In case you aren’t convinced that Ms. Montag is singlehandedly to blame for your derriere dissatisfaction, consider her response to the reporter’s “are you finished with plastic surgery” question: “I’m just starting,” the impossibly blonde bombshell insisted. “As you get older, there are so many different treatments—all the big celebrities get their spider veins removed. Let’s just say there’s a lot of maintenance. Nobody ages perfectly, so I plan to keep using surgery to make me as perfect as I can be. Because, for me, the surgery is always so rewarding.”
Surgery is so rewarding? No, dear, making sandwiches and delivering them to a homeless shelter is rewarding. Teaching your child to ride a bike is rewarding. Earning a diploma, learning Italian, baking homemade bread, delivering a meaningful eulogy, growing heirloom tomatoes, writing an old-fashioned letter to your grandmother in gigantic block print, holding a ninety-second plank, popping a perfectly ripe zit without drawing blood: all rewarding. Granted, spending tens of thousands of dollars to look like a human Barbie doll might make you batshit giddy when you look in the mirror, but I’d hesitate to call it rewarding.
Let me reiterate: I’m not necessarily against a little subtle cosmetic enhancement. (If you are and think less of me because I’m not, kindly refer to the disclaimer at the beginning of this book.) And to be fair, I don’t know a single gal who’s walking around in a wholly natural state. We’re all doing whatever we can to mask, mitigate, or at least deflect attention from what’s happening to what nature gave us. We dye and straighten and style our frizzy old-lady hair, whiten our teeth, and smear extra-thick, spackle-like foundation all over our faces. We wear tights to hide our spider veins and cellulite and age spots, and pretend to love turtlenecks so we can conceal our sagging necks. We struggle into Spanx (more on that later) and sport bras that have more padding than a bed pillow to create the illusion that our bodies aren’t morphing into mush. As one friend put it, “Some people wear their fake boobs in their bras; others wear them underneath their skin . . . what’s the difference?” You have to admit she has a point. I just wish the surgical option didn’t exist in the first place so I didn’t have to be simultaneously horrified and enticed by it, or feel like I’m supposed to measure up to the gals who’ve had bumper-to-bumper work done.
It’s actually not at all fair when you think about it. In our grandmother’s generation, if you looked great at a certain age, it was because you’d taken good care of yourself.* You’d earned it. You’d shunned the sun and done your calisthenics and passed up every delectable dessert you were ever offered, and you had youthful skin and an enviable waistline and the ideal 1:1 face-to-chin ratio because of it. But now, anybody who’s willing and financially able to succumb to the scalpel can look younger and better than you do, and all of the sun shunning and jumping jacks and salad eating in the world won’t tip the scales in your favor.
Of course, there are alternatives to surgery. Like working out (awful) and dieting (worse) and self-tanner (stinky but definitely less awful). Self-tanner might be my favorite invention of this century. If you’re not convinced that everyone looks fifteen pounds thinner and fifteen years younger with a fake tan, check out the before-and-after pictures in any weight-loss product advertisement. Before: lumpy, bumpy, and pasty-ass white; after: taut, toned, and the color of melted caramel. Coincidence? I think not.
If you’re a self-tanning virgin, there are several things you should know. First of all, you can pay eight dollars for a bottle of the drugstore cream, thirty dollars for a fancy department store brand, or fifty dollars for a salon experience. I’m not here to tell you how to spend your money, but it’s worth noting that they all use the same ingredient to stain your skin, and they all get all over everything you wear and make you smell like a rotting pelican carcass until you can shower (generally four to eight hours after application). But fifteen pounds and fifteen years! No stain, no gain.
I never felt any need to cheat on my eight-dollar drugstore tanning cream until I accidentally purchased a certificate for a professional tropical spray tan at my kids’ school auction. I didn’t really consider the fact at the time that by “professional” it meant somebody else would be putting it on my body. (It was a fund-raiser, okay? And also I may have been drunk. But if I was, I was drunk shopping for my children, or their art and PE classes or iPads for the classrooms or new solar panels or something, so try not to judge.) Anyway, that certificate sat in my desk for eleven months, because every time I went to book my professional tropical spray tan, I was reminded that I generally try to avoid getting naked in front of a complete stranger, “professional” or not. That’s when I would decide that I was Far Too Busy that week and put it off. Again.
Then my friend Barb called.
“Want to go with me to get a spray tan before spring break?” she asked. Barb was heading off on a cruise and I was going to Florida, and obviously, we’d both be baring a lot of (old, white, flabby) skin. I was about to decline—who had the time or money for such luxuries?—when I remembered the certificate.
“I’m in,” I told her, praying that the spray-tan lady was older, whiter, or flabbier than me—preferably all three.
Of course, she was adorable. And also younger, tanner, and much, much fitter.
“You can just undress in there and come back out when you’re ready,” Britney informed me, pointing toward a bathroom. (Her name wasn’t really Britney. But it may as well have been.)
And walk from there to here buck-ass naked while you’re just standing there watching, you perverted freak?
“Oh, do you want some paper panties?” Brit asked as I shuffled toward the bathroom.
“I think I’m good,” I muttered, closing the door behind me.
I’d worn my tiniest thong underwear—the kind that’s basically a string up your butt and around your hips with a small triangle of fabric in the front. Why I felt compelled to cover just this one ugly part when I’d be baring 3,458 other ugly parts is a bit of a mystery even to me, but it somehow felt more appropriate. Wearing only this scrap of elastic and Lycra, a paper shower cap, and a smirk—a super attractive look, I might add—I trudged out of the bathroom and over to the tanning booth.
“Okay, stand right in the middle, then spread your legs nice and wide, and raise your arms out to your sides,” Brit instructed me, scrutinizing the job in front of her through scrunched up eyes. “Can you lift your boobs up any higher? No? Well, maybe bend forward a little. Maybe a little more. Oh, never mind.”
I rotated naked in front of her for six years, trying to tighten my abs and flex my triceps and retain my dignity, which I quickly found out is totally impossible to do simultaneously. As humiliating as the whole experience was, when Britney was done airbrushing parts of my body my gynecologist has never seen and I looked in the mirror, I swooned at the sight of my younger, leaner-looking self. I drove home ridiculously pleased with myself.
Then I undressed. Huh, that’s funny, I thought as I checked out my rear view. That little T-shaped bar where my thong was looks awfully high. In fact, it sort of looks like it’s halfway up my back. But that can’t be. Because if it were, you’d see it when I put on my bikini bottoms. Certainly Britney would have noticed this, being a professional and everything.
So I put on my bikini bottoms to check. They sat a good two inches below the T-shaped bar, which poked out above my bottoms and sort of looked like one of those steer skulls you see in a lot of Southwestern décor. My friend Hannah said I should bedazzle it (because of course I took a picture and sent it to everyone I know and then posted it on my blog); other friends said maybe people would think it was a birthmark or a tattoo. At the end of the day, I decided that nobody was looking at my ass anyway—at least I certainly hoped they weren’t, tramp stamp or not—and I bravely went on my trip and did my best to rock my white stripe. But do let my stupidity be a lesson to you.
If that little story puts you off fake tanner fo
rever, maybe the answer for you is Skinnies. You know about these, right? I saw them first in a discount department store, but apparently they debuted on Shark Tank, the show where aspiring entrepreneurs pitch their million-dollar ideas to investors in the hopes that one of them will pony up the cash to help launch their businesses. In this case the idea was Skinnies Instant Lifts, a handy, nonsurgical option for masking extra flab on your arms, thighs, tummy, muffin top, and hips. I’m sure the Skinnies people have a whole spiel about their high-tech product design, but I’ll just summarize it for you: It’s basically tape. You see, you just stick one end of the clear adhesive strip to the lowest part of your sagging skin and then yank on the tape, affixing the other end up nice and high. The result is a perfectly smooth tape-covered tangle of extra flesh and skin. “Hides under shorts, skirts, and tops,” a video promoting the products insists. “Nobody will know but you!” (And maybe the friend you have to enlist to help you pull those giant strips off because I’m guessing that shit takes balls.) The sharks passed on the inventors’ equity offer, but apparently there’s a market for Skinnies—the show’s website claims they sold seventy-five-thousand-bucks’ worth of skin tape in the first five months. They even make a waterproof version the maker claims “you can wear under your skirted swimsuit,” as if the mere fact that you’re sporting a skirted swimsuit isn’t depressing enough without having to worry about someone catching a glimpse of your taped-up ass underneath it.
I think I’ll pass. But I like knowing Skinnies are out there, because now when I see some impossibly fit-looking woman my age, I can totally assume that the reason she looks so great is because she’s wearing several yards of tape beneath her Lululemon yoga pants.
CHAPTER 3
Hair Is a Full-Time Job
Now that we’ve all agreed to try our best to become Italian and stop filling plastic surgeons’ pockets with cash we don’t technically have, I suppose we should talk about hair. Jesus. After a certain point, keeping that shit looking presentable is a constant, exhausting, losing battle, like holding on to an umbrella in a tornado . . . uphill in the snow, wearing banana slippers, and carrying an angry, pregnant porcupine.
Now, before you get all “Embrace your gray! It’s elegant and chic and sophisticated” on me, allow me to point out that when my hair turned more salt than pepper, it also assumed the texture of a Hungarian Wirehaired Vizsla and decided to completely defy gravity and grow out instead of down. Remember Rosanne Rosannadanna from Saturday Night Live? That. But less attractive.
In high school, I had a French teacher who washed her waist-length hair exactly once a week. You could tell this because she had a hairstyle schedule that revolved around that weekly event. The first clean-mane day she wore it long and loose, parted hippie style right down the middle. On day two, she pulled the sides up into matching barrettes. Day three she’d add a braid to each side of her face and gather them in the back; on days four and five the braids, along with the rest of the length, would get bound into a ponytail. On day six—if you were lucky enough to run into her at a football game or school play—you’d see she had inexplicably wrapped the side braids up and over her head (which was by now beginning to resemble a freshly greased skillet). Day seven was usually some clusterfuck of shiny, slimy braids all tangled Medusa fashion about her skull. Mercifully, this look meant that it was almost time to lather up again.
My current hair-coloring schedule, sadly, looks a lot like that but is drawn out into a three-week pattern and simplified a bit and minus the braids. Week one, after my roots are freshly dyed, I can wear my hair any old way I please—pulled back into a ponytail, swept into a messy bun, blown out or straightened or curled, bangs or no bangs. This week goes by very quickly. Week two, a nice white stripe appears out of fucking nowhere down my part, and my temples start to look ashy, so there’s no more pulling it back. I apply some color—at home, by myself—to these spots, just to get through the next ten days, and pray that there’s no wind in the forecast. Week three I mostly wear hats and stay home a lot, trying to avoid any social interaction until I can make it to my next salon appointment. This week feels like it lasts seventeen months.
When I was young, I cursed my baby-fine, stick-straight, couldn’t-hold-a-curl hair. I wanted to be Farrah Fawcett, damn it, but I was lucky to be Kate Jackson on the best of all hair days. No matter how much time I spent primping and curling and teasing that mess or how much White Rain I shellacked it with afterward, it looked like a frozen lake at sunrise within fifteen minutes. It was smooth and glassy when I wanted big and fluffy, and I honestly couldn’t imagine pulling a worse card in the hair lottery. Hahahahaha, I tell the stupid young bitch that I was. She clearly had no idea.
What I would give for wake-and-go hair again. Oh, I still can have a halfway decent looking ’do; it just requires several hours and an entire cabinet full of products to achieve and maintain it. Without that effort, I scare children—and I mean that literally. Just recently, while I was fixing my morning cup of coffee and hadn’t braved a glance in the mirror yet, my oldest daughter came into the kitchen. Her slippers made skid marks on the tile when she saw me.
“Mom, what happened to your hair?” she asked, appalled.
“I don’t know,” I replied, absentmindedly patting it with my hands. I’d gone to bed with wet hair the night before, which is never a wise move on my part. “What’s wrong with it?”
“It looks like a rat got into it and built a nest,” she informed me. I ventured a peek in the hall mirror. She’d sort of nailed it with that description.
According to my hairdresser, the answer is some kind of fancy chemical blowout that originated in Brazil. Because those fucking Brazilians haven’t tortured me enough with their god-awful butt-crack waxes and itty-bitty bikinis. Now I’m supposed to wrap my head in formaldehyde, a known carcinogen, and walk around looking like a Vaseline-coated rat (no clips, ponytails, or hats allowed!) for several days while the deadly toxins fully penetrate my hair to remove the frizz—for five minutes or until the regrowth appears. Never mind that the treatment costs several hundred dollars a pop, has been banned in Canada and Europe, and has potential side effects including blurred vision, headaches, dizziness, wheezing, throat irritation, nausea, nose bleeds, chest pain, and rashes. We’re talking about Gisele Bündchen hair! Unless, of course, you die from the fumes or it all falls out, which apparently can happen if you believe everything you read online. Clearly, buttery-smooth supermodel locks come with a price. Call me a penny-pinching chickenshit, but it’s not one I’m prepared to pay.
This does not mean I am willing to live with frizz. I use glossing shampoos and smoothing balms and straightening sprays, and do weekly conditioning treatments. When I style my hair—which I will admit isn’t often because I work at home and I am almost certain my mail carrier, who is the only other adult I see most days, doesn’t give a rat’s ass what my hair looks like—it’s an event involving clips and sections and a huge round tourmaline ceramic brush and another flat-paddle model. I aim the blow-dryer down the hair shaft like you’re supposed to and don’t stop until every last strand is bone dry, even when my arms are quivering from the effort. (Confession: I even invested in a $200 ionic blow-dryer because it was supposed to give me flatter hair. I know a lot of you swear by your negatively charged blowguns—my sister once left hers in a hotel room and made her husband drive six roundtrip hours to retrieve it—but all mine gave me was a flatter wallet.) After a coating of anti-frizz shine spray I whip out the hair mascara, which is exactly what it sounds like and sort of helps tame the halo of flyaway hairs that sticks up in every direction and makes me look like one of those troll pencil toppers no matter how diligent I am about styling. Then, as often as not, I look in the mirror, decide it still looks like crap, and throw on a hat.
It’s exhausting, all of it.
Maybe the problem is that my hair is still long. It almost always has been. I’ve tried cutting it a few times over the y
ears, but I always regret it within two days. The last time I chopped off a significant bit of it—into a stylish, blunt, chin-length bob exactly like Jennifer Aniston was sporting at the time—I was in my mid-thirties and had just had my first baby. “You got the mom cut!” my (much) younger brother said when he saw it. “Are you going to get a minivan now, too?”
“Jennifer Aniston has this haircut, and she’s not a mom,” I informed him with as much self-control as I could muster. “It’s chic.”
“If you say so,” he replied with a shrug.
I immediately went out and pierced my nose. I am not lying. I pushed my newborn baby into a tattoo parlor in her stroller to have it done, too. I was that determined to prove to the world (or at least my brother) that I hadn’t gone to the land of control-top jeans and sensible shoes yet. Right away I loved my little cubic zirconia stud and felt young and hip again just for having it, but the back of the post always poked out of my nostril and made me feel like there was a big booger dangling there. I was constantly having to tuck it back in, which made me worry people would think I was a dust junkie trying to wipe away a trail of cocaine, which would be particularly inexcusable what with my new baby and all. Plus makeup would get caked around the stud, and sometimes it itched, and all in all it turned out to be a big, fat pain in the nose. When my hair grew to an acceptable, non-mom-cut length again (to clarify: my head hair, not my nose hair), I took out my fake-diamond stud and let the hole close up.
I’m not sure what the cutoff is on long hair, either. It seems like most women gradually go shorter and shorter as they get older, and while I don’t want to be one of those ladies with a long, nasty gray braid down her back, I’m not really into the Jamie Lee Curtis look, either. You really have to have a great face to pull off the pixie crop, and I’m not saying I’m ugly or anything, but if you’ve seen me in a hair-towel turban I’m sure you’d agree that when it comes to hair, the more I have the better I look.
I've Still Got It...I Just Can't Remember Where I Put It: Awkwardly True Tales from the Far Side of Forty Page 4