I went to the center where I would receive my massage. As I later found out, this place was one of those trendy new medical spas that seem to be all the rage these days. When I wandered in the receptionist smiled at me and asked if I was there for Botox. I raised my brows in shock. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘right there – that’s where we need to put it.’ She was so sweet about it that I refrained from smacking that silly little bitch to the other side of the room. ‘No, I’m just here for a massage,’ I said in the calmest, least confrontational voice I could muster. As I sat there, waiting for the therapist to come out, I looked around at all of the women giving or receiving treatments. There was no denying they looked fabulous. Everyone looked so well rested. I struck up a conversation with a woman who looked like she got about 16 hours of sleep a night, and she proceeded to tell me about her four children under the age of 5. She didn’t look a day over 25 – had she sold her children to pay for whatever she has done at this place? Did she give them away so she could get all that rest? How in the heck did this chick look so good?
I recently turned 30, and though I didn’t think I looked old, I didn’t think I looked youthful either. I found out that receiving Botox injections and having one’s face burnt off so it could grow back in five days, was apparently the trick to looking 18 at any age. I like to take a ‘don’t knock it till you try it’ approach to things in life, so this got me thinking – why do we put ourselves through the pain and expense of any measure that promises youth, from makeup to facelifts?
There’s a not so famous quote by Cathy Ladman that goes a little something like this:
Make-up is such a weird concept, but I buy into it like every woman I know. I’ll wake up in the morning and look in the mirror: ‘Gee I really don’t look so good. Maybe if my eyelids were blue, I’d be more attractive.’
The truth is few women look good without makeup. Frankly, I’ve never met a person that didn’t need a little help from a bottle. Most women don’t wear makeup up here in Tahoe-Truckee, but most women also resemble beef jerky. I don’t know if it’s too much sun, or if it’s the lack of moisture that prunes one’s face up, but most people look old before their time. I was in Ace Hardware the other day talking to a man that had such a wrinkled up face, I swear I heard horses gallop and the crack of a whip as someone shouted ‘Rawhide’ with a little roll off their tongue from the back corner.
I used to say I was all for natural beauty. Let’s hear it for the ladies who won’t succumb to the societal pressures of having every dent banged out of their face or get boob jobs to recover their tits from hanging out in their shoe insoles. But then I woke up one morning and realized my husband must really love me because I look like the south side of a Labrador in the a.m. My eyes are puffy, my lips cracked, I won’t even start about my breath, and my curly mane looks likes a Grand Teton of pubic hair.
Back in the spa, as I lay there, not paying the least bit of attention to my massage, I began to daydream of a face that was missing the little butt-crack in my forehead that I so intensely loathe. I know a lot of people worry about their face being expressionless after receiving injections, but I worry about half of it not working anymore. There’s nothing that takes the focus off a furrowed brow like a lazy, drooping eye or lip. I’m not quite ready to say the heck with the natural look. In reality, you really can’t take credit for what you’re born with, only what you do for yourself. The truth is, even when I see someone with a hair color they have no business sporting or a botched up nose job, I still applaud them for trying.
We’re all a little vain, and growing old gracefully only means you really don’t care to change anything about yourself anymore, not that you didn’t wish something was different. I know when I roll out of bed I’m a dead ringer for Don King, but my husband just smiles, and my toddler thinks it’s hilarious. If there was one person I wanted to be beautiful for, it is my husband, and the man already thinks I’m gorgeous. I suppose that’s why he made the appointment for only a massage in the first place.
