The magical makeover is a myth
‘New Year, New You’ is January’s mantra. This can mean many things, but often it’s meant in a physical sense; and so gyms are jammed with people torturing themselves on the treadmill in an invariably vain attempt to vanquish their not-up-to-scratch selves, and reveal the real, new, improved them to the world. But this is glossing over the issue. You and I both know that a 10 minute make-over does not a goddess, or a god, make. In fact, if the car crash lives of celebs, as dished up on the cover of gossipy, glossy magazines, is anything to go by, then magical transformations are still a fairytale – with no happy ever after.
Speaking of fairytales, just before Christmas I went to see the
Tiger Lillies and Justin Bond do Cinderella… or Sinderella. This gal wasn’t the sugar and spice and all things nice Disney-esque Cinderella; she was a foul mouthed, psychopathic, singing, Jerry Springer-esque, drag queen, crackwhore conducting a public slanging match with her dysfunctional
family. During one deliciously venomous exchange with her step-siblings, Sinderella crowed, “You’re so ugly! You know, I saw in the paper the other day, that you can get a face transplant. Remember that woman who had her face torn off by her dog in France? You should do that.”
I had read that story too and it had got me thinking because the article had ended with something like, “… you have to have a face to face the world.” Which, I guess, is why there’s a
Changing Faces poster campaign on the underground right now, where we, the observer, are challenged to look a less than picture-perfect person in the eye. Disfigurement has a bad press – think Richard III – which is why another story I read, some years ago, in the waiting room of my mother’s beauty salon, about a woman who found a greater sense of self-confidence after having been facially scarred, left an impression on me. And my mother’s account of a client who was constantly engaged, despite an eye-catching birth mark and because of her natural vivaciousness, intrigued me.
The truth of it may be that many of us are more Dorian Gray than we care to admit. Digging below the surface is not only hard work, but who knows what may lurk there? What if it’s not gold we’re unearthing, but the grotesque painting we’ve been hiding in the attic? Notably, in a film version of Cinderella – which, annoyingly, I can’t get hold of – starring Kathleen Turner as the glamorous, gold
The beautiful but ugly Olsen sisters?
digging, stepmother and Jane Birkin as a weird, ethereal, cave-dwelling, fairy godmother, the Ugly Sisters were not physically ugly, but were in fact, beautiful, vile, self-absorbed fashionistas. The Cinderella moral was not ‘beautiful girls go to the ball and get the guy’, but ‘beautiful hearts are blessed’. Remember, in the old versions Cinders fed the fairy godmother who came asking for food disguised as a beggar.
That’s not to say looks don’t matter – they do – but if we stop and consider the results of research claiming that women who have undergone breast augmentation are three times as likely to commit
suicide as those who have not, it suggests self esteem is often not to be found in the procurement of an E-cup. In our obsession with perfection, we are often missing the point that being happy in our own skin is something harder to believe in than the happy ever after promised in a plastic surgery ad. And anyway, shouldn’t we be a little wary of the term ‘boob job’, which could, if you think about it another way, mean a ‘botched execution’. Hmmm…
So here’s to 2009 and a new frame of mind through which to view ourselves and the world.
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Adventuress Undressed 