Clear lungs, full lashes, can't lose

Addictions, social media traps, and our relentless obsession with home improvements

I like to write about the beauty industry’s mean streak in the 90s/00s and how its stranglehold on my image was damaging to me as a young adult (you heard me Seventeen Magazine!). It’s a small step toward reclaiming my identity after so many years of being told I had the wrong one.

But, don’t get it twisted, I’m not dusting my shoulders quite yet. Even though I recognize how terrible and insidious those beauty standards were, I am not on the “other side” of it. In fact, I just had one of the biggest (and weirdest) cosmetic fails in awhile (stay tuned). It got me thinking about other traps I’ve fallen for in my life, the empty kind that leave you like a distant, unfulfilling lover. The pursuits which often disappoint, insatiate, leaving you hungry for more.

There are many attractive addictions laid at our feet as we enter early adulthood. Like a plush, dangerous red carpet, pathways to smoking and drinking, allure us, not in some back alley/dark web space, but in plain daylight, the rest of society already there, waving us over. Our compulsion to fit in is tested and so many of us end up walking down that crimson velvet. We shiver on the sidewalks in winter, hacking dart after dart, or test the limits of booze by flirting with, or actually getting alcohol poisoning (I am sadly guilty of both). How else can you convince half the population to light chemicals on fire and inhale them into your delicate lung system? Or slowly sip on poison until it makes you slur your speech or worse, blackout. Well, for one, you’re usually not doing these things alone (at least not at the outset). And it helps that all of these fun little accessories are packaged beautifully in bottles, romantically lit taverns, and in blockbuster films. Graphic designers pull out the stops, and more money than you can fathom keeps the engine roaring.

For those a little more medically aware who skip the smoking and drinking phase (good on you), there are still addictive traps hidden in every inch of our North American culture, packaged by the same designers, paid for by the same never-ending capitalist system. Perhaps, that system knows we’re a species looking for that endorphine hit, that societal acceptance. Our long dissipated tribal way of life has been erased, and a desire to connect is a true one. But that pursuit can be bought cheaply, quickly, and often without intention. Other than smoking or drinking, I wonder if our obsession with beauty and home improvements are equally detrimental to a healthy life. In these funnels, much like smoking and drinking, your money disappears quickly, and one tends to feel left out if you’re not joining. The most destructive part of these latter vices (yes I’m calling it), is that they aren’t proven to cause harm by a surgeon general, no warning label pops up after you’ve seen too many ads on the perfect home, the perfect body. You can binge all day and night, for years, (for decades!), and never know you need your stomach pumped.

I’m not putting home improvements in here to get a laugh, even though I find the whole affair kind of hilarious. Something happened between the late 90s and now that is not dissimilar to the haute cuisine movement. Endless content online and on TV showed trade secrets from famous chefs and interior designers. For the most part, to indulge in eating fancy food or revamping your living room isn’t a bad thing, perhaps much in the way having wine with dinner or the odd joint won’t kill you. Good food and pretty rooms can (and I hope) make you feel great, but it’s the rapid pace at which we tire of these luxuries that is becoming unsustainable. The amount of times we’ve flown around the world to dine on foam and mole for $300 a plate is something we’re finally starting to re-evaluate, especially post-covid and now with the buzz around Noma closing. (Thanks for this read Linda Yahya. Your Sunday Scaries newsletter always has gems!)

When these interests blow up and infiltrate every corner of popular culture and social media, (think of the magnanimity of design moguls Joanna Gaines and her Magnolia Network or Studio McGee ) sprinkle in money, and advertising on social media, you have hoards of young professionals pouring into Home Depots with the same Pinterest boards, tearing down their perfectly fine homes to build white modern-farmhouse lookalikes. Average homes on our streets are being looked at with disgust, marketed as tear-downs when they’re just, well, old.

What’s the big deal? Trends come and go right? In the 80’s stucco walls were a hit, metallic wallpaper and dark green marble slapped. Well, before the internet (!), if you remodeled your living room, you really did it for you, and the few people that came into your home. Today? We can get the job done, and what do we do before the paint dries? Post about it online for the rush. Without hosting a party, we can get the likes and lovely comments thousands at a time, immediately. Now imagine, (or see yourself), pulling down our phones in our kitchens to reveal dated beige cabinets, hating the place we should love living.

I made the mistake of putting my actual kitchen in my Dream Home board on Pinterest and I cried.

Last summer my family bought a home which I adore, but the last renovation was probably in the late 90’s. Even though I try to tell myself I don’t care how it looks, I find myself telling every person who walks through the door our plans on how it’s going to look later. Talk about not living in the present (or appreciating the fact that we own a home!), my eyes are so focused on the future, I’m missing all the good about the now. I wonder how it might sound if parents of pre-teens going through puberty thought the same way. “Ooof, they’re a mess now, but just wait until they’re in their 20s. They’ll be beautiful.”

There it is.

Beauty and the pursuit of it.

If it’s not money (the requirement) it’s the lifelong search for eternal youth (the desire) that invades even the most stubborn characters. The eternal refreshing our homes, refreshing our closets, our hair, skin and bodies. Especially for women, we’re only at “the prime” in such a slender few years of our lives. It’s such a waste — we spend our early lives looking ahead to get it, or looking back mourning it.

I recently found this photo of me posing at 7 or 8 years old with all of my Barbie furniture, hoping to get into the fan section of Barbie magazine.

But even then, there are opinions on how and when to covet this beauty.

I briefly dated a guy in college who used to tell me “don’t wear makeup, it’s unnatural.” Some version of that came out of his mouth almost every time I got ready. “You don’t need that!” He means this as a compliment, I told myself. I never listened to him. I chuckled a “that’s so nice,” while I reached for my mascara, feeling increasingly worse inside.

He was younger than me and into classic rock, which means I became obsessed with Led Zeppelin and Lou Reed. He had long, curly blonde hair, and was tall and thin. He walked right out of the 70’s, a young Robert Plant, and even though I was years older than him, I felt inferior. “It’s faking it when girls wear makeup, it’s not fair, it’s tricking us.” He’d continue to lament while he gazed dreamily into his posters of Nico, and Joni Mitchell… or was it Janis Joplin?

I actually didn’t wear makeup in early high school, when most of my peers were hot-rollering their bangs, and experimenting with lipliner (thank god). But one year during drama class, I wore makeup for the character I played. On my way to the bathroom to wash my face after my monologue, a popular girl who never spoke to me approached me. “You should wear makeup more often, you look really different, really pretty.”

That was it. Her words became every advertisement in Cosmo, custom made for me. My final sell. The very next day I wore makeup. I have been wearing a version of makeup ever since. The carpet rolled out, I walked down it to a flurry of attention. Smoking, drinking, and boys followed. It felt so good to be in.

Ohhh Glamour Shots — innocent pageantry (if that exists) or a total setup?

I suppose the opposite realm doesn’t interest me either. My Robert Plant wannabe pisses me off in hindsight, when I remember his passive aggressive way of telling me how to present myself or that makeup conceals truth. Which, at the core of this newsletter is what I’m sort of saying, but then why am I still unsatisfied? Could it be that the addiction being sold to us isn’t the problem, but it’s the way in which we come to buy it? If our free will is the most important asset in this western world, can we tell when we’re not truly exercising it?

The cynic is me doubts that, but there’s a thread there I want to pull at. In the meantime, this year, my biggest life-change is going to come from the things I can do within me and without money. How much time do we spend drinking the poison, inhaling it, injecting it into our foreheads, slapping it on our walls, ordering it from Wayfair? Only to then feel bad, so now we need to eat this way, re-post that inspirational meme, dry-January, go organic, learn to garden. In a time where arguably the most important party banter should be about creating community, educating ourselves about racial justice, or learning more about the collapsing climate, (ok maybe gardening belongs here), we’re at the peak of a mental illness crisis, in large part thanks to the time we spend looking at (not so deftly hidden) advertising on social media.

In December, I spent $200 on eyelash extensions. I didn’t tell anyone because I was embarrassed that I still wanted them to look different than my natural ones (re: short and straight and thin). I figured a few weeks without makeup was actually a honorable quest, even if that meant spending a stupid amount of money on glueing fake ones to my eyelids. My body had some choice reactions right away.

For some reason, within less than 24 hours, my left eye’s glue for didn’t hold. I had a row of long feathery lashes on my right eye, and none on my left. I wore mascara on one side of my face for almost two months (as in, yes, currently still dealing with this), and every time I look in the mirror I laugh, frown, and feel duped once again.

When I get quotes back over $10,000 to re-do our bathroom, it makes me wonder where all my “eff the system” attitude went. 10k used to afford me a trip around the world (shit, maybe twice), and now it can maybe get me a basic bathtub and some heated tile. Still, I’ll get in line, tell myself that a nice soak is worth the money. But hopefully I’ll be satisfied then right? Just one more thing, and then, I’ll be happy.