This weekend, while running errands and (painfully) breaking in a new pair of Tory Burch Reva flats, I started thinking about all of the aches and pains that some of us women endure for the price of beauty. Are we masochists? While new technology has aided us to go to further and further lengths to make ourselves look better, this practice has been going on for centuries!
Ancient Egyptians used lead sulfide and copper as eye makeup. Makeup was a symbol of high-status, and the more they wore, the higher class they were. Using toxic materials like these often led to heavy irritation, mental problems, and sometimes blindness. All to make themselves look like a million bucks…
During the Renaissance period, women used arsenic-containing white paint to lighten the skin on their faces. At that time light skin was associated with the upper echelon of society. Of course this led to arsenic poisoning and death!
Have times really changed since then? Though we may not be covering our faces with lead, plenty of women still go through dangerous lengths for the sake of vanity. We let aestheticians get up close and personal with our lady parts to remove all of our pubic hair every month. Despite knowing the risks, we spend time every week baking in a tanning bed. We go under the knife to make our breasts and butts bigger, our stomachs and thighs smaller, and our noses cuter. We risk the blisters and squeeze our feet into towering high heels. We sardine ourselves into body shapers and Spanx. We apply painful, burning chemical peels to make ourselves look 10 years younger. We overdraw our checking accounts for designer bags and shoes. All for what? To look beautiful of course!
I, for one, blame evolution. One of the fundamental rules of evolution is that an ability or trait can help survival or reproduction. Darwin came up with the theory of sexual selection that says that certain astonishingly beautiful traits become preferred even when not exactly useful, simply because they appealed to the opposite sex. For example, a peacock’s plumage! This is true of other birds as well. Male apes will physically attack (and kill) a potential mate/female if they find them to be scarred or flawed. So do we spend thousands of dollars every year to make ourselves beautiful because of survival of the fittest or because we are ridiculously vain? It depends on whom you ask!
It’s no secret that good looking people are more likely to get ahead than their not-so-aesthetically-pleasing counterparts. We’ve all seen this occur in the workplace more than once. It has become ingrained in us that beauty = success. We can’t help that, but we can control the lengths we go through to achieve this. So why do we do it? Well, because in this world, beauty is praised. Beautiful people are loved. And in the end, isn’t that what we want? Love?
So here I am sitting here with aching feet, a blister on my toe, still trying to break in this damn $200 pair of shoes. Which for that price, should’ve been comfortable right out of the box!!!
So is it worth all of the suffering?
Absolutely ;-)
XOXO
Tagged: beauty, beauty is pain, cosmetic surgery, liposuction, makeup, pain is beauty, spanx, Tory Burch, tory burch reva flats 
