When I was growing up, I remember thinking that the most beautiful women in the world were blondes. I'm not sure if this was due to the fact that I, myself was blonde (and I was identifying with what I knew), or if it was because most of the women in magazines seemed so. Cheryl Tiegs, Kim Alexis, Christie Brinkley, Farrah Fawcett.. they were everywhere, and I probably disregarded everyone else.
As time went on, I began to recognize that there were other types of beauties in existence. I almost became anti-blonde, because it started to feel just "blah" and typical. It didn't seem unique or exotic, in fact, it seemed rather boring. I no longer felt "lucky" to be blonde haired with blue eyes (which are now green....telltale?), I felt jealous of those other women who possessed the genes which made them seemingly ethnic and unique and mysterious. These weren't women in magazines (yet), these were women I saw every day, out in the world.
If I dyed my hair black and got a tan, I still wasn't going to look Greek. If I dyed my hair red and stayed out of the sun, I wasn't going to look Irish. It wasn't just the hair color, it was eye shapes and bone structures and varying natural skin colors which made them beautifully unique and not boring American blonde.
Interestingly enough, and perhaps sadly, I bet that the people with these beautiful traits wished they had different ones. I've seen enough orange-haired Italian women to know this. It seems like a universal thing to want to look like something you are not.
In my early 20's I remember having a discussion with a female friend of mine, on the subject of "if I ever owned a hair salon", and saying that my goal would be to make women work with what they had. Because that is what they were meant to have. Straight hair would not be permed, curly hair would not be straightened, etc. Now perhaps this is a little unfair on my part, because I was blessed (?) with pretty reasonable hair. It was not too thin, not too thick, not too flat, not too curly, not too straight, not too greasy.
It's easy for me to say "deal with it", because I had it mostly good in the hair department, and I didn't care much about trends, either.
Back then, if you had flat or thin hair, you tried to grow it, then permed it. It looked good on maybe 3 people, and the rest just looked strange. It didn't look like you had naturally wavy hair. It looked like limp hair trying to make a show of things. Or fat-lady-at-the-circus-like. Meanwhile, the wavy/curly haired people were using irons (the kind you use on clothing....), wearing woolen winter hats whilst dressing (trying to get the crown flat), and blow drying for hours trying to avoid the looming disaster of resembling Annie on crack and not even remotely Farrah Fawcett-like.
While hair perming has mostly been eradicated, there are still all those other things which we feel the need to change. Nose size, boob size, skin shade, lip size, cheekbone prominence, eye color, you name it. Now let me say a few things here. For one thing, I'm not talking about disfiguring or painful body ailments. If they cause physical pain, and can be fixed, I'm fine with that. For another, I am all for women trying to make themselves look "attractive" or changing up their looks now and then. BUT, I think that most should learn to work with what they've got, rather than chasing some magical version of themselves.
I could go into a huge sidebar here regarding plastic surgery, but I won't, for now. What I'm mostly trying to say is that outer beauty can be whatever we want it to be. There is no magazine cover standard for it any longer, and we need to recognize that our traits, good and bad, are what make us uniquely beautiful. Our too small eyes or boring blonde hair or big noses or A-cup boobs make us who we are, and that is what counts.
Just ask Jennifer Grey. She knows.
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