Who the Mirror Bills: How Beauty Standards Turn Women Into Their Own Harshest Critics

The Mirror That Magnifies Everything Ten Times

There is a mirror in my bathroom that magnifies everything ten times. A Conair, thirty-nine dollars, bought by me, with my own money, like a woman ordering her own interrogation lamp and tipping the driver.

Sit with that. Nobody made me. I stood in a store, a functioning adult who pays tax and votes, and decided what I needed was to see my own pores at the scale of the moon. Then I brought it home and stuck it to the wall at exactly the height where every morning I lean in and meet the face that only exists at that distance, the one no other person will ever see, because nobody loves me enough to stand four centimetres from my chin under a cold light and study it. Only I do that. Only I get that close. I am the one person on earth willing to look that hard for something wrong. The harshest inspector on the site is the woman who owns the building.

The Order of Operations

My regimen used to be whatever soap was in the shower and the arrogance of good collagen. Now there is an order of operations. Niacinamide from The Ordinary, which I have repurchased so many times the app greets me by name. Then, on the correct nights, the Biologique Recherche P50, an acid that smells like a barn floor and costs like a weekend away, which I apply with the concentration of a woman defusing something, because a stranger on the internet with better skin than mine said to. My Shoppers points have watched me buy more retinol than food.

And I am not doing this alone, which is the part that should embarrass all of us and does not. My friends and I send each other before-and-afters of total strangers. "She has had her lids done and I need to know where." These are not shallow women. They run departments. They have opinions on foreign policy. They will still stop everything to zoom in on some stranger's jaw and forward it with one word: "okay??"

A Little Something Here, and Here

I went for a mole check once. An actual medical thing, skin cancer, sensible, at a clinic up on Bayview. The doctor cleared the mole in about ninety seconds, and then, still snapping off the glove, said, "You know, we could do a little something here, and here," gesturing at my face like a contractor pricing a reno on a house I happened to be standing in. I came in about dying. He found a minute to sell me on the living. I said no. I thought about it in the car. I still think about it, which is the point, which is the sale.

None of this is vanity, whatever your instinct wants to call it. Vanity is a choice you can decline. Nobody calls a man vain for showering. It is maintenance, it is hygiene, it is just being a person, except the definition of "just being a person" kept quietly expanding on me, tinted lashes, the correct acid on the correct night, and the line never once moved back, and now the baseline for looking "fine, not sick, not sad, not giving up" is a face my grandmother would have called done up for a wedding.

You Can Be Plain at Home, Not Out There

My mother never talked about any of it. She just did it, at her own mirror, before the house was awake. The one time I caught her she did not turn around. "You can be plain at home," she told the mirror, not me. "Not out there." Then she blotted her lipstick on a square of toilet paper and left for work. I keep the same blot on the same cheap tissue in my own bathroom now, and I never decided to, it just arrived, the way her hands arrived on the ends of my arms.

When the World Stops Looking

Then, because the joke has a second act, the body starts doing what bodies were always going to do, and the same world that spent forty years pressed to your glass suddenly cannot see you at all. I felt it start. I am in it. Somewhere in your late forties you become a woman waiters look past, whom the girl at the counter calls "hon" in the voice you would use on a nice old dog. And you are supposed to take this as freedom. Is it not liberating, to go unlooked-at. Some days, sure. And some days it is just the strangest grief, to spend your whole life being told your worth is a thing people can see, and then to feel the seeing switch off, on schedule, the same year you finally stopped apologizing for the space you take up.

Lying to the Mirror From a Little Further Back

I did not throw the mirror out. Obviously. It is still on the wall, still giving off that faint fluorescent buzz, and I looked into it this morning and ran the inventory, the one we all run and none of us cop to, and then I put the niacinamide on before the moisturizer because God forbid it "cannot penetrate," and I went and had a genuinely good day as a competent, loved, grown woman. That is the part that should tell you something. I can see the whole racket, name every piece of it, know exactly how stupid it is, and I will still lean in tomorrow. Knowing never once stopped me. I have started to think it never stops anyone, and that the women who swear they quit the mirror are just lying to it from a little further back.