Why Does Beauty Even Matter Now?

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Hi. Hello. How are you? No really, how are you? Sorry, I was out last week doing... I honestly don't even remember. My brain has been on a weird loop since most of the time I'm asking myself, "Wait, did that really just happen?"

It's my job to write about beauty. But lately it feels like I'm set adrift on a lazy river ride of garbage sludge to expound virtue upon the five near-identical shimmery tones of MAC's new strobe creams or interview a dermatologist about easily Google-able information on antioxidants as I wake up every morning to a news update about what other apparently alienable rights have been signed away while I was asleep. Even surrounding myself with my beloved beauty products brings me less joy. The swipe of a new lipstick or popping the seal on a new skincare tube just seems kind of dumb now.

Who gives a shit about makeup? Why bother about a haircut? Never have I felt more useless as scrolling Twitter and picking at my split ends, my brain absorbing the cultural melee as I thought, "I should really get a trim." So I tried to ignore it all — my vanity, I mean. But honestly, what does a beauty writer do when the thing I do seems totally futile in the face of horrific political uproar?

There's a lot happening continuously, compounding on itself so that anyone who cares is basically left in a state of overwhelmed frustration and helplessness — I feel like a low voltage electrical circuit, constantly being overcharged until I short out, flip the breaker switch, and repeat. It would be easier and more comforting to shut down and ignore it and look away and anesthetize myself with the literal thousands of distractions that exist even on a good day.
But rather than do that (which arguably I've been doing my whole life), wouldn't it be better to nourish that void with bolstering inspiration and self-fortifying materials to recharge and bounce back as a slightly more useful individual? Meditation and self-discipline have never been my strong-suits however a bit of self-care I can do — that, with a whole new focused perspective. I talk to friends, some flippant and some absolutely fired up (a good way to decipher your own barometer on things). Maybe I imagined it but I feel like I hugged them a bit more firmly and a bit longer when I saw them, if only because I needed the same response in kind. It worked sometimes and other times I just wondered if that person thought I was extra creepy or something.

Even in better times I'm wondering what the hell I'm doing and why. Who needs music right now? Who needs makeup tutorials, films, books, art? But it's that sort of stuff that reconnect us to the beauty and truth of humanity which is absolutely essential in times when you recoil in disgust at this newly unearthed humanity beneath the already festering boil of callousness and greed.

I read somewhere (I can't remember it and Google is failing me right now) that beauty is essential to the human condition because it reconnects us to divinity — whatever that even means today... I think it has something to do with how humans instinctually believe that people/things that are beautiful are "good" and divine so to surround yourself with beauty is to make yourself divine. Pretty neat, huh? I'm not super religious but I'm pretty sure that divinity is one of those unfuckwithable things. How you wanna get there is all you — make it a ritual of adorning yourself in whatever embellishments you see fit to face the face the world in. There's so much beauty to be drawn out from our collective strength, ripe to be shared, redefined and reclaimed. The unknown parts of it may very well be our greatest weapon. After all, we're battling the same old tired kind of evil that we've seen before, but there is so much of us that they have not. But you've gotta give yourself the time to sit in the warm bath of your mind and allow yourself to draw it out and bask in it. And then use it to show others their own strength and beauty.

It isn't just about self-care, at least not to me. It's about designating the face and figure (yours respectively) of a new revolution born out of impatience and now obvious necessity. Things are being decided for us whether we're there to fight it or not and our images are the ones being coopted for it. Let's recognize the best and most capable and meaningful versions of ourselves when those images are repeated back to us. I, for one, want to bring my most glamorously terrifying self to the table.

While on the one hand, part of me side-eyes the some of the ways protesting and activism have questionably been appropriated as the new #content du jour, it does serve as a new constant that we scroll past regularly to remind us of what's being threatened and what we are fighting for. It's 2017 and that's how cultural events unfold now.

Vanity can be dismissed to death but I've seen what a woman who's wearing her best and favorite face can do and lemme tell you — I wouldn't stand in her way in anything less than my own best. The revolution will be hash-tagged, filtered, re-Grammed and retweeted over and over. You literally can't take your eyes way from it. And if women are to be the face of a revolution, we ought to be the ones in charge of how exactly we are seen.