The ugly truth.

 Remember when your parents used to tell you all those funny but fictitious tales, such as eating bread crusts makes your hair curly, or if the wind changes as you pull a face, you’ll be stuck with it? Or how about that classic, most far-fetched one of all: that beauty comes from within.
 What? You didn’t know that was a myth? Don’t worry, neither did I, for a long time. But, as with the tooth fairy, I finally faced up to the truth. Beneath our highlighted hair and behind our designer sunglasses, we want to believe that beauty comes from within but, sadly, everything in our society indicates otherwise. From the airbrushed pages of magazines to the Botox parties sweeping the nation, we’re obsessed with how we look.
 As children, we’re socially conditioned to see beauty from a particular visual viewpoint. Culturally, we’re aware that our focus on looks is warped, but correcting it seems a tougher challenge than shifting grout from a shower recess. Where did it all go wrong? We could point the finger at that intimidating piece of plastic named Barbie; or the freakishly neutral Kate Moss; or perhaps Marilyn Monroe. While we’re at it, I hear Medusa was a saucy piece in her day too.
 If beauty evolves with the eye of the beholder, today’s beholder appears to wear tinted lenses, because we like everything bronzed and tanned. Now, I consider myself quite confident in my own skin, but there are times when I curse my Italian lineage and wish my grandmother had run off with a Greek fisherman to add a little olive to my paleness.
 Luckily in our superficial world, Greek ancestry is only a spray away. In fact, it’s astounding how easy it is to alter your appearance. The other day I overheard three women talking about erasing lines on their faces with the kind of casualness you’d reserve for getting stains out of clothing. We think we aspire to natural beauty, but we’re determined to make beauty fussy and time-consuming.
 A few years back it was suggested I get fake nails to ‘elongate my arms’ for a friend’s wedding. Hoping people would fall for this remarkable optical illusion; I sat for two hours while a nail technician glued fake nails to my healthy ones. I say glued, when in fact I should say welded, because these talons were stuck to my fingers for months. When I finally peeled them off, my nails had withered and softened so much, they were brittle and bended backwards with the slightest touch. I had to hide my hands in gloves for about 3 months before they were back to normal.
 In the pursuit of beauty, pain is the big winner – from razor cuts and waxing trauma to scalp-burning bleach and peroxide. This theory was heightened recently when a friend’s cousin found herself in hospital after suffering a severe allergic reaction to a spray tan. People had always told her she looked better with a tan and, as she lay there blistering in her hospital gown, she wondered how they’d think she looked now.
 Under the influence of painkillers and feeling sorry for herself, she told her cousin that she started to hanker for those childhood myths – the magic of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny – and as she watched her skin peel away, she desperately hoped beauty wasn’t skin-deep, after all.