kimberlysteele | Entries tagged with beauty

The term "jump the shark" comes from Happy Days, where in the fifth season, Henry Winkler played Arthur "the Fonz" Fonzarelli waterskiing over a caged shark. The show had grown so boring by season ten, a young Heather O'Rourke was thrown in as a recurring guest star in a weird and desperate attempt to revive it. The show wrapped in its eleventh season.

Like Happy Days in its last days, we are at an unhappy crossroads with beauty standards. The cute are not cute enough. Handsome is not handsome enough. Perfect is nowhere near perfect enough. A list celebrities at the top of their games are openly disfiguring themselves in order to cling to images that AI can create without a single cut or drop of blood. It's as if we are living out the adage "Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad." Every day, there is a new human face on the formidable Lesson of the Screen. When your world becomes the screen and you choose ever-decreasing dopamine hits not for thrills but to make it from hour to miserable hour, no human will ever be beautiful or interesting enough to hold your fungus-gnat attention span. This includes the live humans to whom you may have vowed fidelity.

Childhood is now accompanied by almost constant screen time, crowding out the physical world and decreasing sensitivity to the subtle planes even more than my TV-addled Generation X. TV and movies helped me to become dysmorphic -- to this day I am not comfortable on camera and I do not feel I want to be in front of one. At least nowadays I don't feel there is anything at stake when I am captured on video. I am not proud of the times when I was more concerned about my appearance. My old dysmorphia and urge to look perfect pales in comparison to what young people are going through now. My generation did not have screens following us on vacation or to the beach. We did not have the internet, let alone TikTok. There is a girl who become rich and famous on TikTok for merely twitching her pretty nose on camera to a beat. There is a Chinese influencer named Zhou Chuna who had over 100 plastic surgeries by the time she was sixteen. She is now approximately nineteen. She reported suffering memory loss from going under frequent anesthesia, yet her only regret was not getting the procedures sooner than age thirteen, when she started down the plastic surgery rabbit hole. She is part carnival freak, psychiatric patient, and human lab rat.

The ~~Beautiful~~ Uncanny People

Each decade brings more insecurity to increasingly-younger people, and celebrities and influencers are on the bleeding edge of the experimental wave. Michael Jackson cut off his nose to spite his face: there was no doubt he hated himself, no matter what the other allegations against him were. We can see the initial rush of approval and acceptance celebrities get when they get their first tweak: a nose shaved down, veneers, lip injections, modest implants. A little plastic surgery can transform a good looking person into a total babe. Once the high wears off, what reliably tends to develop is a wendigo of dysmorphia. The celebrity gets more done, all the while chasing the original rush of the first medical procedures. Celebrities used to look great until middle age. Some could even pretend they were not getting anything done. The trouble with plastic procedures used to occur at age 70 or 80, and suddenly celebrity grandma and grandpa looked drawn and tight. Nowadays there are celebrities in their 20s and 30s who are already looking weird. Fancy galas are a sea of collapsing nose jobs, Ozempic cronehood, and lumpy post-filler foreheads and cheeks. The male beauty standard yields even worse results, with old men attempting to reimagine themselves as hair-plugged K-Pop twinks and average looking dudes flocking to looksmaxxing forums so they can turn into egg-sucking Handsome Squidward. If I were one of the women who was supposed to be impressed by looksmaxxers, I would be in mourning for them. They have sacrificed themselves to the demon of wasted time and All Dressed Up With Nowhere To Go in the same sense as any vain girl who has no other hobbies besides her appearance. Beauty standards are now so warped, it is the height of fashion to be a sexed-up child with a micronose and violent anorexia. Humans now think they are as malleable as Mrs. Potatohead and find out they do not have interchangeable parts in the hardest way possible.

Let Her Have It: The Beauty Standard is Yours, Honey!

AI does not have the limits of the flesh. The AI hottie IS Mrs. Potatohead. She can swap out her features, gender, and even her species at the drop of a hat. She can hit all of the dopamine triggers and she can do unusual porn. She could do an army of her own selves (Andrew Tate's ultimate secret fantasy) and she would not even be sore or end up with herpes. She can look absolutely perfect anytime, anywhere, and she never has to age. This is why I suggest leaving the beauty standard to her and her to it. Let's all give up. I am not saying we should be unhealthy; no, we should all take good care of ourselves by eating moderately (this means eating medium amounts instead of gorging or starving) and getting our limbs moving in the spirit of use it or lose it. But let's stop doing it to look perfect as AI has taken that from us. Only AI can look perfect.

The now washed-up Kardashian-Jenners had their fun combining self-disfiguring surgeries and AI filters to become cartoon versions of themselves: the joke is on them because their faces, boobs, and butts cannot uncarve themselves. They now get to live with plentiful scar tissue and an aging process that will resemble milk more than it does honey. There is an old, cruel epithet about women who try to look much younger than their actual age that compares them to mutton dressed as lamb. I don't even eat flesh and I know that means taking an old animal and putting it on the dinner table pretending it is fresher and a higher grade of meat. If you've ever seen the Stanley Kubrick version of The Shining, there is a terrifying scene where Danny's father goes into Room 237 of the Overlook Hotel and encounters the ghost of an old woman who killed herself in the bathtub. She puts on a spirit-mask of a young, nubile whore in order to seduce him. She has trouble holding the glamour, so Danny's father ends up in the embrace of a floppy, gray, decrepit hag. The hidden face of the old person who has had many surgeries to appear young reminds me of the Room 237 scene. For those of us who see the soul, the uncanny glamour of youth reveals hideous glimpses of the clutching, hungry, desperate harpy beneath, no matter how good the work of the surgical team.

Inner Beauty

To the young and pretty: No matter how beautiful a person becomes, looks fade. Nobody gets out of Meatworld alive. Your body has been dying since the moment it was born into Meatworld. This is Meatworld and Meatworld SUCKS. You have a pretty jawline? It will sag. Pretty, upturned eyes? They will droop. Nice legs? Varicose veins, cellulite, and age spots, and that is if you are lucky and don't lose the function of your knees. If you invest most of your energy into looking cute, you may end up with some influencer or celebrity cheddar but you will likely fail to develop any practical set of skills if you fall out of public favor. The karma of looking cute is not at all cute. You can choose to chase the dragon or dance away from the addiction towards brighter realities.

Blessed are those who talk to the trees -- I know this, because I am one who talks to trees but was too distracted as a younger person to talk to them. When the mirror is trying to grab you (this includes screen mirrors such as iPhone cameras), walk away. Do you really need to spend more time in the abyss of cheek exercises and woeful lamentations about a particular body part? STOP, drop the phone, and go outside and find a tree. Sit with your back to it. Do this enough and you will feel weird sensations of energy moving in and out of your body. Another name for this practice is the Druid Tree Ritual and I wish I had done it back in the day. The Druid Tree Ritual is a form of prayer and also communication with the living earth. With repetition, it can give you valuable mental impressions to heal a sick mind and clear out some of the Meatworld chatter. Only by giving trees a chance can we understand them: the tree ritual is a way they can "talk" to us.

Mirror, Mirror

The old name for dysmorphia was more blunt: vanity. Vanity is one of Catholicism's Seven Deadly Sins and it is a pretty bad one, ranking right up there with Pride. If you are preoccupied with looking in the mirror, photographing, and videoing yourself, let's face it, you just might be vain. I know I was. One thing I have done to force myself out of my own vain habits is to put the statue of a god above the full length mirror in my house. Every morning, I force myself to sincerely bow in respect to the god before looking at my own reflection.

Yet another trick I have to combat dysmorphia, vanity, and unhealthy obsessions is the work of discursive meditation. By taking a single topic every day and unpacking it like a ZIP file, you learn to fill your astral plane with something other than idealized, unattainable dreams of your own face and body.

There are now beauty contests for AI "women". AI "women" are the new influencers who can pretend to be whomever they want. There are AI K-Pop bands and of course there is AI porn -- I have never watched it but I imagine the production and lighting are excellent. Since AI are willing to work for free without complaint and can be thin without starving, give them the rope they need to hang themselves, let the bald computer nerds essentially go at it with each other in the guise of AI "women" competing for attention (no that's not homoerotic at ALL, nothing to see here, folks, keep moving) and go outside and sit under a tree. You're welcome.

AI beauty contestant Seren Ay, who can literally become Mrs. Potatohead because she is the figment of some computer geek's wank cache.

For all its grandstanding, arrogance, undiluted bigotry, and ignorance, the Christian Bible does not state "Cleanliness is next to godliness." The quote is commonly attributed to John Wesley (1703-1791). Wesley was the founder of the Methodist Church. We may have him to thank for the compulsive bathing habits of Americans, who are only out-bathed by Brazilians. Let's take a second though to parse the statement that allegedly originates from one of Wesley's sermons. "Cleanliness is next to godliness". Not underneath; NEXT TO.

Wesley, like many Christians in his era, seemed to bank on his own entry into an eternal life in Heaven where he would sit alongside his God and presumably have as much or more authority over human beings as he did while he toiled in Meatworld. This sort of attitude is comically hubristic in my opinion and is one of the reasons I find most stripes of Christianity to be insufferable. To say cleanliness is next to godliness is almost arrogant enough to say cleanliness is the same as godliness. The implication is that circumstances that would make one dirty or ugly also make the person, place, or thing suffering those circumstances evil, cursed, or Satanic. I'm not surprised it came from a Christian preacher: it has the air of sanctimonious, paranoid, absurd frigidity about it.

In Japanese, the word kirei means both beautiful and clean. The illusion of cleanliness is that it is synonymous with beauty and beauty is always apparently clean in some key respect.

The trouble with both cleanliness and beauty in our civilization is their equation with godliness. That which is symmetrical, vital, fertile, and new reigns uber alles. Beauty is a phenomenon perceived entirely from the outside; it is naively presumed to be a perfect reflection of the truth within.

I was at the physical peak of my own beauty at age 21. Though I saw myself as a near-10 stunner, I was actually a mid with excellent grooming habits. I was also stupid: I made the grave mistake of chopping my long hair off at age 19, wanting to fit in with gamine supermodels who slouched on magazine covers. I am a gnome compared to those women -- so I hilariously worked retail to sell clothes modeled by them while imagining myself to be of the same beauty caliber as them. Not everyone is into tall girls though: for a petite woman, I qualified as a hottie back in the day, which wasn't bad for someone as naturally nerdy as me but certainly never would have made do for a local beauty contest, let alone a runway. I was pretty enough on the outside and hideous on the inside. Behind my cute facade, I was a cauldron of anger and sorrow, lying to myself and others, ungrateful, and thirsty. I find it funny when people say they want to go back to nineteen. I don't.

Nowadays, the actors who dominated my era -- Julia Roberts, Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise -- are being remade via AI. No matter how perfect you are or were, there is a computer who can invent a more perfect version of you that does a better job of squeezing the dopamine triggers that made you famous in 1983. These new AI versions are uncanny. They're more symmetrical, fuller-lipped, larger-eyed, and squarer-jawed, and cleaner in every way, yet something is off. AI always gets something wrong, like those AI-generated kitchen photos where the vase of flowers gets eaten by the ceiling fixture or the towel disappears into the wood of a cabinet. Whether AI creates a late teen hottie or a digital rendition of a "perfect" kitchen, it's always a Frankenstein's monster that looks like it slithered from the fever dreams of a few million struggling, depressed, materialist mid-wits. Probably because that is what it is.

The images of the Perfect Mate/Perfect Kitchen are neither attainable nor sustainable. They are only meant to trick us into spending inordinate amounts of money and resources. In the case of the AI hottie, the statement goes "You're not ugly, you're just poor." What this means is that only those too poor to afford multiple cosmetic procedures need to remain ugly. Warhol's prediction of everyone becoming famous for 15 minutes in the future has been limited in some respect to those who opt into having one or more cometic surgeries. One of the commonest procedures done on young women, often when they are teenage girls, is the rhinoplasty or nose job. To be honest, a smaller, straighter nose is often a vast improvement, plus the internal part of the nose job tends to involve correcting a deviated septum, which is something I suffer from.

Big Lipped Brunettes: The Three Jolies

In the realm of non-functional cosmetics, larger lips have been a trend since Angelina Jolie became famous. In order to achieve what Jolie had naturally in her youth, women and men get a slurry of hyaluronic injected into the region every 6-12 months. The chemicals create a semi-permanent state of inflammation that dissolves over time. Little did Angelina Jolie know that her lips would launch other celebrity ships. There are three examples who spring readily to mind: Megan Fox, Ssniperwolf a.k.a. Lia Shelesh, and Kylie Jenner.

Megan Fox through the years.

Megan Fox, age 37, is an actress known mainly for being the female love interest in 2007's Transformers, a silly Michael Bay sci-fi movie that featured talking car-robots and a young Shia LeBeouf. She was considered the most beautiful woman in the world after being put on the map in her early 20s. She started modeling as a child. Lip injections seem to have been Fox's claim to fame: once she got them, she landed Transformers and the gigs kept rolling in. Only when it became self-evident that she was a prima donna did Fox start losing cache, and by that time she was famous enough to sustain herself without having to do much in the realm of actual acting.

Lia Shelesh, a.k.a. SSSniperwolf

Sssniperwolf is a YouTuber named Lia Shelesh who started off with videos about gaming in 2013. She switched her content to bland reaction videos in 2017 and was able to generate interest mainly by creating controversy and looking cute while doing it. Sssniperwolf has been arrested multiple times. She likes to steal things, hit people, and doxx those who make fun of her. Her first known mugshot in 2013 shows her without her trademark full lips. Her blow up in 2017 seems to have been synonymous with her lip enlargement.

Kylie Jenner

Kylie Jenner, age 26, inspired a bizarre trend in 2015 (when she was in her own late teens) known as the Kylie Jenner Lip Challenge. Her fanbase of tween and teen girls would stick their lips into empty Gatorade bottles and suck the air out, creating enough suction to temporarily engorge the lips. Jenner herself had already transformed herself from gawky teenager to the world's hottest model by getting lip fillers.

In all three cases, the rapid encroachment of age has made the three Jolies into Jokers. The original Jolie has become so dysmorphic, she famously went through a voluntary double-mastectomy because she has the breast cancer gene. To my mind, this was not far from cutting off one's hands for fear of getting a hangnail, but Hollywood gonna Hollywood. For Fox, dysmorphia has taken over her mind to the extent that she can no longer see the diminishing returns of plastic "improvements". Shelesh has yet to stay out of police stations and should probably consider where she is going to source lip fillers when she is detained in jail. Jenner is the poster child for her generation aging like milk. Because she is so gonzo about having herself carved and stabbed in the name of beauty, at age 26 she looks far older than I did as a poor, non-surgeried plebe at age 37.

I am sure I don't have to spell it out that all three Jolies are cautionary tales. For Fox, physical perfection is an addiction. Though 20 let go of her a long time ago, she clearly has not let go of it. Shelesh seems like a straight up terrible person: it's not just insecurity and dysmorphia eating at her, as it is in Fox's case. Jenner, like her older Kardashian clan sisters, is a monster of insecurity poised as a role model. For all three, the future looms and it looks like Madonna at the 2024 Grammys.

The spectacle of outer beauty carries a potent glamour. Sometimes the golden mean as reflected on the outside tells the truth about its astral, mental, and causal plane origins. Sometimes it lies.

Beauty is an industry and more specifically, a racket. One of the primary goals of mainstream media is to make people feel insecure about the way they look. Especially funny is how the same media extols the virtues of being beautiful on the inside while blatantly overvaluing youthfulness and attractiveness in every frame, billboard, and song.

Being beautiful on the inside and the outside are far from exclusive conditions. Consider the late George Michael of the 1980s musical duo Wham! who kept several charities alive via anonymous donations, worked in a homeless shelter and begged other volunteers not to reveal what he was doing, and secretly paid for a woman's IVF treatments so she could realize her dream to become a mother. Michael, who died of cancer at age 54 in 2017, gave away a $200 million dollar fortune and may have done so undiscovered had it not been for his untimely death.

Though I would argue it is far more valuable to be like George Michael than to look like him in his prime, spiffing up what you've got on the outside is a good idea. As in all things, moderation is key. The trouble with our modern age is the drive to physically resemble one's own version of perfect. "Perfect" can be extremely warped. Nowhere is this more tragicomically demonstrated than the plastic surgery addict who refuses to let go of his or her youthful self and winds up as yet another slightly ghastly clone as if that younger self had a love child with a Madame muppet. Far better to let the hair gray, the jowls emerge, and the crows feet to spread, I think. There's something about the natural aging process that makes humans resemble ancient trees in their grandeur. They are big, old, and gnarled with complex networks of lines. One can only imagine the tangled complexity of their roots. The last thing I would want to do would be to zap that complexity into oblivion with a surgeon's knife.

Starting From the Bottom with Footwear

I used to wear heels as a young woman. I associated them with classiness and adulthood, plus they made my short legs look a bit longer and my big hips appear to be more narrow. I no longer wear heels, though I would consider it for a special occasion. I have never had a problem with buying gently used shoes, and this has saved me a fortune over the years as I tend to beat my shoes up fairly badly. The main secret to shoes looking good for short people is to create a solid monochromatic line from the waist down. When socks match shoes and shoes match pants or skirt, the effect is very pleasant to the eye. Contrarily, pairing chunky, white or multicolor athletic shoes or sandals with shorts or too-short pants and further breaking the visual line at the waist can make a person look slovenly or careless. If you want to instantly look saner and more put-together, think monochrome, baby.

Clothing

According to valuepenguin.com, the average cost of clothing per month is $120. This is absolutely absurd and unnecessary. I rarely spend $120 on clothing in an entire year. The number one inflator of clothing costs is buying new. The second is buying too many clothes.

When I was in college in the 1990s, I thought I had a fairly large amount of clothes. I had 4 pairs of jeans, 4 skirts of various length, and about 20 tops. I had at least 6 dresses. Then I met my roommates. My roommate had 50 pairs of jeans. I have no idea how many tops she had. She had dresses, T-shirts, and a trunk stuffed with accessories. She had a leather bomber jacket that got left in someone's car and was ruined with mold. Most of my roommates had similar amounts of clothing.

I visited Antioch College in Ohio (where I did not attend) to see a friend of mine in the 90s. Antioch was woke before it was cool. Back in the day, Antioch was the school that started the whole trend of forcing young men to ask permission at every phase of mating in order to avoid nonconsensual acts that would otherwise immediately be construed as rape. Antioch was a rich kid utopia where children decided exactly what activities made up "class" half of the school year. The other half was spent on campus doing drugs. Once every few months, every dorm student would convene in the center of campus for a makeshift parade/freakshow, with young adults doing whatever came to mind, such as riding tricycles. Antioch collegiates did not bother with laundromats. Instead, they bought any clothing that fit from local thrift stores, wore the clothing until it was stiff with bodily excretions, and then either threw it away or let it accumulate in piles in the hallways of the co-ed dorms.

When well-cared for, thrift store clothes can last much longer than the paltry few months they would spend on a faux-bohemian at a party school. I have had a few of my thrifted items for two decades. They are usually nicer items than anything I can afford to buy new. I have somewhere between 8-10 skirts, five pairs of pants, 25 or so tops, one blazer, one winter coat, one spring coat, two bras, other assorted underwear, a dozen scarves, and about 25 pairs of socks. My entire wardrobe fits into 3 large pull-out drawers and half of a small clothing rack. 80 percent of it, excluding socks and underwear, is thrift and the rest was Christmas gifts. I have not bought a new item of clothing for somewhere going on fifteen years.

Hygiene

I am lucky that my Japanese genetics took over my bottom half and I never grew much hair at all on my legs. Shaving sucks and personally I wouldn't do it to my legs even if I was paid to do so. That said, the secret to a great shave is hair conditioner. Once you have used hair conditioner as shaving cream, you will never go back.

Isn't crotch funk a fun human predicament? Crotch stench is usually the result of not wiping thoroughly enough or not bathing frequently enough or both. I have never been able to grok people who have access to perfectly luxurious baths and showers who go without for days or weeks like a medieval European serf. Another issue is many cannot smell their own body odor. Please, for the love of Pete, take frequent baths or showers. It's really not OK to stink. Body odor is its own form of perfume. Just like department store perfume, I don't want to smell it on someone from a few feet away, and I'm going to be super-grossed out if I can smell it across a large room or coming at me down a hallway from 30 feet.

I have mentioned in past articles about calcium packing teeth at night. Calcium packing is where you squish out the contents of a gelcap calcium supplement and rub the white goo into the cavity prone parts of your mouth at night. It works very well and done regularly enough, can combat halitosis and prevent tooth decay.

I wear regular antiperspirant/deodorant from the dollar store in the warm months and deodorant only in the cool months. Deodorant can easily be made with one part arrowroot powder and one part coconut oil with a dash (anywhere up to a teaspoon) of baking soda. A few drops of essential oil of lavender or tea tree oil can be added for scent.

Plucking hairs makes them grow back more slowly. Native Americans in Thomas Jefferson's time hated facial hair and plucked theirs out without mercy. Pluck enough times and the hair will not grow back at all. Keep this in mind when you pluck your eyebrows!

Body Butter

Just as conditioner is better at being shave cream than shave cream, body butter is better than lotion at being lotion. Body butter is one part coconut oil, two parts shea butter, and one part olive or jojoba oil. Melt all of the oils together for about ten minutes on a low heat stove or double boiler, pour into a large bowl, mix with essential oils if desired, and then sit the bowl in the refrigerator for two or more hours. When the oils have semi-hardened, take the bowl out and whip it as if it was whipped cream. The resulting butter is absolutely amazing.

Hair Care

I feel like I have some expertise where hair is concerned because I have always had a ton of hair. I was born with a full head of black hair. My hair is very coarse and thick. It wasn't always fun to have this hair -- it can be extremely crazy and it requires much care and handling. Believe it or not, I used to have three times as much hair on my head as I do now. I believe my insane hair is an indication of my weird etheric body, which is excessive in its own way.

It's just not necessary to spend a ton of money on hair. I have not had my hair done in a salon for fifteen years. One reason is I don't like to be fussed over as I sit in a chair. I find it very weird. Salon styling is also way, way, way too expensive for my budget. I don't dye my hair. Dye and bleach are both very harsh and strangely addictive, but if you like dye and bleach, whatever, you do you. My natural hair color is dark brown shot through with gray. When I finally start having big gray-white spots near the scalp, I plan on removing most to all of the brown with bleach and going completely silver.

Long Versus Short

I have had short hair and medium length hair. Ironically, long hair is easier to maintain and takes less time to style than short hair. I believe long hair is appropriate for men and women of all ages. Long hair is great for everyone except for people with the thinnest of hair. There is often no way to hide a pronounced cowlick with short or medium length hair. If you have long hair, all you need to do to erase the cowlick is to put your hair up or in a ponytail.

My Hair Routine

I wash my hair every two days. After washing with normal cheap $3 shampoo (right now I'm halfway through a bottle of Suave Ocean Breeze) I condition with whatever conditioner I have on hand. Suave conditioners are particularly nice but I like anything with a pleasant smell. After rinsing out the conditioner, I spritz my hair at least ten times with a mixture of one part vinegar to three parts water. I towel dry my hair by daubing, wrapping, and squeezing, but not rubbing. Then I rub a small amount of coconut oil into the ends of my hair and at the nape of the neck where it likes to get frizzy. I put a turbie twist towel on my head and then sleep with it on all night. I do not own a blow dryer. I style my hair in the morning by using a straightening iron to flatten out my bangs.

Cutting Hair

I have cut my parents hair for years. Both of them have thin, short hair. I cut my father's hair with an electric razor and my mom's with a combo of electric razor and scissor. They both get hair cuts about every eight weeks. I also cut my own hair using the Unicorn Horn method. This method is where you put your hair in two ponytails, one at the top of the head near the forehead and one at the back of the head like a more traditional ponytail. You then pull both ponytails in front of your eyebrows and cut a straight line. When the ponytails are loosened, the result is extremely flattering layers. People with thinner hair can do the unicorn method with a single ponytail. I use two because I have too much hair to get it done in one.

Overall, beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder. When I look at an Instagram model, often all I can see is thirst and Photoshop. I don't understand the appeal of Kim Kardashian at all and I think she was much cuter before she went whole hog on lip fillers and butt implants. There used to be a makeover reality show I watched called What Not to Wear. What Not to Wear nominees were recommended to the show for a $5000 wardrobe, makeup, and hair makeover by their friends and family. Though sometimes the show genuinely improved the appearance and the pride of its nominees, it was far more common for it to strip the nominee of her individuality. The show was proficient at turning biker babes, anime princesses, and amateur street walkers into posh suburban mom clones in kitten heels and tasteful blazers. In short, sometimes ugly is beautiful. If I don't like your tattoos or your neon bustier, no one is making me look at them. Somebody likes it, and if that somebody is you, all the better.