You might have days when you're driving down the highway with the sun at a distressingly high angle and, as the car slows due to traffic, you glance at yourself in the rearview mirror. You might see a face looking back at you that could not possibly be your face because your face doesn't have deep lines around the jaw (but only on one side) and a down-turned mouth that resembles the Grinch a few weeks leading up to Christmas. Up until that moment, you were feeling at peace, perhaps even joyful about the direction your life—and the car—is going. But then you see that vision and your mood plummets. It wouldn’t be so bad if you had one of those faces firmly held in place by enormous cheek bones, with some slight wrinkling around the mouth and eyes to indicate a life that has enjoyed a healthy dose of sunlight and red wine at appropriate times. But in the mirror, all you see is a face resembling a handbag just brought home from the store that collapses once you take the stuffing out.
You start frantically doing face yoga, contorting your muscles into positions that your mother told you never to experiment with lest, well, you get into a car crash and stay that way. But it feels good to take matters into your own face, even at the risk of neighboring drivers spotting you moving your jaw up and down while your mouth is wide open and your tongue out. They might wonder if you are making faces at a baby in a nearby car, but, alas, you are not.
You've heard about Botox and, of course, the myriad of technologies available to women facing—no pun intended—this same situation. You'd spoken to a friend who claims she's gotten "a little Botox" ever since she was thirty-five (she's fifty-five now) just to "relax some of the muscles around the mouth". You know thirty-five-year-olds who get it just as a “refresher”, like the woman you once met at a party who claimed she gets it every year on her birthday. You wonder why all these technologies exist if people like you can't take advantage of them. Isn't that like insisting on using a chalkboard while the person next to you is writing on an iPad? What if more women—hell, people—are utilizing these available technologies and you just don't know it because they look so damned good? What kind of idiot passes that kind of thing up?
So you make a phone call. The first place comes highly recommended by the aforementioned friend, but the vocal fry of the receptionist is off-putting. Doesn't she understand how important her tone is to the uninitiated? The next place Google presents offers a more soothing voice, but its prices are a bit steep. You pause and think. This doesn't have to happen now, of course; you have your whole life to get face work done and the more you wait, the more money you will save.
A few weeks and rearview glances later, you circle back to the first place. It feels like the best for a rookie to embark on such a journey. Fortunately, this time the person who answers has a calming manner and seems older than twenty. You book a session for Botox in two weeks as well as a consultation about any other procedures you might need.
In the interim, you fret. You know that you are in for a confidence-crushing session from which you may never recover. You are about to face the Susie Ormands of facework—the person whose job it is to make you feel like shit for everything you have and have not done in the past. Susie tells you how you should have invested in mutual funds with the money your grandfather gave you for your sixteenth birthday; these people will tell you how you never should have stayed in the sun with your friends during that beach trip which yielded a terrible sunburn but also a boyfriend. You know that you will never be able to un-hear these words, and that you will be held hostage until you relent and agree to get the first fifty layers of your epidermis burned off. One for each year, just like the rings of a tree trunk.
When the day arrives, you are mostly just ambivalent. Having come of age during feminism's second wave, you feel like you are doing your sisters a disservice. And while you know that many of those sisters are having their faces numbed into a permanent state of astonishment as we speak, you nonetheless feel that you owe more to your younger sisters, the ones who, with social media, face more scrutiny than you ever did. You feel you will be letting them down. It also bears mentioning that your own mother makes frequent suggestions about your getting "some work done", including offering to help fund a facelift after you once mentioned that someone you knew had just gotten one, but you—in the spirit of fighting the patriarchy (not to mention going against everything your mother has ever suggested)—have consistently and adamantly refused. You will not undergo painful—and optional—treatments to alter the trajectory of Mother Nature.
Until now.
You walk into a large, bright room appointed with overstuffed chairs. You move to the two receptionists sitting at a desk in the center, like a command station. You give them your name, but they were, of course, expecting you. Could you fill out this form? They hand you a tablet. An inner rebellion starts to foment. You chafe against the stupid questions ("how many drinks do you consume in a week?") and consider answering everything ironically. You are reminded of the fact that you have always prided yourself on being a rugged individualist, a maverick, a free-thinker; and yet you have succumbed to the most insidiously omnipotent master: the Beauty Industrial Complex.
You are shuffled off to another room and asked about your medical history. Do you currently take any medications? Had any recent surgeries? The nurse is surprised when you tell her no to all of the above. And it dawns on you, how skeptical you are of the medical establishment, how much you have prided yourself on refusing to "fix" things. Hell, you have a torn ACL from a skiing accident twelve years ago that you still haven't gotten repaired.
You find yourself getting anxious as she continues to pry. Do you have to tell her about the scalp cyst that was removed four years ago? It feels like you should, but you resent her prodding all the same. What does it have to do with a process that will move the corners of your mouth northward an eighth of an inch? You stare at the only part of her face that her surgical mask is not blocking: her smooth forehead. You are reminded how your hairstylist proudly displayed her line-free brow when you asked her opinion of Botox two days prior. This is the hallmark of a botox-ed face. You may not have noticed them in the past, but now you will see them everywhere.
“What brings you here?” she asks sweetly but authoritatively.
You come in hot: "I'm concerned about the intensity of my frown, but I do not, I repeat do not, want to look weird." She recoils ever so discreetly. The place is too pristine, too feminine, for such forthright talk. You have now been relegated to the uncouth, the unfeminine, the outspoken—all qualities you have possessed since the age of five, but situations like this make you all the more aware of it. And once the cat is out of that proverbial bag, you simply stop caring. It’s akin to finally taking off those painful heels at the high school dance and being able to let your freak fly when “Brick House” comes on, or letting your mascara smear because a good cry feels better than trying to look pretty. You have moved to the wall where the stoners and the art kids hang out. You have declared not only your position but your very identity, and there’s no going back. It’s worth mentioning that this is all taking place in North Carolina, where women tend to be a tad less passionate about their desire to smash the patriarchy.
Once you start, you can't stop. When she tells you that of the remote possibility that the needle may strike the wrong muscle, resulting in a crooked smile, you openly recoil. “Uh, I don’t think so,” you say wryly. For five hundred of your hard-earned dollars, you will not run the risk of looking like a stroke victim.
She tells you about another procedure that might be better for you since "You're afraid of the needle". This is, interestingly enough, called micro-needling and will knock you back a mere $900 a session. She recommends two and shows you photos of how wonderful it is. And you can't deny it; it does look wonderful, but right now all you want to do is get the fuck out of there and eat a pint of Ben and Jerry’s.
You bid each other goodbye. You have stopped caring that she has been focusing intently on your jowls for the last thirty minutes because you have been focusing on her forehead. Most likely she feels about the former the way you feel about the latter, but you don’t give a shit. What's so great about a smooth forehead anyway? What's so fucking awesome about lack of concern, worry or focused attention?
The two receptionists at the command center ask you to settle your bill: "It's seventy-five dollars for a consultation," one says. And even though no one told you this over the phone when you called to make the appointment—and you asked—you hand over your credit card as quickly as you can. A young woman calmly strides in. They know her by name and direct her to one of the rooms. She couldn't be more than eighteen and seems more at home here than you could ever be. This makes you feel both a deep sadness and a particular sort of envy. You don't even bother waiting for the receipt which, in a calmer moment, you might need when you call to contest the bill.
The minute you find yourself in the warm confines of your car, the tears start to flow. It’s not just that you were being held hostage in that place for close to an hour; it was that you went against the truest part of yourself. You forgot that, for the most part, you love your face, even its intense resting bitch state. It has character. It moves a lot as it expresses feelings. In fact, when you stop blubbering, you might consider never referring to a “resting bitch face” again.
Because you know there are a billion reasons why you might, at times, be in a resting state of non-cheeriness. You might feel sad that women have not really changed much since the 1950's when the cosmetics companies saw an opportunity to profit off the low self-esteem of American women whose men had recently fought in Europe and—so the beauty industry maintained—experienced the charms of European women. You may think these new technologies are really no different than the advent of depilatories and upper lip bleach—just a lost more painful and costly.
You may feel sad that young women are no longer competing with women overseas but with filters and Kardashian lookalikes, and that these women have no idea what sort of trap they're falling into because they haven't known a world without the cell phone. You might be thinking of all of this. You might be planning to write or rant about it, and it's not making you laugh. Yet.
You might even consider not glancing at yourself in the rearview mirror during a midday car ride unless there’s a chance you have food stuck in your teeth. You’d hate to cause an accident, for one thing; for another, you don’t need to look. You already know who you are.
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