Jackie Wells-Fauth
When I was much younger and stewing about whether or not to try applying makeup, I remember my grandmother saying, “Even if you put lipstick on a pig, underneath, it is still a pig.” I understood that she wasn’t trying to call me a pig, she was trying to say that my looks (be they perfection or the portrait of Dorian Grey) ultimately didn’t depend on what I wore for makeup.
I always thought that this clever saying was hers, but I have learned over the years that “putting lipstick on a pig,” is a popular saying, meaning you can’t hide things with some elaborate cover; the lipstick isn’t going to fool anyone.
This attitude, however, has stuck with me over the years. I will never be a raving beauty, and I’m good with that. I don’t know if I’ve always felt this way, or if I just started to develop this attitude the older I got and the more I looked at the worship of beauty in the world.
You are looking at a woman who personally flunked the “tissue test.” My teeth are not as white as a tissue, but then, I don’t hold tissues in my teeth, so it’s probably all right. I don’t have a skin regimen to perform for hours nightly. I splash a little soap and water on my face to remove the excess sweat and dirt, and I call that good.
I was never any good with makeup. I tried mascara when I was young and by the end of any given day, I resembled a raccoon with a snub nose. Lipstick (when I did try to decorate the pig) came off in splotchy patches the first time I drank anything and getting that greasy stuff off of my dishes dampened my enthusiasm for it. Besides, I always used the wrong colors and had a kind of “here comes Jackie’s lips,” motif going, so eventually, I chucked the lipstick tubes and the mascara brushes.
As for wrinkles—facial or otherwise—I have ‘em and I have no idea how to stop them, so I just tell everyone my face is full of character. I went to college with a girl who woke us all up in the middle of the night, crying because she had gotten hemorrhoid cream in her eye. As we were flushing her eyes with water, it occurred to me to wonder how she had gotten hemorrhoid cream there (it just seemed like a long way to miss the target.)
When I asked her, she stared at me in shock. “Well, it’s a well-known treatment to prevent wrinkles, didn’t you know?”
No, I really didn’t know. In fact, I still don’t know what the philosophy was for putting a medicated treatment intended for the lower regions of the body on your face. I didn’t ask any more questions and I have never learned the theory behind it (pardon the pun), but I have spent some hours awake in the night with my imagination working on the problem. I’m sure it couldn’t be as fantastic as I imagine!
Put that together with the question of why a girl that age was concerned about facial wrinkles and it seems like she might have gotten an overdose of worry about her beauty. I would say you’d make a fine start on the wrinkles scrubbing that cream off your face!
Then we come to “inner beauty”. Now, I’m a firm believer that some people look a lot prettier on the outside than they sometimes are on the inside. However, I also know that no matter what I look like on the outside, I am not always so pretty on the inside, either. Occasionally, I have the inner beauty of Belle, from Beauty and the Beast. Other times, however, I’m just the beast—everywhere!
I’m not really sure where I am wandering with this particular train of thought. It just always amazes me what we can do to enhance our appearance, but whenever I see a carefully and attractively put together woman, I always think of another saying my grandmother used to repeat to me, “It is not always necessary to gild the lily.” I like that—I’m a non-gilded lily!
dropsinthewell 