Skin Deep

...I don't believe them when they try to tell me / life is more than / skin skin skin skin deep...

"Are they actually more lovely, pound for pound, measurement for measurement... than any other women you've known? Or is it that they just... well, act beautiful?" –Dr. McCoy, Star Trek TOS

Which is the point of the episode, in case you don't remember.

"It wasn't until years later that I realised people weren't making a fuss over me because I was some incredible beauty or genius; they were making a fuss over me to compensate for my being slashed. I accepted all the attention at face value and proceeded through life as if I really were extraordinary." ---Tina Fey

Of course it's arguable that she actually IS extraordinary, or became so. Self-fulfillingness and all of that. Predetermination because she was smart and clever and funny, and that was never going to not be realized.

Why one should never say "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," from The Book Of Life blog:

It’s a phrase with the power to silence. Once it’s been uttered, trying to keep up a dialogue about the merits or drawbacks of certain visual things can come across as shrill, anti-social or just plain rude.

This tendency to surrender to relativism is a paradoxical symptom of a scientific age. Science, the most prestigious force in modern society, deals in objective truths. The things it passes judgement on are obviously simply not in the eye of beholders. One can’t fairly say: ‘Well I don’t really feel that way about the boiling point of water or the nature of gravity.’ We have to be subservient to the facts science hands down to us.

Although lately, even science has been subjected to subjectivism. Everything is. Bad behavior "on all sides," a legitimate investigation termed "witch hunt," any sort of criticism becomes "bullying," and calling someone out on actual bullying is "reverse bullying." Beauty seems simpler, because it is superficial and everyone knows it, or should.

I'm a big fan of The Bombshell Manual Of Style, as is xoJane who is very obviously much MUCH younger than I as evidenced by her remark about Britney Spears in 2001.

At any rate, the Bombshell Manual, in addition to being rather foundational for my own Principles of Princessness, casually remarked that women who are beautiful treat themselves as if they are beautiful. The inverse is also true. Women who treat themselves as if they are beautiful (and, as Dr. McCoy suggests, "act beautiful") ARE.

I adopted that awhile ago, in hopes that treating myself like a bombshell would help me feel like one (it does) and that would reflect in my approach to most everything (it has) and encourage self-care while staving any temptation to 'let myself go' and not in the Frozen way.

Someone hoped I wouldn't be offended that he shared a remark about a co-worker who just loves my rear end.

Yeah, I get that a lot. It's been following me around almost my whole life. 

Mind you, this is YESTERDAY, not a decade ago.  I've recently been feeling a great deal of angst about my own age-related irrelevancy and fading attractiveness. The world is harsh for women such as me, who haven't yet achieved the goddesshood of Emma Thompson, Meryl Streep, Helen Mirren, Glen Close, Jane Fonda or Betty Davis. Although, last week, a young intoxicated man who was celebrating his birthday, the same number Pugsley celebrated in February, was about to get separated from his friends, and I said he should hurry to catch them or risk spending his birthday with me.

"I dunno, you seem pretty cool," he replies. I insist he should party with people his own age.
"Oh, come on," says he, "What are you, like, 32?"

Wondering how many beers exactly he's already consumed, I reveal my actual age, at which he goggles.

I'm really good with makeup.

In any case (and I may have mentioned this) I don't take remarks about my own looks particularly seriously. I don't get to keep them (though I'll fake them as long as I can) and the Legendary Ass will eventually degrade into myth. I've tried to cultivate Cute And Fluffy, along with Charming and Witty, because I maybe CAN keep those, and no one is ever going to notice my large and beautiful brain.

Which, if my mother and grandmother are any yardstick, I also won't get to keep.

Vanity and fear, my defining qualities. Nice.

Crack The Sky; Skin Deep