Mirror, Mirror Off the Wall

by Kjerstin Gruys

  The overwhelming majority (63 percent) felt that I shouldn’t be allowed to see photos of myself that were taken during my no-mirrors project until the full year was over. I’d expected this and knew it was for the best. I felt bummed and relieved at the same time. I worried that my world might feel less animated without being able to easily relive joyful memories a few days after an event, but adding photos to my list of “no exceptions” made things straightforward, simple, and, ultimately, nicer. It pleased me to imagine that for the next eleven months my life would be free of the self-bullying that frequently accompanied photo-viewing.

  Still, I was delighted to see that there would be one exception to the no-exceptions policy: my wedding photos. Of the 63 percent of voters who wanted me to wait the whole year before seeing photos of myself, a slim majority (33 percent of all voters) felt that my wedding photos should be excluded from the ban. I was overjoyed. This was something I could look forward to, and it helped take away some of the anxiety I’d been feeling about the possibility that I might miss out on something priceless by not seeing myself on my wedding day.

  And with that, my planning phase was complete. The rules were settled, the mirror-avoiding strategies in place, and I’d practiced my everyday grooming. It was time to get serious!

  THREE

  May

  MY REFLECTION, MY FRENEMY

  Men look at themselves in mirrors. Women look for themselves.

  ELISSA MELAMED

  BY THE TIME MAY ROLLED AROUND, I’D GIVEN MYSELF A month to figure out how to handle the practical aspects of avoiding mirrors, but I still didn’t feel completely prepared. Sure, I’d plotted out all of the mirrors I’d encounter in a typical day of my life in Los Angeles, and I’d even spent several days successfully avoiding mirrors until bedtime, but the first week of May presented a challenge for which I’d been unable to prepare: San Francisco.

  May marked a huge milestone in my relationship with Michael: After more than a year of splitting time between Los Angeles (my home) and Palo Alto (his home), we were finally, finally moving in together. I’d never lived with a boyfriend before (I’m an old-fashioned gal at heart!), so this was a pretty big deal for me, but I felt more than ready. To say that I was excited would be an understatement.

  As wonderful as it felt to pack my bags and hightail it to San Francisco to be with the love of my life, not everything about the move was ideal. Namely, moving to a new home meant I would have to navigate a whole new set of mirrors, not only in our new apartment, but also at a new office and in a new city. Even though I’d targeted May 1 as my first day of going wholly without mirrors, I ended up regressed back to my in-training mode for a few days while I adjusted. The good news was that our new apartment in San Francisco had only half as many mirrors as my place in Los Angeles, with one in the bedroom and three in the bathroom. The bad news was that, while moving in during that first weekend in May, I managed to take a nice long gander at myself in every single one of them!

  By Sunday night Michael and I had managed to cover all of the mirrors, and I’d spent most of the following day practicing my reflection-free commute to About-Face, where I was going to be volunteering a couple of days a week (the rest of my time would be spent at home working on my dissertation), but I was still frustrated by what felt like a lack of progress. It had been almost forty days since I’d committed to giving up mirrors, but I had yet to spend a full twenty-four hours without at least a little peek. Even taking two extra days to “practice” felt like I was letting myself down, not to mention letting down the friends and family who were following my progress (or lack thereof) through my blog posts.

  Over a celebratory thank-god-we’re-done-unpacking meal of takeout Thai, I complained about all of this to Michael, who kindly suggested that I shouldn’t feel discouraged. After all, he reminded me, it had taken me only a few days to prepare myself for the mirrors of San Francisco, which was a lot faster than the weeks I’d needed to accomplish the same in Los Angeles.

  I begrudgingly accepted Michael’s point. It was true that I’d begun to automatically look away from even the smallest glimpse of my reflection. I’d also grown increasingly comfortable and efficient with my scaled-back, mirror-free makeup routine. “I guess these are skills I can use no matter what city I’m in,” I admitted between bites of spicy eggplant chicken, “but I also think that L.A. was harder because it just had more mirrors in general!” I didn’t know if this was actually true (or, for that matter, why I was arguing with someone who was just trying to make me feel better), but it wouldn’t have surprised me. Los Angeles, home to Hollywood and all that comes with it, is about as appearance-obsessed as a city can get. It was a great place for studying body image, but—for the same reasons—a pretty lousy place for my own body image. Admitting this out loud made me wonder: If L.A.’s pro-vanity culture had caused me to be more appearance-obsessed about myself, then perhaps living in San Francisco’s purportedly more laid-back milieu would prove to be a positive influence in the opposite direction. I was certainly excited to find out.

  • • •

  WELL-RESEARCHED BOOKS OFTEN INSPIRE ME TO HUNT down the original sources cited within them; these sources would further inspire me to hunt down their original sources, and so on. Mark Pendergrast’s Mirror, Mirror: A History of the Human Love Affair with Reflection, one of the books I’d picked up in L.A., was one such book. Thanks to Pendergrast’s detailed prose and copious referencing, I’d developed a list of additional mirror-themed books and articles I was dying to hunt down. So, even though I hadn’t yet finished all of the readings I’d already collected, I decided to take a trip across town to the San Francisco Public Library.

  Of course, my list of books wasn’t the only reason for my trip; I needed to apply for my library card. This, to me, is the equivalent of registering to vote or otherwise declaring official residency. Since childhood, I’ve always turned to books when feeling overwhelmed or out of sorts. I missed Los Angeles, but knew I’d feel immediately at home the moment I found myself surrounded by endless full bookshelves, the subtle smell of aging paper, the sounds of excited children and of kindly shushing librarians. After applying for my library card (approved! huzzah!) I claimed a study room and put myself to work.

  Using Pendergrast’s vast bibliography as a guide, I’d outdone myself by the end of the day. I couldn’t possibly bring home everything I’d pulled off the shelves, but it was a pleasure to select my favorites and pore over my notes from the rest. I’d learned that many of the greatest philosophical, mathematical, and scientific minds have been inspired by both the mysteries of reflection and the potential scientific utilities of mirrors. I’d read (okay, skimmed) several mirror-themed writings from Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Epicurus, Euclid, Newton, Descartes, and Einstein. I’d learned that the very ability to recognize oneself in a mirror is quintessentially human (okay, actually quintessentially human, ape, dolphin, and sometimes elephant!), and that this discovery had inspired modern psychologists to ponder the very nature of human consciousness and self-awareness. Yet some of the most interesting insights on the topics of vanity and beauty promised to come from the works of some of my favorite poets and novelists, including Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Rumi, John Keats, Maya Angelou, Leo Tolstoy, and William Shakespeare. I took these home, along with a psychology textbook and a few classic feminist texts.

  I especially wanted to find research that bolstered my motivation to become less obsessed with my appearance. I didn’t have to search very long to find the goods.

  The first esoteric gem I stumbled upon was this: Vanity makes us dumber.

  Psychologists have found that focusing on our appearance consumes valuable cognitive resources, which ultimately impairs our ability to perform complex mental tasks. In other words, our brains can do only so much at one time, and thinking self-consciously about our looks (called self-objectification) steals brainpo
wer away from other tasks. Like willpower, obsessive thinking is a major brain drain.

  I suppose this shouldn’t have surprised me.

  A few years earlier I had locked myself out of my office at UCLA, thanksverymuch to vanity. The timing couldn’t have been worse: It was a Sunday evening, when nobody—not even custodial staff—could be found to help. I’d been working for hours, intently editing what I hoped would be the final draft of my master’s thesis. The deadline loomed, and I was in a panic to finish on time. Hopped-up on thirty-two ounces of Coke Zero, my bathroom breaks were frequent and distracting, though not as distracting as the huge zit on my chin. On the bathroom break in question, I remember washing my hands at the sink and then leaning forward into the mirror, chin first, to scrutinize the growing bump. I sucked my lips into my mouth, stretching the skin on my chin into pallor as I grimaced with frustration. Nope, not ready to be fussed with, I thought, itching to pick.

  I’d performed these facial acrobatics numerous times that evening, each time huffing at my reflection in disgust, “Ugh, why haven’t I outgrown these damn breakouts?” Always, I’d returned to my office determined to stay focused on the more important task of figuring out how to make my research sound smarter than I felt. But that last time, as I walked down the hall back to my office, I stopped halfway in a panic: Where were my keys? My hand—which should have gripped a veritable wind chime of keys for my home, office, and car—held only a damp, crumpled paper towel. I rushed back to the bathroom, heart sinking. My keys weren’t resting on the counter. They weren’t hanging in the stall, either. Shit. Shit. SHIT!

  With growing alarm, I considered my phone and laptop, both taunting me from behind my office door. I was screwed. I’d have to leave my car on campus and walk home. I lived a little over two miles away, and it was getting dark. Sadly, this scared me less than missing out on the hours of writing I’d planned to complete that night.

  My beloved car would be towed before morning. My thesis would remain unwritten. My promising academic career would be ruined! All because of a stupid zit.

  Almost an hour passed before I found a way back into my office. First I tried climbing over a fence to reach my window from the outside, but found it locked. I tried to break into the student computer lab so I could e-mail an SOS for help, but I’d forgotten my passcode (naturally, it was recorded on a scrap of paper left in my office). Finally, while attempting to jimmy the lock with a bobby pin, something occurred to me: Why had I left the bathroom with a crumpled paper towel in my hand? Why hadn’t I just thrown it away? Wait. Maybe I threw something else away instead! Sure enough, I found my keys at the bottom of the restroom trash bin. I’d absentmindedly thrown them out and walked off to open my office door with a paper towel. Oops.

  This story came crashing into my memory while reading about the relationship between mirrors and body image. Here’s what I learned: My ditzy behavior that fateful Sunday night was the perfect illustration of recent research linking increased self-objectification to decreased cognitive performance. Thankfully, vanity doesn’t dull our minds permanently, but it does leave us less able to perform at our best while we’re at our most appearance-obsessed.

  This has been demonstrated experimentally by exposing people to self-objectifying situations and then having them complete math tests, memory tasks, response time tasks, or something called the “color-naming Stroop task” (most likely named after an otherwise unmemorable Dr. Stroop). In my favorite study, seventy-two men and women were required to try on either a bathing suit or a V-neck sweater in a dressing room that contained a full-length mirror. They were then asked to take a math test while still wearing the bathing suit or sweater. I presume—though the article did not confirm—that the sweater condition also involved wearing bottoms of some sort. Anyway, women wearing the bathing suit had significantly lower math scores than those wearing the sweater, presumably because they were too busy thinking about their thighs to contemplate trigonometry. Interestingly, the men participating in the same experiment actually scored better while wearing swim trunks. Go figure. Maybe the researchers should have used Speedos.

  But I believed their conclusions; they echoed my own experiences, as well as those of other women. Eve Ensler, Tony Award–winning playwright of The Vagina Monologues, activist for global women’s rights, and a personal hero of mine, wrote this in her book The Good Body: “Maybe because I see how my stomach has come to occupy my attention, I see how other women’s stomachs or butts or thighs or skin have come to occupy their attention, so that we have very little left for the war on Iraq—or much else, for that matter.” She goes on: “What I can’t believe is that someone like me, a radical feminist for nearly thirty years, could spend this much time thinking about my stomach. It has become my tormentor, my distractor; it’s my most serious committed relationship. It has protruded through my clothes, my confidence, and my ability to work.” I could relate to this.

  One article published in Sex Roles even argues that the intense focus on Sarah Palin’s physical appearance during the 2008 presidential election (remember that $150,000 makeover?) might explain her frequent gaffes while in the public eye, ultimately shaping election results. They write, “Several lines of laboratory research suggest that this focus [on Palin’s appearance] may have been detrimental to the Republican ticket because . . . it may have increased Palin’s focus on her appearance, which, consistent with research on self-objectification, likely impaired the competency of her actual performance.” I’d always assumed that paying attention to my personal appearance would boost my confidence and therefore improve my performance. Apparently not.

  Having absorbed this information connecting vanity to brainpower, I felt a bit smug. I’d stumbled on a jackpot: To the extent that avoiding mirrors would decrease the amount of time I spent thinking about my looks, I’d soon be adding Mensa meetings to my social calendar!

  By the time I left the library, it was well after dark. I’d become so immersed in my tasks that I’d lost track of time, and had to hurry home in a cab, arms and book bag filled with new reading materials. I gave Michael a swift kiss on the cheek, devoured some leftover frozen pizza, and then promptly put myself to bed, reading until I fell asleep with the light on.

  The next morning I awoke earlier than usual with the realization that I’d just spent my first full twenty-four hours without looking in the mirror, and I hadn’t even realized it. I’d been so blissfully distracted by all of the interesting things that I was learning that I hadn’t given much care to what I looked like. I took note of this as an important lesson: If I truly wanted thoughts about my looks to take up less space in my brain, I needed to find more interesting and worthy passions with which to fill it.

  • • •

  MY FIRST FEW WEEKS WITHOUT MIRRORS WERE PRETTY great, though I can’t claim that they passed entirely without vanity. In fact, quite the opposite was true at times, as I awoke almost every morning with makeup on my mind. I was tickled by the idea that I’d mastered a more minimalist routine, and on days when I was back in Los Angeles, I walked the halls at UCLA silently daring my colleagues and students to compliment me on my cosmetic skills. To my delight, this actually happened several times, when friends who knew I’d started the project noticed that I “didn’t look so different from before!” Geez, why didn’t I cut back on makeup ages ago? I wondered. Five products were much faster than eight, they added up to lower expense, and apparently I still looked adequately put-together.

  Noticing the extent to which my newly minimalist makeup sped up my morning routine led me to a new line of scholarly inquiry. It turns out that cognitive performance was only one side of the story. Vanity also steals from us something much more basic: our time.

  A recent article in the Journal of Socio-Economics analyzed the American Time Use Survey, finding that American women spend an average of 49.68 minutes each day (with men spending an average of 33.48 minutes) on basic grooming alone. By my
calculations, this number—which doesn’t include nonbasic (complex?) grooming, such as time spent getting haircuts or shopping for clothes and makeup—translates to 302 hours per year, or the equivalent of seven and a half workweeks. Zeroing in more closely to the issue of mirror-gazing, cosmetic giant QVC conducted a survey among a thousand of its female customers to see how much time they allot daily for their beauty routine and how many beauty products they use. After reviewing the survey results, QVC released a press release announcing their finding that women spend a cumulative of five full days in front of the mirror each year. Other reports suggest that the average woman looks at herself in the mirror between thirty-four and seventy-one separate times per day (with men looking twenty-seven to sixty-six times per day).

  This sounded like an awful lot of mirror-gazing, and I was curious to know whether my blog readers would relate to these numbers. So I created a poll on my blog asking, “How frequently do you look in the mirror?” Here are the options I gave my readers to choose from:

  a. Never! Your no-mirrors project is nothing compared with me!

  b. Rarely. Like, if I’m getting a haircut or trying on clothes.

  c. Several times each day, like when I’m getting ready or when I’m washing up in the restroom.

  d. Constantly! I check myself out whenever I can . . . in mirrors, windows, silverware, other people’s sunglasses . . .

  When the poll closed, 91 percent of my 134 respondents claimed to look at themselves in the mirror either frequently or constantly, with almost 30 percent selecting constantly.

  In The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law (which I assign to my seminar students), Stanford professor of law Deborah Rhode further points out that “the more time women spend on elaborate grooming, the more time many men spend waiting for the results. A survey of British husbands estimated that they would spend an average of twenty weeks over their lifetime waiting for their wives to ‘get ready for an evening out.’” Considering the fact that women’s elaborate grooming is often aimed at pleasing their partners, I couldn’t help but wonder whether men would consider the time to be wasted or well-spent.