Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Please Pass the Tie-Dye


It’s 1965. For the past several years, women have thrown out their lipstick, hairspray and unblushingly ditched their deodorant. Welcome to the era of flip-flops, hippie headbands and feminism.

Oh, wait. Sorry, about that. I was just having a retro moment. In all seriousness—I think I had an excuse. There seems to be a muddled vibe over beauty now, just as in the psychedelic 60’s. (Not that I was there, of course. I am indeed a 90’s girl.) Now, the questions seem to roll like this: “If God made us all fearfully and wonderfully made, why dress up?” “Why wear makeup?” “Why wear matching socks?” The thoughts have begun to sound slightly vintage, no?

A friend once asked me how I could still wear makeup, considering what I believed about beauty. My brain sputtered and backfired like a 1966 Volkswagen van, trying to formulate a response. Truth be told, I think I must’ve miscommunicated myself if she somehow thought I was against outward appearances.

Makeup and pretty clothes have their place; what I believe is that their place shouldn’t be in our priorities. We are easily confused on what real beauty is—thinking that it’s our face or our clothes. We (speaking mostly from experience with myself) are easily dragged into an obsessive-mindset, where beauty becomes the qualifier for things to be “good,” and “valuable.” We tend to judge a clam by its grainy little shell and forget completely the pearl inside. We tend to be narcissists.

Of course, tossing out makeup, fashion, shoes, hairbrushes, and earrings altogether will not fix the problem. While you’re free to do so if you want, the operative word is “free.” We have no hard and fast rules on fashion, because it’s not the source of the problem--our own human depravity is.

A change of attitude is what’s needed, not so much a style overhaul or a campaign against hygiene. To see external beauty as it really is, as a nice-but-temporal thing, would be a more radical change than we might suspect. There's no need to throw out the baby with the bathwater--or the deodorant either.

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