed to believe that only certain shades of Black are beautiful. Programmed to want hair on the pillow, to become fixed on having long hair, lots of hair to flick and shake in weaves, braids and instant Afro-Asian dreads. Bushels and bales of hair to meet our ever-increasing demand are shorn from the heads of wrenchingly poor Asian women. Sold American--a perfect study of exploitation all around.

As distorted as the mirror is for us, it's just as bad, and in some ways worse, for Asian, Native-American and Latina women. To be considered beautiful, must a Chinese woman look like Connie Chung? Brazilians like Sonia Braga? I can't recall the last time I saw an identifiably Chinese, Korean, Puerto Rican or Mexican woman in a beauty ad or fashion spread or on a national-magazine cover. Have you ever seen one?

Getting my nails done a few months ago while working on this article, I asked several of the young Korean manicurists in the shop to describe the women they considered beautiful. They pulled out American fashion and beauty magazines and pointed out varying models, all of them tall, all with blonde or brunette hair, none who looked even vaguely like an Asian woman. Almost to a woman, these young Koreans all spoke about wanting to have bigger breasts.

Wanting. Yeah, that sums up what happens to women in this country when it comes to the beauty thing. "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the...?" Most of the time when the question is raised, the answer isn't you. In fact, most women rarely (as in almost never) look in a mirror and are satisfied with what they see. You are either too short or too tall, too fat or too thin. Your eyes aren't the shape, size or color that is considered beautiful. Your hair doesn't blow in the wind, or drape your shoulder or fluff out on the pillow. You have too much butt or too little. You worry because you have skinny legs or thunder thighs, 32A's or 36DD's. You worry about gravity sending nipples downward, about time and wrinkles, stretch marks and cellulite.

But then how do you keep a capitalist-consumer culture afloat if people are not kept in a perpetual state of wanting, of feeling insecure? Women--of every ethnic group and color--already programmed to perceive ourselves as commodities, whose value rises or falls depending on how close or far we are from some standard of ideal beauty, are the perfect marks. One young woman I worked with--tall, naturally blonde, who wore at best a size 10--talked in casual conversation with a group of us one day about how as a teenager she became obsessed with her weight. Nina talked about looking in the mirror and constantly worrying that she was too fat. "I dieted down to a size 6 and still felt I was fat," she said. "All of my girlfriends wanted to be thin; that was the ideal. When my mother started saying I was too thin and told me to stop dieting, I pretended to go along with her. I'd eat and then go into the bathroom and stick my finger down my throat. For years I was bulimic, eating, gorging on food, then swallowing laxatives and throwing up right afterward. I finally ended up in a hospital with my stomach a mess."

One of my girlfriends used to constantly chide me when I refused to let her or anyone else pluck my eyebrows by saying "Beauty knows no pain." It's probably what Mandarin mothers told their little daughters as they wept through the pain of having their feet bound ever tighter. "Hush now, don't you want to look pretty?" How many Black women heard those words or something similar as children the first time the hot comb burned, the chemical relaxer set your scalp afire? Women's bodies have long been considered little more than malleable clay to be reshaped to meet whatever the standard of the day, no matter the risk, discomfort or pain. At the end of the last century, wealthy white women went so far as to have ribs removed to achieve the perfect wasp waist. Thousands of other women endured the tortures of the damned by constricting waists and rib cages in corsets meant to be pulled to the breaking point. Fashionable women swooned often back then, which had a lot less to do with delicate "white woman sensibilities" than with the fact that their corsets left them oxygen-deprived.

"Beauty knows no pain" is the motto millions of women adhere to as they starve themselves to the point of anorexia or develop bulimia, have noses broken and sawed, teeth pulled, lips surgically thinned or plumped up by injections, ribs removed, thighs and stomachs suctioned, breasts reduced or added to, faces lifted and tucked, eyes reshaped, and buy contact lenses not to improve their vision, but to have the eye color of their dreams--perhaps in a perfect shade of emerald green.

And for beauty's sake millions of women in this country today walk around with silicone time-bomb breast implants. Women made to feel insecure because their breasts are too small, insecure because they were disfigured by cancer surgery.

Mirror, mirror... What price beauty? What beauty do you seek? "She does not see her beauty..." --so goes a poem by our laureate Langston Hughes. But can one ever see beauty through a distorted mirror? Like Toni Morrison, I never wanted to see another generation of Black girls grow up longing, feeling and believing themselves not beautiful. I know the struggle those of my fortysomething and older generation have gone through trying to "decrud" ourselves, break free.

I am just a few years short of 50, and it has been years since I stood in front of a mirror wanting to look like someone other than myself. But I remember how, as a teenager, I, like so many of my girlfriends, longed to look like Dorothy Dandridge. To be Black, but not too Black. I remember longing to have my sister's hazel eyes and lighter skin and hoping that my breasts would continue to grow to the melon-size ideal. I remember every time I got my hair done how disappointed I was that it never looked or moved like that of the white girls touted as beautiful in movies and magazines. No, I never longed for blue eyes, never daydreamed about being white; and yet I wanted to be part of the rarified group considered beautiful.

Today when I look in the mirror I'm perfectly content with what I see, and while swearing to lose weight, I am not overwrought by my hips, thighs or belly. Yet I'm constantly reminded every time I open a fashion or beauty magazine, something I try to do only rarely, or those once-in-a-while times when I tune in to BET, VH1 or MTV, that yet another generation is being brainwashed into believing that beauty is less about what they are than it is about what they are not. Automatically, I search for Black women. And yes, there are more of us than was ever true before, and the women are beautiful. But it remains a beauty narrowly defined. They don't look like Grace Jones or Alfre Woodard, Leon-tyne Price, Sarah Vaughan or Whoopi Goldberg. Don't reflect our range and depth of beauty.

I watch Black men rhapsodize in song to women more likely beige than chocolate-brown, women wearing lots of somebody else's hair, women with neat little noses and lips that can be full but not too full, women who remind me of Dorothy Dandridge. And I can't help but wonder what effect these images are having on yet another generation of little girls who are more brown than beige, little girls with full lips and noses, little pigtailed girls whose hair doesn't brush their shoulders or fan in waves.

No matter that we profess shock when we see a Michael Jackson distort his color and features, narrow his nose, thin his lips, reconstruct his face as it becomes ever lighter, ever whiter before our eyes, pushing his stray processed hair out of his face while singing "It don' matter if you're black or white..." What message do our kids take away? While we may tell our little girls that Olivia on the Cosby Show is beautiful, "but no more beautiful than you," what do they really believe if all the little Black girls who appear on television shows and are oohed and aahed over, all seem cast from the same mold? Do our children end up standing in front of a mirror dissatisfied with their reflection, believing that beauty is something other than what they see, wanting to be transformed, longing for the bluest eye?

COPYRIGHT 1993 Essence Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group