Product-Free Trick To Look Your Best Ever In 5 Minutes! Beauty Editor Candidate #2 Tries It For You
Plus: Your biggest deal ever on subscriptions runs through January 8!
Hello Sassy People,
Belated things first, I published this little message yesterday without emailing it out or externally promoting it and was blown away by you dedicated AJPTers who found it anyway. That’s so incredibly sweet. I want to encourage the rest of you to leave a note there too because it's never too late to tell anyone you are happy that they are alive, including this guy. Thank you!
And then on to today’s featured story: Thanks to you, my co-editors, who generously weighed in yesterday on what type of piece would be the best to run now based on the current vibe of the world, we are going with this one below. It was submitted by Cathy, after I announced that I was searching for submissions from anyone who wanted to be our next AJPT Beauty Editor. That’s also when I made the declaration that you would be choosing our new Editors along with me. (I am realizing in writing this how many links I have in here today - what’s up with that? - AND how much I rely on you to run this whole thing - jeez, thank you! But if you are sick of this free consultant work and want to get paid for your contributions, send your stories for publication to me jane@anotherjaneprattthing.com.)
Anyway, after announcing the worldwide hunt for new AJPT Editors, I recently ran the first gorgeous Beauty Editor entry. And today I have Beauty Contestant Number Two for you. (It’s not really a contest and we would certainly never condone an actual beauty competition, which is why that term is maybe marginally funny.) So let’s see what Cathy has to say about beauty and then let’s love and support her in the comments, as you do so incredibly well.
Love love,
Jane
PS We reached another milestone the other day! AJPT has now published a whopping 500 stories!! So whether or not you read or relate to today’s, definitely look around and see all the other amazing and provocative works of art to be found here. As incentive, I will take the paywall down off of this hyper-popular piece, so that you can read it and no doubt want to then read the other 499. Let me know what you love and hate and don’t care about all of it in the comments, please. I live there and get lonely when it’s just me.
By Cathy Alter
Mirror gazing, if you think about it, goes back to ancient Greece, with the story of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection. It’s a story of vanity, unrequited love, and narcissistic personalities worldwide. (Before I married my kind and evolved husband Karl, “narcissist” was also a prerequisite to apply for the job as my boyfriend.)
I don’t fear that I’ll go the way of Narcissus. These days, thanks to my impending 60th birthday, I would rather avoid mirrors at all costs, especially in profile. But, as I’m about to learn over the next 5 days, the point of mirror gazing is not about vanity. Instead, the practice can also boost self-kindness and self-acceptance. At least that’s the plan.
Because when Jane asked me to take on the role of one of her beauty editors, I thought, I better start with myself. It’s not that I want to fix anything about the face staring back. (And I definitely don’t want to fix anything about your faces, dear readers.) It’s that I want to have more compassion for that face. Especially on those days when I feel my worst impulses taking over. Aging is no picnic, after all.
So, let’s stare gently into our mirrors. I’ll go first.
Day 1: My Bathroom Mirror, Always The Ficklest
The mirror gazing rules are pretty simple: Use a mirror to make eye contact with your own reflection. As a beginner, practitioners suggest setting a timer for 5 minutes and working up to 10 or even 20 minutes. As a meditative practice, mirror gazing is all about staying present in the now. It’s like taking a psychological snapshot of your inner thoughts and feelings.
I head to the mirror in our master bathroom, set my timer, look into my eyes. A few days earlier, my dermatologist zapped off some pre-cancerous lesions from the left side of my face and one of the eyes into which I’m gazing is swollen and black and blue. And I have an oozing scab on my cheek. “Eyes, up here, buddy,” I remind myself.
To avoid seeing the carnage, I move in closer, my nose practically touching the mirror so that all I see are my eyes. It’s then when, BOOM! I’m no longer looking at myself. Instead, I see my father staring back. Our eyes are the exact same watery green, our irises rimmed with the same navy blue. I reflexively jump back, like I’ve been visited by a ghost. Except that my father is 92 and happily awaiting our Thanksgiving visit the next day.
“Hello,” I say to bring myself back to the moment. “What’s going on in there?” There is no answer; I hear nothing except my heart, which is pounding like I’ve run up 10 flights of stairs. What is taking so long? I ask the mirror. These five minutes seems endless and impossible. I feel weird and lonely and decide that I cannot take another second of staring at myself. When I grab my phone to turn off the timer, I realize that I’ve mistakenly set it for 45 minutes.
Part of mirror gazing, I learn, is that everyone makes mistakes—even in our habits of criticizing the parts of ourselves we considered flawed. I mean, who doesn’t have flaws? It doesn’t make us any less worthy of love, especially of our own love. The more I stare, the more I hope that on the other side of the mirror is forgiveness.
Day 2: My Mother’s Mirror, In Which I Search For Approval
To avoid making the same 45-minute mistake, I ask my husband to set his timer and head off to the downstairs bathroom in my father’s Connecticut townhouse. We arrived from DC a few hours earlier and I leave Karl and Leo in the den to catch up with my dad. As I take my place in front of the mirror, I can hear the rise and fall of their laughter from the other room.
This particular mirror is not a happy place for me. It’s where my mother always did her morning makeup, the sink crowded with her Estee Lauder foundation, Bobbi Brown eyeshadows, and a tube of Revlon’s Love That Red lipstick, her trademark color. My mother was always an early riser and didn’t want to wake my father by putting on her face in the bedroom. And, as someone who wore full makeup to take out the trash, I’m not sure that my father ever saw her in her natural state. In her era, if you were born pretty, as she was, you stayed pretty.
“How can you look in the mirror without your makeup on?” she once asked me.
“How can you not?”
Well, I get it now. It’s just that my mother has been dead for over a decade, so I can no longer commiserate with her. When her dementia made it untenable for my father to care for her, he made the heart wrenching decision to place her in a memory care unit.
I look into her mirror. In Jewish folklore, mirrors are portals to the spirit world. Some tales even describe a person looking into the mirror and seeing the image of their deceased staring back. I wouldn’t mind seeing my mother again. Seeing her the way she was before dementia robbed her of everything. Black hair, black eyes, and those red lips!
My mother was my first mirror. Letting me know that if I didn’t “floof” my hair, I’d look like I had cradle cap. That I was no natural beauty (like Christie Brinkley, her words) and that I’d always need to wear makeup. That I should always put on my lipstick because “You never know who’s around the corner.” I stare and stare and wait for my mother to show up. It dawns on me that I’m always looking for my mother. In the bathroom, in my face, in the words that come out of my mouth. When I hear Karl’s timer go off, I return to my family. Leo asks me what I was doing. “Staring in a mirror,” I tell him. “Why?” he asks. “You look beautiful.”
Perhaps we all should be looking into Leo’s mirror more often.
After Thanksgiving dinner at my brother’s house, his wife Abby and I go into their eldest daughter’s bedroom so we can stare in her mirror. Sophie is an actress in LA with handfuls of pre-Raphaelite hair and perfect skin. Even though Sophie’s mirror has a soft pink lighting and puts Abby and I in the most flattering light, literally, we can’t stop singing the Songs of Ourselves.
My wrinkles
My dark circles
My double chin
When I tell Abby that this isn’t the point of mirror gazing, she asks what we’re supposed to be doing.
“Just look into your eyes and accept yourself as is,” I explain.
“Ugh.”
“What’s wrong with you?” My eyes have wandered from mine to hers. “You’re beautiful,” I tell her. “You have no wrinkles. Your skin is flawless.”
It’s a better song to sing. Catchier, too. The harder part is believing the words. But if Abby doesn’t believe mine, she can always look at the list of affirmations taped to the door of her daughter’s closet.
“My aura is magnetic” reads the first item on the list.
“I am irresistible.”
“I radiate love and inspire people.”
Sophie is the Stuart Smalley for the modern age. In fact, we should all tape Sophie’s list to our mirrors.
Day 4: My Son Leo’s Mirror, The Funniest And Most Surprising View Of All
I still haven’t worked up to more than 5 minutes of mirror gazing. And as Stuart Smalley might say, that’s good enough. (And doggone it, people like me!) When we arrive back in DC after Thanksgiving, I return Leo’s travel kit to his bathroom. It’s then when I noticed that my son has taped a small piece of paper to his mirror. It reads, “Vir Bonus Dicendi Peritus.”
“What’s good, guys?” I say poking my head in his bedroom. It’s how Leo and his friends greet each other. “Let’s mirror gaze.” Ever since beginning my project, Leo has been dying to get in on the action.
He hasn’t reached his growth spurt yet, so the visual comedy in front of the mirror makes us both laugh. “What the hell is this?!” Leo says, cracking up all over again.
“What do you see?” I ask him.
Like my husband, Leo has a real engineer’s brain. Logical and methodical. “I see that my glasses are dirty.”
“Look inside of your eyes,” I instruct. “What do you see?”
He stops laughing long enough to say, “My pupils.”
He laughs and laughs and poses this way and that, giving me a Blue Steel look before blowing himself a kiss.
“I can’t do it,” he says, crumpling over and complaining that his belly hurts from laughing so hard.
Before we began our gazing, I learn that the message taped to his mirror is a Latin phrase meaning: A good man skilled in speaking. Leo has taped it there, he tells me, because he liked the sentiment.
“Don’t you see a good man when you look into the mirror?” I ask him. “Do you see anything deeper within your eyes?”
He stops laughing long enough to say, “How am I supposed to see all that in my pupils?”
This makes me crack up. We laugh together until the timer goes off.
“Well,” Leo says opening the door to his bathroom. “I suppose it wasn’t a total waste because it was so funny.”
When I turn off the bathroom light, I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and do see something deeper in my pupils. It’s the immeasurable beauty in being Leo’s mama.
Day 5: My Bathroom Mirror Take 2 - Mind- Blowing And Like Being on (Good) Drugs
Before I began my mirror journey, I found something on reddit called, “Mirror Gazing is a direct portal to the Unconscious.” The comments section is a collective warning not to try mirror gazing after taking a bunch of ‘shrooms.
“I once looked at myself and my face started getting butterfly features,” begins one post. “Oh, hell yes,” begins another. “once while doing it, I saw my face in 4D. Another time, I saw my father.”
I wanted to know who I might see. Without an inside hookup to psilocybin, I scored the next best thing: a free gummy from my friend down the hall. “It’s sativa,” he tells me. “The happy kind.”
A few hours later, I am in front of the same mirror into which I first stared. And unlike the mushroom mirror gang on reddit, I regret to inform you that I had no strange visitors show up in my mirror. Not my mother, not my shadow self, not Demi Moore or even Margaret Qualley. Just me, eyes at half mast, clearly amused.
Standing there, zoned out on the happy kind, the lyrics from “You are the everything,” an old REM song starts playing in my head.
“Everything is beautiful
And she is so beautiful
She is so young and old”
But I didn’t hear Michael Stipe’s voice; instead, I heard my own.
We are all beautiful. We are all works in progress. Mirror gazing makes it easier to contain both truths.
Hey Cathy! I love all of your contributions to AJPT so far and can't wait to hear the response to this one. I think it is also a strange coincidence that you quote Michael at the end of the piece, just as I am asking everyone to wish him a happy birthday!
And since I forgot to write this in my intro to your sweet piece, I will say it here: Most of the time, publishing stuff about Michael's job makes me feel odd - like recently when another friend posted a picture of us on social and put an REM song as the soundtrack (what?? he is so much more than REM). But in your case, you use his lyrics so beautifully, giving credit to a wonderful person AND artist. And right around his birthday, no less!
Thank you so so much for this thoughtful and peaceful piece!
I thought of applying to be beauty editor, but to me beauty is not in the face, not really. It’s in our scars and their stories, our eyes and their level of light of dim, it’s how we feed and tend to this body we take for granted- pinching pulling and picking at its skin cover while underneath it, it does a billion things at once to keep us alive without our ever needing to think about it.
So this will be my unpopular opinion comment: beauty is not in your face, and if it is? Prepare to spend your whole life chasing after that face you used to see at 25, and couldn’t appreciate the collagen holding it on.
I’ll go so far as to say we’ve come this far.. from the 1980’s to now, but still think beauty lies in whatever the strangers in our comment sections believe our faces to be.
Or, at least for far too many - self-esteem does.
And for those who know they rock, that they are truly beautiful, congrats! You are what everyone is trying to pay for — unwavering self-worth under the gaze of a hypercritical hypocritical society.
It’s the Winona Ryder Theory. You can be the coolest, most beautiful, most admired girl seemingly in the world but it doesn’t mean you believe it, or happy, or won’t be stoned like a witch if you makes mistake. The higher others lift you instead of yourself, the further the fall when you’ve lost your usefulness - not your beauty.