jen larsen dot net » beautifulness and fashionableness

on the intersection between self-worth and personal grooming

jen larsen — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 20:23:00 +0000

Right now, I’m broke. Brokety-broke. Broke-diggity. I mean like, dust in my bank account, holy shit how am I going to pay my half of the mortgage kind of broke.

It’s my own fault—obviously the money fairies didn’t come nibble away at the pile of coins that used to glimmer so charmingly in the middle of one of Wells Fargo’s finest vaults. I had money; I spent money. I neglected to set aside enough of a cushion to get me through the drought I saw coming, but how bad could that drought be? This year it was pretty bad for a whole host of reasons I just backspaced, because my temporary poverty is not very interesting.

What I think is more interesting is the fact that I have let myself fall into this state of benign neglect that I am having really an astonishing amount of difficulty shaking myself out of. It’s a cycle of the type you might call vicious, and it’s starting to feel actually malignant.

I am too poor to leave the house, so I don’t put on real clothes (EVER. Yay, freelancing!), and I don’t fix my hair and I haven’t worn makeup in—well, it’s been a long time. This slides down to the point where I rarely shower, which coincides with the fact that I haven’t looked at myself in the mirror which means that my eyebrows—I can only imagine—are taking up most of the real estate of my forehead and I have a handlebar mustache that does not suit me and my hair has become a bird’s nest in eight different shades (sadly none of them are silver yet) and my fingernails look like they belong to an eight-year-old girl who plays Guerilla Soldiers in her backyard which is not necessarily a bad thing, except that I am a little bit vain about my hands because they are, like Jo’s hair, My One Beauty.

So I feel like a hot mess. Despite the fact that my worth as a human has nothing to do with the state of my eyebrows. There is something about the inability to maintain a personal grooming standard that goes beyond physical attractiveness and strikes right at the heart of my sense of self. And I dislike it.

Unfortunately I am helpless and hopeless at addressing my hot-messitude on my own, because that’s one of the problems I generally throw money at to fix and—well, you know. So I can’t leave the house. And I can’t open up my own home-based escort service to pull in a little extra cash. So I sink lower and lower in my decrepitude but who cares, because my dogs love me even when I look worse than they do after a mud-puddle adventure and E almost never wrinkles his nose or looks away, aghast at what he’s shackled himself to.

I keep swearing that the very first thing I’m going to do when I get a bucket of money is laser my name into the side of the moon. And THEN I am going to spend an ENTIRE DAY at a salon being told I am the most beautiful girl in the world both inside and out, in my soul and over every inch of my skin while they polish me to a high-gloss shine. But since I hate that shit, probably I will just go get my eyebrows fixed and my cuticles weed-wacked and try to pretend this never happened. Come soon, money. Come before someone actually sees me looking like this. I will wait for you in the shower.

tattoos and lies

jen larsen — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 19:32:48 +0000

My very first tattoo was a lie.

When you lie, you are reshaping the world in the image that burns bright in your head. And the version of yourself that you present is so much better than the Universe’s version. In the Universe’s version, you are not nearly as interesting as you wish you were, and so much more flawed.

When you lie to someone, when you tell someone exactly what they want to hear, you are making the world a better place for them. You are smoothing down a red carpet and ushering them forward into a brighter reality, a happier one in which you are the person they expect you to be. In which you are exactly as cool as they think you are, before they know any better. Before they catch you in a lie.

My body felt like a lie—I was thirty years old, and I was fat. I don’t remember what size I was, I don’t remember how many pounds, but it was somewhere between 200 and 300, which is what I can say about my body for the majority of my adult life—somewhere between 200 and 300 pounds.

But in my head, I wasn’t fat. In my head, I was lovely and bright and sprightly and confident and I could be a happy person. In my body I was trapped by gravity, earth-bound, sure that anyone who saw me believed in all the clichés about fat people—slovenly, lonely, bad-smelling, alone.

And one day, I couldn’t stand it any more. I told everyone I was celebrating being close to finished with graduate school—all I had to do was finish my thesis, write a book and it was done, and I was celebrating turning thirty years old. But really, getting my first tattoo was my attempt at making a deliberate, conscious, permanent change to my body. And more than that, it was an attempt to make my body beautiful. The white flag I waved at the world. If you are forced to look at me, at least now you have something beautiful to look at. Here’s a reason to think I am interesting, beautiful, amazing, lovable. Not a liar.

hello, i am pretty

jen larsen — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 05:02:27 +0000

Usually, when this happens, it is because of an outside force meeting the immovable object that is my self-esteem and my inability to truly believe, over long periods of time and through swamps and over hills and down into valleys and in ditches, that I have good qualities. The story goes how I was feeling fat/ugly/weird-looking/zitty/strange/dumb, but someone looked at me and said Wonderful Thing about my Beauty, either Inner, Outer, or Both, and I had an epiphany about my true, excellent self, and I felt that this was a real turning point for the way I feel about myself and the way I carry my little pea brain around inside my pointy head.

And it’s a magical story full of wonder, and you want to cheer about how beautiful it is to truly understand and have faith your goodness and your expression of that goodness in the world and how sometimes, when someone sees something in you, it is the most meaningful connection you will ever experience with a human being outside of one you have either just birthed or who has given you a pony.

But the holy grail of self-esteem, the goal and the point and purpose of developing a strong sense of self, a core, a line of pure white light that burns up your center and explodes out the top of your head, is absolute autonomy. To not worry what other people think about you, to not rely on the opinions of people who are not sharing space in your head, to be utterly self-sufficient and absolutely confident, to be a pillar of self-fueling, flaming awesome that will never burn out.

It’s terribly rare for most people, I think, and that is a terrible thing. You look in the mirror, and you want to say “Oh my god, I am so hot I want to make out with myself immediately.” You want to say my god, I am sexy, good lord I am lovely, check out those gams and would you look at those nicely turned ankles and madam, truly your eyes are the spectacular double-hung bay windows into the very best soul the world has ever seen. Except that you have a sense of modesty, and a sense of absurdity, a sense that you’d be kind of an asshole to say anything complimentary about yourself. That you need to wait around for someone to point out your good qualities before you are allowed to have any. You don’t need to be told to believe anything else in your life—why do you need to be told to believe that you are beautiful? Why do we wait? Why is it so often hard to admit to ourselves, and then so impossible to admit to anyone else?

Usually I wait. I say oh, thank you! And I blush. That indicates that I have never thought that I had Good Quality, and thank you for bringing Good Quality to light for me! Today, though, I surprised myself into it. At the nail salon, a before-the-wedding event for E’s soon-to-be sister-in-law. I was paying, and I glanced up to find the other ladies in our party of Ladies Who Lunch and Also Get Sparkly Pedicures, and I noticed a girl at the other end of the room and I thought man, she is so cute, as you do, and you know how this story ends—it was me, in the mirror, disoriented by the angle and the unexpectedness of the mirror being there across from me and the light and the sun in my eyes and the Astroturf.

But there is no getting out of it, when you are startled into truth. I walked over, pretending that I was examining the rack of scarves and bags but what I was doing was staring in Fascinated Wonder. Hey, yo, holy crap. Look at me. I am a girl you’d think “wow,” about. I am beautiful, right there in the mirror. I would make out with me, and I wouldn’t even have to be that drunk. I really am beautiful, and no one had to tell me.

Of course my sense of self-awareness kicked in pretty rapidly, and I felt like a jackass and embarrassed and stupid and then I thought no. Fuck you, sad little organ-grinding part of my brain. You are taking the night off. You’re going to say it out loud. Say it. Say it. No? Okay. Maybe we will let you off the hook with the self-affirmation exercises in the mirror.

Writing this feels pretty much as naked and absurd—oh my god you guys, I am so totally pretty! But listen—this is something you want to do. This is something you want to think about yourself. This is a five minute stretch you want to put in, in front of a mirror. You want to say holy crap, I am a golden god, just the once. I promise you it is an amazing feeling. An amazing, no-bullshit, tell-it-like-it-is kind of exhilaration. It feels good, and it’s so good for you, too. Please tell me how pretty you are.

Photo by karen_d

at a premium

jen larsen — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 16:33:38 +0000

The jeans in my drawers, all three pairs, all come from Old Navy. I have three pairs of jeans that are no longer my size set aside to give away, and they are all Old Navy jeans too. There is nothing wrong with Old Navy jeans, really–they are very inexpensive and come in an exciting variety of washes and shapes and styles and colors enough to turn your pretty head. But besides the fact that they aren’t quite right–for instance, the boot-cut pair are embarrassingly just a smidge too short, and too-short pants on a woman is one of my pet peeves–it somehow feels like Old Navy jeans are not enough.

There is premium denim out there, people. Premium! For a premium, admittedly. But in the world exists brands of luxury denim that are not only luxuriously made of hammered gold and pressed diamonds and sheets of fabric that have been woven by fairies in a land of dreams where wishes always come true and McDonald’s breakfast is served 24 hours a day, but they also have magical properties. The greatest of all qualities that premium denim has, and I have heard tell that it has many qualities, is that it makes your butt absolutely magnificent. Premium denim lifts, shapes, separates, fluffs, caresses and presents, so to speak, your glorious technicolor ass in even more glorious surround-sound.

I will say it right here, flat out to the world and in front of all my peers and loved ones: I am not ashamed to say that I would like to have a glorious ass. That’s right. I am fond of my buttocks as they are. I think they are nice buttocks. But I would like for premium denim to come into my life and take my very nice bottom by the hand and lead it all the way up to the Promised Land. I want people to sing hallelujah to my bum, to weep and cry out loud to the heavens praise the lord and pass the hand lotion, it is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

Premium denim, they say, can do this for me. It can also make me look gigantically tall and obnoxiously long-limbed and spectacularly thighed. In premium denim people will mistake me for Heidi Klum, be briefly embarrassed, and then want to be my friend because I am even hotter than Heidi Klum! Okay, maybe not that last part. But premium denim! It exists, and we can all agree that somehow, by dint of its premiumness and magical denim properties, it is something that you want to be investing in. And oh, it’s an investment. Not just of money, but of time, because do you know how many kinds of premium denim there are in the world? As many as the twinkling stars in the sky they came from.

And then each brand is subdivided into types and shapes and washes and waistbands and styles and colors and platonic ideals and lengths and then after you figure out the combination that best suits you, your complexion and your astrological house in which your moon rose, you have to figure out your size and in order to do that you have to know a mysterious number which is possibly your waist size but there sure is a lot of goddamn interpretation of exactly what it means to be a certain number of inches. How do you interpret a number of inches? It is a mystery of premium denim. It is what makes me say you know what? Maybe I don’t want to invest in magic denim. Maybe I am okay with my perfectly adequate butt. I was happier when I didn’t know about premium denim.

photo by digicla

well-moisturized

jen larsen — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 06:28:01 +0000

In the past few years, I have become a person who moisturizes. For years I would spring from the shower and into my clothes and dive out the door, because sleeping until the last moment and spending little to no time on grooming or maintenence seemed to me to be a waste of valuable time and non-renewable resources. Why slather up my body with expensive lotions when my skin was perfectly adequate, making moisture all on its own? Who cared about my delicate under-eye area, and if my oil-slick face ever required any kind of extra lubrication, then it was the end of the world or nigh unto it, and I ought to start coming up with some way to redeem my immortal soul.

But then I aged. I am thirty-mumble, which is just a handful of years away from mumble, and while my skin has not shown any signs of kindly reducing oil production and spots, it has simultaneously become cranky, crepe-y and lined. At the same time, I have lost a lot weight rapidly, and skin that is not thoroughly moisturized bounces back less well than skin that is well-oiled daily. Of course if you tell me that I am going to become a maniacal devotee of the body lotion, if not a full-blown addict.

There are bottles and bottles of tried and rejected lotions and potions and unguents for every part of my body, under the sink. I have explored every option for keeping skin soft and bodies supple and eyes bright and alive and awake and unwrinkled. I would try puppy blood, if they could promise me that it would stave off puppet lines until the end of time. When did I become so vain, so high-maintenence, so worried about things like this? It takes so much time, in the morning. It takes reserves of cash, the fortitude for a regular routine, a sense of detail and organization both in the moment–what tube goes where and how much and in what order and let’s keep it together people–and in general. You have to monitor the effectiveness of your products, the state of your skin for any changes, your level of attractiveness vis a vis your current and recent application of a beauty routine. You have to quit your job and spend all day in your bathrobe in front of the mirror, ready to spring into action the moment a fine line appears, because otherwise you have lost and might as well just go out in your underpants, chewing on a chicken bone and making fart noises.

I started my Beauty Rituals awhile back, and I look–fine. Maybe about my age, which is really the most you can hope for. But now I can never stop. What if my oil of olay is the only thing keeping me from looking twice my age, like my own grandmother, or like a wrinkled, aging elephant with only a few good years left in him before his foot becomes a wastebasket? There’s no going back. And I’m afraid that going forward, things are only going to get more expensive.