Despite What You've Heard, Beauty Doesn't Age
As a makeup artist at the MAC counter, I hear countless women lament the perils of aging. Here's why we need to expand our ideas of beauty.
Published
Beauty is one of those words that signifies a meaning so big, the translation usually fails. It’s much like the word love. When we tell someone we love them, we surrender ourselves to the fallibility of language, hoping that they understand what we mean, hoping our words haven’t shrunk our intended meaning. Language can only take us so far, and then we have to fill in all the blanks on our own, or else just keep a sense of faith amidst uncertainty. We can speak of love all we want, but we can only prove it through dedicated action. It’s similar to the way beauty reveals itself to us.
We have come to a flaccid consensus that beauty fades. We hear it all the time, spoken as a warning. I work as a retail makeup artist, and I often meet older women who lament how they once were beautiful, or caution that my beauty will fade. For a moment it almost makes me anxious, like my beauty is a currency that I ought to do something with before it is too late.
But their warnings aren’t so much about beauty in and of itself — they’re about sex appeal or how attractive others find me. This isn’t the same as beauty, although sex appeal may contain beauty. Beauty is unlike sex appeal in that it cannot be commodified or owned or even really contained, not even by language. I know it sounds like a cliche or an attempt at self comfort, but I do not think my beauty will fade, whatever beauty I may have. Despite what we hear, I think that beauty endures.
One of my favorite contemporary poets, Terrance Hayes, in his poem, “God Is An American,” writes, “Yes, I have a pretty good idea what beauty is. It survives/ alright. It aches like an open book. It makes it difficult to live.” Beauty is a system with a force so strong, it aches when we feel it. It’s too large for our tiny human bodies. It moves us, takes us somewhere else. Sometimes the beauty in our lives is realized in hindsight.
Every so often, I experience beauty from the outside. It could be a moment laughing with friends or truly pulled ino the present moment. Suddenly, I am transfixed by a heaviness, a sinking feeling. It feels like the fourth wall of my life has been broken, and I’m outside myself, not in the moment anymore but somewhere timeless and able to envision the future moment when I am blissfully reminiscing on the current one. I think forward to a moment where I know I will need this memory. It will become one cog in the machine that drives me forward.
That’s why beauty hurts, I think. Because when we bear witness to it, we have a deep understanding that it is totally necessary and also fleeting. It’s that thing we cling on to when the wheel turns and we are not laughing with our friends anymore. That’s another difference between beauty and sex appeal. Sex appeal isn’t really necessary. Though it can certainly help in life, it’s totally trivial and it dies with us. The beauty I’m talking about is borrowed from the main source, which is everything and has lived before us and will continue after us.
In A Happy Death, a novel by absurdist French writer-philosopher Albert Camus, Camus says, “When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears.” I think some of the secret colors of my life are the rules I’ve made up for myself and place inexplicable faith in. When I see a fox, it’s a good omen. When a bat flies by my head, almost grazing me, it’s a sign that I need to either hold on tight or that I really need to evaluate my own sanity. When I am in a cafe begrudgingly starting my day before work, almost in a state of panic about nothing in particular and a Tom Petty song comes on, that is my dead father telling me to chill out from the other side.
Some of the secret colors are the snippets of conversation I have heard eavesdropping on strangers on the subway when they thought no one was listening. It’s words they told their friend that are also something I needed to hear the strangers who have seen me crying and offered a hug or a cookie. These are the secret colors of my life and however small or asinine they might be, they urge me to keep going, to keep adding to the list. The beauty in these things create a sense of fullness and an excitement that proves that the human spirit is real. These are the things that I will hopefully remember when I’ve got one foot in the grave. Hopefully, I won’t miss being aesthetically beautiful, and I’ll just remember how any validation that sex appeal once evoked was fleeting and hollow anyways.