Month Without Mirrors 5.9.11 Update: My Mirror Shroud, Hair Care, and Going to the Gym

One of the cooler things that's happened as a result of this project is cyber-meeting a California academic who's also abstaining from mirrors—for a year. Not just any year: the year in which she's getting married. I love her description of plotting out mirror-avoidance with her fiance; she's also exaining mirror-themed poems and books. I'm looking forward to reading more on her blog, Mirror Mirror Off the Wall, and you should totally check it out! She's contemplating not even looking at her wedding photos until after the experiment is over; wonderful proof that the "bridezilla" phenomenon gets attention because it makes women look cray-cray. It's thoughtful, reflective stories like hers that are probably more representative of women on the eve of marriage.

"I bought it.  I loved it.  It loved me.  Until... somehow... we fell out of love. Mirrors are to blame."
—Mirror Mirror Off the Wall

Her "rules" entry prompted me to clarify something that caused some eyebrows to raise; a couple of  commenters felt that my use of a hand mirror to apply makeup went against the whole point. (In fact, some felt that wearing makeup, period, went against the whole point. But this experiment isn't about my relationship to beauty standards; it's about my relationship with the mirror. Dig?) I am indeed using a hand mirror to apply makeup, but I'm using it at close range so that only the feature I'm able to see is the one being worked on. (In fact, the below shot is a broader scope than what I normally see, but anything closer made photographing this an impossibility.) And I quickly realized that I only need it for eyes and lips; the rest of my makeup, I apply blindly.

My handy accomplice.

A few people have also expressed quiet concern for the eeriness of having one's mirrors shrouded, as though I'm sitting shiva for myself. But look! My mirror veil is pink and froofy and adorable and makes use of my enormous collection of vintage slips that are far too synthetic to feel comfortable lounging around in! Betty Draper in da house!

The biggest practical concern I've had thus far has been something I wish I'd put more thought into: That other beauty experiment of mine, the no-shampoo bit. It's not styling my hair that's problematic (I usually either wear it loose or in a purposefully disheveled updo anyway); it's dealing with the greasies. Because as much as I crow about how fantastic life is up here on my shampoo-free perch, the only reason it's fantastic is because I've made good use of dry shampoos and hair powders. I don't use them daily, but I do rely on them, and without those tools I'd look, well, terrible. And again: The point of this experiment is not to see what happens if I walk around in public with toothpaste on my shirt, lipstick on my chin, and hair like a particularly bedraggled Dean Martin. In fact, I need to look reasonably neat in order for this experiment to work: I want to not think about how I look, not be concerned about whether I look poorly groomed. So I present to you my workaround:

If I feel my hair and it seems like it could use a touch-up, I lift up the white slip and find this cutout shaped to my face, which allows me to see where I need to apply some product to my hair, without seeing my face. My hair is rarely the concern when I look in the mirror anyway, so I'm satisfied with this solution. (My "bad face days" outnumber my "bad hair days" by probably a 12:1 margin—that is, assuming both of those are gauged internally, not by how your face or hair actually looks, which, in my case, is pretty much the same day-to-day.)

It's been surprisingly easy to avoid mirrors: With only a handful of exceptions, I've been good about anticipating panes of glass and unexpected mirrors. (Why do so many elevators have mirrors? I've never noticed that before!) I was out and about plenty this week but was working from home; this week, I'm working in an office—a famously image-conscious office, at that. The company cafeteria features a funhouse-style mirror at its exit; of the architecture, the New York Times writes, "Gazelles and other svelte creatures pass along a wall of rippling mirrors. Their figures merge, contort, morph and liquefy. The panoramic image changes constantly, forming and reforming in the eye of the beholder. Why shouldn't beauty flow into the soul like a fresh scent strip?" This place will be home base for the next week, folks. I'll resist the temptation to peek (never fear!), but being in an environment where image-consciousness is turned up to 11 and having no clue how I look will be an exercise in self-restraint, that's for sure.

As for other shared spaces: I admit to feeling slightly foolish at the gym when I turn away from the mirror to do my biceps curls, but the side benefit is that gym rats are less likely to gawk when you're facing them head-on. A more direct benefit is that without intending to, I've been able to do more reps, with both biceps curls and triceps extensions, which are the two exercises I usually perform directly in front of a mirror.

Previously, I'd believed I felt inspired by looking in the mirror at my muscles as I'd pump iron. I'm not a fitness fiend, but I lift the heaviest weights I can when I work my arms, and it shows. Most of the time I feel pretty good about that. I grew up thinking my body was incapable of doing anything remotely athletic: I saw no problem with sitting down on the T-ball field to pick dandelions; I couldn't ride a bike until I was 31; I would invariably feign illness the day of The Mile, when all students had to run a timed mile in P.E. class. Before joining a neighborhood gym for the first time, at age 25, I actually spent the day at a gym in the Bronx—an hour subway ride away—so that there would be zero chance anyone I knew would witness my trial and humiliating errors. So for me to not only be lifting weights but having actual muscle to show for it is still a thrill for me, and I love seeing my (moderately sized) biceps bulge when I'm straining to complete my last few reps.

But at some point in those minutes, probably once a session, I think of the time an ex-boyfriend called me a "bruiser," or the time we were watching the scene in Fargo where Shep beats up Steve Buscemi's character (NSFW) and he squeezed my arm and told me I was "built like Shep"—who, while undeniably powerful, doesn't exactly embody the look I'm after.  

Or I simply see that the muscles I've worked so hard for are snuggled into the layer of fat that surrounds them, which doesn't particularly bother me unless I'm, say, intensely focusing on the way my arms look. Which is exactly what I do every time I do biceps curls.

When I face away from the mirror, my workout becomes only about how I feel. I truly thought that it already was, mind you; but removing my self-observation cuts off one avenue for my thoughts to wander to appearance, not performance. Yes, I lift weights in part to look better. But my muscules will develop regardless of whether I'm observing the way I look during exercise, and my self-surveillance robs me of the opportunity to focus solely on the flexing and retracting of my muscle. In short: When I observe myself lifting weights, I'm impeding my flow, which is what I'm after. When I'm just lifting, however, I can harness resources that are stunted by my reflection.

It's still too early to tell how I'll emerge from this project mentally and emotionally—but if this keeps up, I'll emerge stronger in at least one way.

Little Girl in the Mirror, a Play in One Act

The scene: Pret a Manger, 3rd Avenue, Manhattan
The time: The present
The players: 
• Olivia, a girl of approximately five years old wearing a pink raincoat with small printed umbrellas, sparkly barrettes, and a backpack with purple shapes of indeterminate significance
• Autumn, an amateur sociologist of 34 who is wearing a hunter-green shirtdress and has not washed her hair for several months nor looked in the mirror for five days; nonetheless, she has a vaguely professional air
• Grandmother of Olivia, a sixtysomething woman with a silk handkerchief covering her hair

Autumn is seated on a bench working furiously on her laptop. Olivia enters and stands next to Autumn. In front of Olivia is a mirrored column. Olivia stares at her reflection.

Autumn: Are you looking at yourself?
Olivia: Yeah.
Autumn: Do you like doing that?
Olivia: Yeah. My imaginary friends do too.
Autumn: Do you see them in the mirror?
Olivia: Yes. Molly is there [gestures to her right] and Hadley is here [gestures to her left].
Autumn: So they look in the mirror when you do?
Olivia: Yeah, but they wear different things. Molly has lots of coats to wear when it's raining and Hadley only puts on dresses at night.
Autumn: But do Molly and Hadley both look like you in the face?
Olivia: No. Molly's teeth sparkle.

Enter Grandmother of Olivia.

Grandmother of Olivia: Olivia, we've got to go.
Olivia: Okay.*
Autumn: But we're not done talking about the seeds of self-objectification in the young female mind, which are of particular note here as subject is in the phallic stage of Freudian psychosexual development, thus the triangular division of herself from Molly and Hadley, who signifies her wish to unite with her father.
Grandmother of Olivia: Oh, go wash your fucking hair, lady.


[End scene]

*Everything to this point was real. This starts young, folks.

Why I'm Not Looking in a Mirror for a Month

As of 12:01 a.m. Sunday, May 1, 2011, I’ve embarked on a monthlong mirror fast. Thirty-one days of no mirrors, store windows, shiny pots, spoons, or the dark glass of the subway.

My personal bathroom mirror is shrouded; my windows will either be open at night or be covered with drawn blinds so that I can’t sneak a peek. At public places and the homes of others, I will avert my eyes where I know there’s a mirror, and will look away as quickly as possible if I run into an unexpected reflection. The only exception to this will be the use of a handheld mirror to apply makeup—I will apply my skin products (serum, tinted moisturizer) without looking, but will use a small mirror for the color products (eyebrow pencil, eyeliner, mascara, and lipstick). I am also allowing a small hand mirror to be used to spot-check for spinach in my teeth. Deal? I’m doing it this way because not wearing makeup for a month is another sort of challenge, and I don’t want this experiment to be about not wearing makeup for a month; I specifically want it to be about the dozens—perhaps hundreds—of times each day that I look in the mirror for no practical reason. 
 

*    *    *    *    *

Marilyn, Annika Connor

I purposefully say “no practical reason,” because there are plenty of reasons that I look in the mirror as frequently as I do, reasons that go beyond checking for lipstick smears or unreasonable hair. To be clear: I am not bound to my mirror. Some acquaintances reading this may be puzzled as to why I believe a mirror fast will be a challenge for me; I’m not prone to pulling out a hand mirror to check my makeup, and I don’t give off the vibe of someone who can’t be torn away from her own image. I don’t know how often the average woman looks in the mirror; I’m guessing I’m about on par, perhaps shying toward the more frequent end of the scale. So I’m not particularly concerned that the time I spend in front of the mirror is consuming me.

What I am concerned about is the uncomfortable recognition I had when reading John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. He writes:

A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. … And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. … Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.

Reading this was the first time I’d understood that objectification does not mean sexualization. Because I don’t usually present myself in a particularly sexualized manner, I thought I’d done what I could to safeguard against my own objectification. But I haven’t, because in many ways it’s near-impossible: Women are constantly being looked at. Even when we’re not, we’re so hyperaware of the possibility of being looked at that it can rule even our most private lives. Including in front of our mirrors, alone.

Sometimes I look in the mirror and see myself, or whatever I understand myself to be. Other times, I distinctly see an image of myself. When I see my image reflected on a mirror behind a bar I think, Oh good, I look like a woman who is having a good time out with friends. Or I’ll see my reflection in a darkened windowpane, hunched over my computer with a pencil twirled through my upswept hair, and I’ll think, My, don’t I look like a writer? Or I’ll walk to a fancy restaurant and see my high-heeled, pencil-skirted silhouette in the glass of the door and think: I pass as someone who belongs here. You’ll notice what these have in common: My thoughts upon seeing my reflection are both self-centered and distant. I’m seeing myself, but not really—I’m seeing a woman who looks like she’s having a good time, or a writer, or someone who belongs at Balthazar.

I may in truth be any of those, but I am relying upon a false reference point. It’s false because it is, by necessity, distorted—whether it’s distorted by the physics trick that shows us a reverse image of what our onlookers see, or by my own subjective opinion, or by my pucker-lipped “mirror face,” the fact remains the mirror will not only not be able to tell me whether I’m having a good time, it can’t ever really tell me whether I look like I’m having a good time. I know perfectly well what I look like; still, I use the mirror as a divination tool to repeatedly confirm both how I look and how I should feel about it.

One of the symptoms of an eating disorder is what’s known as “body checking”: excessively feeling, measuring, or monitoring aspects of one’s body. The idea isn’t necessarily that an ED patient is checking her or his body and finding it unsuitable (though it can be that); it’s more that the chronic observation signals a preoccupation that bespeaks the larger concern. The act of monitoring becomes one of the touchstones through which an ED patient marks her day. I wouldn’t exactly say I’m “face checking” myself, but most of the time when I’m looking in the mirror, I’m not merely looking for stray eyelashes. I’m looking for confirmation that I look good enough that I needn’t be anxious about my appearance—not at any given moment, but in perpetuity. In other words: I am asking the mirror to free me from being absorbed with my looks. It’s like having an AA meeting at Tequila Willie’s.

Please don’t mistake me: This experiment isn’t about improving my self-esteem, not exactly. I don’t stand in front of the mirror and pick myself apart, nor do I gaze tenderly upon this glorious visage. My response to my appearance fluctuates, as does everyone’s, I assume. Most of the time I like what I see just fine. Still, if one outcome of this project is emerging with a more consistent attitude toward my appearance, well, that’s just dandy.

Yet my core concern here isn’t whether I like or don’t like what I see in the mirror. It’s about the overriding self-consciousness that’s taken up residence in my psyche. Self-consciousness is often taken to mean some combination of shy, uncomfortable, awkward, and not feeling particularly good about one’s self; it can indeed result in that. But there’s another application of heightened self-consciousness, aptly described in a chapter of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex that's titled, of course, “The Narcissist”: 

I recall another young woman I saw one morning in a café powder room; she had a rose in her hand and she seemed a little intoxicated; she put her lips to the mirror as if to drink her reflection, and she murmured with a smile: “Adorable, I find myself adorable!” … “I love myself, I am my God!” said Mme Mejerowsky. To become God is to accomplish the impossible synthesis of the en-soi and the pour-soi [that is, to be at once the changeless Fact, the Essence, and the mutable, questioning Consciousness]... The young girl who in her mirror has seen beauty, desire, love, happiness, in her own features—animated, she believes, with her own consciousness—will try all her life to exhaust the promises of that dazzling revelation.

When I read that passage from The Second Sex, a trickle of dread ran through me—I felt like I’d been caught, as though Simone de Beauvoir had peered into my brain at my vainest and most delusional and written it down for posterity. But the real concern I have about self-consciousness—both the drunken-mirror-kissing kind and the painfully awkward kind—is that it is impossible to be in a state of flow when you are your own #1 concern.  

In a flow state, a person is so actively engaged with a task that there is simply no room for awareness of one’s self. That’s not because you’re outside of yourself as you might be when, say, watching an engrossing action film; rather, it’s because you are so wholly present in the moment that you and the moment merge so as to engulf your consciousness. Forgive the New Agey woo-woo, but: In a state of flow, there is no self-consciousness, only consciousness.

Mirror Me, Annika Connor

Times I have experienced a flow state: hiking the White Mountains, writing this blog, attending a figure drawing class, creating a magnificent dessert, moonlight swimming in the Gulf of Thailand. Times I have not experienced a flow state: necking with a man who murmured that my body was “amazing,” buying a great pair of jeans, seeing a candid photo of myself and thinking I looked quite pretty, being told by an appealing man that he’d been “spending the whole night trying to not stare at your beauty.” I felt good about my appearance in each of those latter moments, and I’m not diminishing the importance of being able to recognize one’s own beauty. But those moments had no transcendence. I emerged from each of those windows of time feeling beautiful, but the moments were myopic in their focus on my appearance.

When I look at the flow moments, though, beauty takes on a different tint. It’s not that beauty becomes secondary or unimportant; it’s more that I’m fulfulling the false craving I have for feeling beautiful with something more substantial. You can get vitamin C from a pill—hell, you can get it through enough Skittles—but there’s nothing like getting it from a perfectly ripe orange. In both cases, you get the vitamin C, but with the whole food you get things like fiber, folate, and potassium. It’s the same with flow states versus moments of appreciating my looks, or having them appreciated: With both, I still wind up pleased with my appearance. But one is the orange, and the other is a grab bag of candy.

There’s nothing wrong with looking in the mirror. There’s nothing wrong with sometimes looking to your reflection—even when it is impossibly subjective, and backward at that—for a breath of fortitude, centeredness, and assurance. I just want to see what life is like when I’m not using that image as my anchor; I want to see how it affects the way I move through the world, the way I regard myself and others. I want to know what it’s like to sever a primary tie to one of my greatest personal flaws—extraordinary self-consciousness—and I want to discover what will fill the space that the mirror has occupied until now.

I want to eat the orange. 

My $14 Cheerleader: How I Went From Hating to Loving Lipstick in One Easy Week

When Eden did my makeup, she pointed out that by wearing eye makeup but no lip color, I was actually putting my face a wee bit out of balance. "The face is in thirds--you see up here [eyes and above], this here [the nose area] and down below. If you don't have everything in balance, instead of one feature jumping out it just looks sort of strange." (This explains why I've always found the '60s-style "nude lip" cool but bizarro.) "If you're wearing eye makeup and then put on a little bit of lip color, you balance your face and your eyes actually jump out more."

 Brigitte at left: Sultry as hell. Brigitte at right: Vaguely alien-like, and sultry as hell.

Reluctantly, I saw she was right. I never liked wearing lipstick; my nervous habit is to rub my lips (I tell myself I'm "exfoliating" but let's be real) and I fear that if I wear lip color I'll wind up looking like a 6-year-old in her mother's makeup cabinet. But even with the exaggerated lip that Eden did on me, I saw that they still didn't overshadow my eyes. (The false lashes may have had something to do with that.) And off to MAC it was. As a wearer of lipstick for exactly one week, I'm pleased to report my preliminary findings:

I became less conscious of how I looked. Rather: I became less conscious of whether I looked pretty. I don't wear a lot of makeup, but everything I do wear is designed specifically to hide "flaws": tinted moisturizer evens out my ruddy skin tone, mascara darkens the blonde tips of my lashes, and so on. I don't wear makeup that is designed to look like makeup—that is, nothing that announces itself as being artificial. I'm comfortable that way, but it also means that there's zero sense of play in my makeup routine. It's just hiding all the stuff that I think is wrong with my face--how could that be fun?

But with this pert little brick-red Cupid's-bow announcing my presence, pretty wasn't the question. Instead, there was a sense of self-definition going on: No, I don't just look like a slightly Photoshopped version of how I looked when I woke up this morning; I have unnaturally red lips, and you can't deny it. I'm less aware of whether I look pretty because instead of merely presenting my face—which, really, I have little control over—I'm presenting something closer to a look. Now, red lipstick is certainly a signal of beauty, so in one way it's further putting myself out there to be evaluated. But the juxtaposition of bright red lips with the rest of my relaxed look—loose college-girl hair, jeans, barely-there makeup—makes me feel like the lips are a sort of boundary, defining something about me and how I move in a public sphere. I'm bringing something to the table that's me, certainly...but not quite the me I and I alone wake up with in the morning.

It was boiling in the office on Day 2 of my lipstick experiment, so I was sweating buckets. But when I looked in the restroom mirror instead of seeing all that shine on my forehead, I saw this bright little pucker of a mouth wearing this color that still doesn't look at all natural to me. Instead, it looks: a tad obstinate, insistent, amused, amusing. A colleague entered the restroom as I was washing my hands, and in saying "Hello" to her I saw how the slight exaggeration the color gave my lips seemed to also exaggerate what I was saying, even if only to myself. And it was in seeing my lips in motion that I understood what it was that was intuitively making the lipstick experiment more rewarding than I'd anticipated: My words felt just a little bit brighter, edgier, more present. In seeing my highlighted lips move, I saw the words themselves as being highlighted. I never thought I'd be feeling this way about lipstick, but here it is: I felt like what I was saying had more of a right to be said. The vehicle that carries those words was painted with color, verve, punch: How could their cargo not absorb a bit of that essence?

Certainly I'm not the first to connect articulation with lip color: While pigmenting one's lips has been in fashion for a few millennia now, lipstick—with its swivel-up tube that can fit inside even the smallest handbag, making virtually any woman able to swipe her lips and announce that she's playing ball—only showed up in 1923, just three years after the passage of the 19th Amendment. Women matched their new political mouthpiece with exaggerating their actual mouths—besides the bob, is any motif of the newly liberated Jazz Age woman more significant than lipstick? When a woman is described as lippy or mouthy, it's not exactly a compliment, but it's not exactly an insult either. It's more that she's sassy. A mouthy broad? It's not me—but where can I take lessons?

I'd say I'm conflicted about how lipstick made me feel, but I'm not, not really. In no way do I think that my words are actually more important when I'm wearing lipstick, nor do I take any other woman more or less seriously based on whether or not she's painted her lips that day. But I can't deny how I felt: more confident, more present, more rightful. I feel conflicted about a lot of aspects of traditional feminine trappings: high heels (love 'em! hate 'em!), jewelry (holes in our ears? but I happily wear a pair daily), leg shaving (who has time? me, apparently). And that includes the very idea of makeup--I rarely leave the house without it, and part of me really hates that fact, because I feel like I'm telling myself every morning that I'm not quite good enough as-is. But I feel none of those conflicts with lipstick. Instead, I just enjoy how it feels.

Annika Connor, Painter, New York City

Like fragments of an ongoing daydream, artist Annika Connor’s lush watercolors focus on the feminine aesthetic in beauty—lovers in an embrace, ballerinas in flight, even decadent interiors. Annika’s work also extends outside of the studio; she’s the founder of Active Ideas Productions, which promotes emerging artists through education, publications, and more. The impetus to talk with Annika was, of course, her intriguing work, which frequently captures beautiful women in intimate moments. But I was also particularly eager to learn more about her thoughts on personal beauty and presentation: Even in the fashion capital of the world, she stands out as exceptionally stylish (legendary New York Times style photographer Bill Cunningham agrees; he’s photographed her several times) and effortlessly glamorous without sacrificing any of her natural warmth. In her own words:

On Seeing and Being Seen
I got glasses a couple of years ago for distance, and when I did I was like, “What?! You’re supposed to see all that?” [Laughs] I couldn’t believe that I was supposed to see the branches on trees 50 feet away—that’s nuts! That’s way too much information! When I go to the ballet or the museum I'll put on my glasses; other than that, I don't tend to wear them. I kind of like seeing what's in front of me and letting the rest be a little blurry. So I don't really notice people on the street very much, or notice them noticing me—I get lost in this little bubble. [Laughs] But I don’t take the glasses off in order to not see people; it’s just a byproduct.

 Marilyn Multiplied

 
I started this around the time I got glasses—Marilyn Multiplied, and it's obviously playing on the Andy Warhol idea. This is from How to Marry a Millionaire, where Marilyn Monroe plays this bumbling sort of fool because she has to wear strong prescription glasses, but she doesn’t want to. She’s this great comic character—she’s doing all these silly things because she can't see what's going on. In this particular scene, she's gone into the bathroom, she's had her glasses on, she's fixed her hair, she's fixed her makeup, she's straightened her dress, and here she's just taken off her glasses and she's putting them back in her handbag. So this painting is depicting the moment when she's decided to literally not see the world in order to be seen by the world as beautiful. She's playing a comic character, but it struck me as poignant that her character was deliberately operating blind in order to be seen.  When I painted her reflections—they're all her, but they could almost be different women too.  Overall the painting is about the various multifaceted sides one has, all the many women that one woman is, depending on the angle or the light or their mood.

Any flat surface functions as something you gaze at—there's an immediate association with the mirror.  So a painting, although it doesn't actually reflect your image, often functions as a mirror, both to the viewer and the artist. As an artist, it's hard to keep yourself out of your paintings. My paintings almost always have a self-portrait element, even if I’m painting a man or a forest, so when I am painting women, it’s natural that I project a bit of myself into them. Of course my mixed emotions and feelings also go in there on some level, but my paintings take a really long time to make, and my emotions change, so it’s not necessarily as direct as: I’m angry, and then the woman looks angry.

La Goulue

On Allure
I titled this painting La Goulue, which was a great restaurant on the Upper East Side but which also translated means “the greedy one.”  I gave her this name because in this painting she’s so greedy for the viewer’s attention. I was inspired by a Stieglitz photo of a woman looking at the viewer, sort of hanging over a sofa wearing a come-hither look that seems to say, “Look at me.”

In my studio, I actually had to hang La Goulue behind my sofa because she was so demanding of your attention that if she was on the other wall it was interfering with the ability to see my other work.  I love that she’s really insisting having on the viewer’s eye on her, but no, I don’t think I need to make sexy paintings in order to get the viewer’s attention.  When I make sexy painting, it is because my work in part deals with depicting romance and daydreams, and sex and allure is a part of that conversation.

I have a lot of notions that are feminine and super-idealistic—some might say idealistic or naive.  However, there's so much in the world that’s unpleasant, unattractive, uninteresting, and aggressive—if I have the opportunity to literally make something that never existed before, like a painting, why shouldn't I create something that's inspiring and uplifting and beautiful, as opposed to something that’s jarring? I definitely feel that by seeing the world as beautiful, I end up painting a world that is somewhat beautiful.


On Self-Presentation
I want to give gifts to my viewer, and I suppose that kind of extends with my love of fashion and how I present myself. If I’ve put myself together in the best possible way that is the most appropriate for the situation, it makes me feel confident. So for example, if I meet with my lawyers, I’ll put on a great suit, I’ll pull my hair back, I’ll look all...Corporate Annika. Doing this sort of attire makes me feel competent and I’ll ask questions about [faux-deep voice] intellectual property law.

Sometimes there's a theatrical element to what I’m wearing, a bit like costuming. Presentation is a big part of pulling together a look. When you put a frame on a painting, it’s the final touch. And a pretty dress without any accessories or makeup—something feels missing. Jewelry, makeup, hair—it's how you frame the figure. It's similar to how you paint a painting.

During the day I don’t wear much makeup, just the basics to make me look like I don't have dark circles under my eyes. But if I’m getting dressed up for an event, I enjoy doing something dramatic. That's one of the best things about being a woman—we can make ourselves look way more beautiful. I sometimes feel bad for men. They don't get to wear cover-up! That must suck! They just have to look how they look.

At the Les Liaisons Dangereuses: The Young Fellows Ball; photo, Yina Lou

As a woman, when you know you're looking good, you feel confident. Your day is better, you accomplish more, you meet more people, because you have that extra edge. Sometimes when I'm feeling blue, I'll put on an outrageous outfit and go to Whole Foods and grocery shop. The great thing about Whole Foods at Columbus Circle is that everybody goes there. You have no idea if somebody's just stopping and getting some food on the way to a dinner party, so I can totally be in a ball gown at Whole Foods if I feel like it!

So when I am sad I'll put on an outrageous hat or I’ll wear a super-colorful outfit, so people will smile at me. And maybe it's a bit because they’re laughing, but in the end when you’re walking down the street and people are smiling at you, you start to feel better, even if you had been sad.

 Left: At the Performa Red Party; House of Diehl created the umbrella bustle on-site; photo, Yina Lou.

Right: At the Veuve Cliquot Polo Classic.

On Actions and Reactions of Others
Obviously I notice when a guy catcalls or something like that—but I learned while living in Barcelona that that is a compliment.  Of course, you can get offended by it from a feminist perspective, but essentially they're paying you a compliment. There's certain ones I don’t like, but for the most part when I'm walking down the street and some guy is like, "Ooh, looking good!” it makes me smile. Maybe I shouldn't, but—I mean, "Ooh, looking good!" [Laughs]

I don't feel I get belittled for being feminine, because I'm embracing it. My hair is blond and I’m wearing a sequined dress—if the first guy I'm speaking with doesn't immediately take me seriously and think I'm, like, this crazy intellect, that's totally okay! When that person eventually hears my ideas, my smarts will show themselves.

Actually, it's sort of good when people underestimate me, because then it's easy to impress them. [Laughs] And they do—I tend to get underestimated. But when they see my work, the painting speaks for itself.

Held back by beauty? Honestly, I don't really see myself as a beautiful woman. I see myself as, you know, moderately attractive. I'm okay, but I’m not any kind of supermodel. So maybe if you're super-super good-looking, you get pigeonholed by that. But I'm not good-looking enough to be held back because of things like that. [Laughs]


On Fascination
Beauty encourages projection because it engages with fascination: Something that's really beautiful fascinates you. You want to keep looking at it, whether that’s sunshine through yellowing leaves in Central Park on a lovely Sunday, or a woman simply strolling by. 

Because beauty is evocative, you relate what you're seeing with what you're remembering. When you’re looking at a beautiful landscape, you're enjoying the transcendental moment, but you’re also remembering, say a hike you took with your mother some other time. So when you're seeing a beautiful painting and it reminds you of an experience you had, or someone you knew. A beautiful woman can remind you of someone you know, or almost someone you can imagine you want to be.

 Midnight Express

But I also think there is a flipside to the beautiful. In order for something to be truly beautiful, there has to be fragility, or perhaps a potential of destruction. Everybody says beauty is fleeting—it this sense that beauty won't last forever which is part of why it its hypnotizing.

I also think people project with beauty because there's a longing that comes with the beautiful—a longing to possess, a longing to be there, a longing to become, depending on what the subject is. That longing can contribute to that darker side of the beautiful.  And that darker side can intoxicate, intrigue, and destroy.

 Rivera Remembered

Beauty Resolutions

When it comes to my appearance, I've had the same loose resolutions every year: drop a bit of weight, and/or accept my appearance as-is. (Contradictions? Moi?) The former is easy enough when you set your mind to it, but the latter isn't; it's vague, with no real actionable steps. It's about how you feel, not about how you act, and if we all had control over our feelings we'd be a nation of robots (and therapists would be out of work).

And really, I've never been able to stick to resolutions. But I do have a handful of goals surrounding looks:

1) Go for a week sometime this year without looking in a mirror (except once in the morning).
2) Approach beauty with a sense of play, not duty: Try fun hairstyles, try the occasional makeup "look" instead of my usual oh-I'm-not-wearing-makeup makeup.
3) Flipside: Go for a week without wearing makeup.

And again, these seem contradictory. But what I've learned so far in talking with different women for this blog (starting in 2011, this blog will have weekly interviews with women from all walks of life, focusing on beauty-related issues) is that beauty doesn't have to be about duty. I've been surprised by the joy that a number of women I've talked with have reported about their beauty routine: Many report it as a sensual experience, a time to devote attention to a sense of fantasy. I've always approached hair and makeup with a sort of "ugh" approach, but still I do it. Ideally my beliefs would be in line with my actions, but the fact is I prefer how I look with makeup, so I'm not going to change that. But I want to try to stop approaching beauty mainly as something bestowed upon us--or not bestowed upon us--by others, whether that be nature or whatever "look" is deigned to be in at any given time.

One woman I interviewed described liking her beauty routine because then it felt like something she could opt in or opt out of, instead of something based solely on genetic accidents, and I rather like that. I've chosen not to opt out, but I'm not satisfied with the ways in which I've opted in, either--largely because I'm not looking at it as an option. Perhaps it's not really an option; I don't know, that's part of what I'm trying to investigate. But it's worth a shot.