vanity, thy name is henna
... and unshaved legs, pierced eyebrows and bleached teeth. |
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"ALL BEAUTY COMES FROM
BY INDA SCHAENEN | Walt Whitman sang of his own armpits and sweet fat. What do mothers sing about? We sing ceaselessly of our children, of solutions and customs and patterns and problems. We throw suggestions at each other, with or without disclaimers, hoping to feel another's approval. Then we sing of ourselves and our vanities. When the conversation goes on long enough, we ultimately sing of our appearance, refining the discussion to the equivalent of armpits and sweet fat. Our vanities are a matter of selection, and this is a glimpse at vanity on a small scale. Daughter and granddaughter of beautiful, kempt women, I fall far short of the standards they set regarding personal grooming. As an adolescent, I played up my ill-adaptation to conventionally female ways as a means toward self-definition; as an adult, I am a stranger to my ancient makeup kit and ransack my closet daily to find clothes without olive oil stains. I have chosen other ways to be vain. A few years ago, strand by strand, my hair began to gray. At first I was proud of them. To me they represented the trials I had struggled through. They were the visible tokens of my common-enough journey as a mother. My gray hairs came along with my Caesarean section scar, my sleepless nights with newborns, my trips to the emergency room, my worry and guilt over parenting mistakes. They came with the laugh lines at my eyes. As I peered closer to the mirror to inspect them, I felt both shocked that I could be old enough to have gray hairs and proud that I had engaged life deeply enough to have earned them. Vain in its way, of course, this particular pride was quite radical given my pedigree. My mother, like her father before her, had gone gray so young that I have no memory of her natural hair color. I see her leaning over the bathtub, head upside down, surgical gloves on her hands, squirting dye all over her scalp from the pointed beak of the plastic dispenser. As the years fly away, the color is now black, now brown, now rusty red, now wild orange, now back to auburn. Not for a millisecond would she have considered going through the rest of her life with gray hair. I grew up assuming that I would go gray by 20. But at 20 I scorned the image of dangling myself over the bathtub, blood rushing to my head, spreading acrid-smelling goop through my hair. Having read Dorothy Dinnerstein, I respected the crone, tuned in to the wise woman, honored the spinster and resented the patriarchal hegemony that insisted on the value of youth and external beauty over that of the soul. Naturally, the spinsters I had in mind all had gray hair. For a few years I admired my gray hairs. Then, suddenly, the day before a departure for summer vacation, I had my hair colored. As my son bopped around the salon, the colorist spackled henna paste through my hair. Under the heat lamp I nursed my child. Changing back to my clothes in the dressing room, I felt giddy. The strands that had been gray now winked a deep coppery red. The rest of my hair, usually brown, was ad copy perfect: shiny, with a healthy, reddish, glow. To my eye, my hair was beautiful, a gift to myself. As long as the red lasted (it washed out in weeks), I carried my head like a treasure. Recently I had my hair reddened again, and the uplift was the same. Where does this satisfaction come from? I say that I like the way it looks and leave it at that. Many women will say that masking their gray brings their appearance in concert with their inner sense of self. Their gray hair, they say, does not honestly represent the person they feel they are. They want their feelings and their looks to match. But I wonder about this inability to allow for divergencies between body and soul. How odd it is to say that we feel younger than our hair! As if our hair was not an integral part of us, and we have to show it who's boss lest it betray us to the world! Do we actually feel younger when our hair looks unaging? "When you look good, you feel good," say some. "When you feel good, you look good," say others. Vanity is easy to spot, even easier to ridicule, but difficult to explain. There are of course women who skip the artifice. I know one woman with a youthful, wrinkle-free face, bright brown eyes and a slim body made lissome with yoga. She favors vivid red lipstick and layered clothing patterned by silk screen and batik. What makes her deliberately assembled appearance remarkable is her hair: white, wiry waves kink to her shoulders. She wears it loose, or in a ponytail, or even in two thin girlish braids beside her ears. Unfairly enough, this choice of hers rankles me and many others who know her; we all fantasize about dyeing her hair. She would look so much better, we murmur, if only her hair were black, or strawberry blond, or platinum. I know another woman, past 40, who wears her hair down to her waist. Once it was brown; now it is streaked throughout with stiff gray strands, and bands of gray cascade from her part, framing her face in streaky steel. She has a beautiful face with pale blue eyes and wears no makeup. Her suburban friends are advising her to dye her hair; her urban circle says leave it alone. She says she knows she would look better and younger, but declares that a new look "would not be me." Indeed, there is something seemly and aesthetically pleasing about the way her long, long hair makes its gradual way to total gray. Acts of self-adornment, or the act of refusing to adorn, though privately motivated, are public statements; the mirror speaks to us as alter ego and as audience, both. But what is the source of our personal vanity? Our individual histories, of course, and the tastes and preferences we have cultivated because of those histories. Vanity is certainly overdetermined, and perhaps universal. Whichever way the impulse carries us, I like to believe that being
human and able to make choices about what we project to the world, we
all draw from a common, Whitmanesque well of vanity -- that what lures me
to reddish hair is what lures you to staying gray, and you to lipstick and
nail
polish, and you to a perfectly wound scarf, and you to unshaved legs,
and you to eyebrows shaped by hot wax, and you to pierced eyebrows, and
you to bleached teeth ...
Inda Schaenen is a writer and mother of three living in St. Louis. How do you feel about going gray? Let down your hair in Table Talk. |
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