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Pain is Beauty
My macabre love for the beauty and fashion industry started when I was a teenager. Beforehand, I never really had two thoughts about it. Was I bullied in school for how I dressed (among other things)? Yes, but mostly because I was “the new kid” because my family happened to move every few years (because of Dad’s sales consult job for a big company). However, outside of the bullies, the world of beauty never really caught my eye. I only got started because my Mom thought a modeling class might be a fun thing to do.
I fell in love with the makeup and the clothes followed shortly after. While I was never obsessed, I did love looking up the more fantastical fashion looks, couture (the ‘highest’ of high end in fashion), as well as the seemingly magical creative makeup designs. This continued into my college years where I took a fashion anthropology class. This class looked at what ‘beauty’ meant in different cultures around the world from different time periods (black teeth of the Edo period in Japan, the arsenic and lead ingredients in Victorian-era makeup in London, the wife fattening ‘camps’ of Mauritania in Africa, just to name a few). We looked at the psychology, sociology, and anthropological standards of ‘beauty, ‘fashion’, why did these people feel the pressure to do these specific behaviors all in the name of beauty, these kinds of…
