inner_beauty ovenbird This morning at breakfast my nine year old daughter told me that the girls in her grade 3-4 class are wearing makeup and she wants to wear makeup too. The girls wear sparkly eye shadow and shimmery highlighter on their cheeks and foundation. My daughter would also like to wear these things. “Why?” I asked. “Because it’s fun,” she said. “What’s fun about it?” “I like the feel of the brushes on my face,” “Okay, so what’s fun about the makeup specifically?” I asked. She didn’t have a concrete answer to that. I wanted to explore her relationship with the idea of beauty. “You know,” I said, “The thing that makes you beautiful is your kind and creative and generous heart. There’s no makeup that can create or enhance that kind of beauty. And when you’re beautiful on the inside people see that on the outside too.” I wondered if that was a lie. I’m actually not sure that many people are looking at the beauty of hearts and souls. I’ve certainly spent most of my life feeling like I’m not measuring up to the world’s beauty standards. There’s an awful lot of focus on physical appearance and the beauty industry is insidious. They market to very young girls and try to convince them to have “skin care” birthday parties at Sephora. My daughter has clearly been taken in by some of this marketing because she says, “What about skin care? Maybe I can just get some of that.” I tell her that the only skin care that will truly help her skin in the long term is sunscreen. She wrinkles her nose because she hates putting on sunscreen. I ask her how that’s different from applying a fancy serum. She says sunscreen smells bad. I say that it doesn’t make sense to fork out $80 for a serum just because it smells good. I tell her about the way cosmetics companies prey on insecurities. I tell her that there’s nothing wrong with her body or her face exactly as it is. And I feel like a total hypocrite because when I turned 40 I bought those exact serums and moisturizers and “makeup that is also skin care” in a desperate attempt to ward off the signs of aging and cover up emerging blemishes. I wear a very minimal amount of makeup and not every day. I don’t dye my hair and I don’t care much about clothes, but even so, I’ve been influenced and I’m not immune to feeling that my body needs to be improved and “fixed.” I don’t want my daughter to grow up feeling that way but I can’t counteract all the forces that will insist she needs to look a particular way to have value. I want her to love her body in whatever shape it takes throughout her life. I want her to love it because it carries the soul that makes her who she is, and that will always be beautiful. I want her to love it because of what it can DO, not what it looks like. I want her to love the way her body can dance and sing and play the piano and hug the people she loves. It’s tricky because I am highly supportive of self expression, and makeup can be that. It can be a way to play and experiment and be creative. I don’t want to take away a creative outlet but I’m highly suspicious of the motivations that underlie her desire for eyeshadow and strawberry scented exfoliator. I don’t know how to support her self expression while simultaneously steering her from self esteem destroying ideology about bodies and beauty, especially since I have failed to steer MYSELF from those thought traps. I want a world in which who we are matters more than what we look like. We don’t live in that world and I am at a complete loss as to how to navigate that painful reality with my child. Still, there are small wins. At dinner one day she looked at me mournfully and said, “your hair is turning grey!” “Yes, it is,” I said. “Everyone’s hair loses pigment as they age. It’s totally normal. I kind of like the way the silver looks shiny in the light.” I meant it too. Sometimes the best we can hope for are minor triumphs. We keep trying. We fail. We try again. My daughter will always be one of the most beautiful people in the world to me, and I hope I can love her hard enough to make her believe it. 260129 what's it to you? who go blather from