Beauty, Eyes, and Icons

Part I Beauty Industry Isn’t Going to Feed Itself.

Are you beautiful enough?

Your self-confidence isn’t going to make anybody any money.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

You could help the beholder, you know. Be easier on the eye.

You could fix just this one thing. You know what I’m talking about. That one thing you’re trying to hide in every angle of every picture. Why should you live your life hating that part of yourself?

Because you’re worth it.

Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s Maybelline?

You saw her — that one perfect human being, a vision, tirelessly applying that contraption to her face with a smile. They always look happy doing so.

Someone out there sells you THE glute workout of the century while sporting a BBL from Colombia. Your eyes see through it, yet still you wonder whether you need more muscle to sit on just to still be considered a woman.

The striking artwork by a grade 12 student at my daughter's school, which I saw recently at an art exhibition. It stopped me in my tracks, and I came back to it repeatedly. This visual protest inspired this post.

Part II The Eye. The Heritage.

I have an eyeliner tattooed onto my eyelids, a decision I can’t bring myself to regret, not even a little bit. It echoes of rock lullabies in Amy Winehouse’s voice.

My eyes can look like boring brown in some conditions, but they turn bright amber when the right illuminance hits them. This amber I proudly inherited from my father.

Interestingly, if you look closely — and this takes both good eyesight and intimacy — there appears to be a dark steel-blue outline around the amber. My mother’s eyes are steel blue.

This discovery is very special to my heart.

Sometimes I go over the ink of my eyeliner with a dark blue pencil to bring out that steel-blue embrace.

We chop ourselves, color our faces and hair, put contacts into our eyes, and undergo procedures.

Where is the line between adorning a temple and conducting a ground-up renovation to rebuild it in a different style?

Would that finally satisfy the scrutinizing eyes of the beholders of our beauty?

Part III Renovation vs Restoration.

Here I am, drawn to tell you about the Rotunda of St. Nicholas in Cieszyn, my hometown in the Polish region of Silesia.

It is one of those rare treasures that was hiding in plain sight.

For generations, few people realized just how extraordinary it was because its original Romanesque beauty lay concealed beneath later additions and renovations. What looked like an unassuming old building was, in fact, one of the oldest and best-preserved Romanesque structures in Poland, quietly waiting to be rediscovered.

It took painstaking research and restoration to peel back the layers and reveal the masterpiece that had been there all along — a nearly thousand-year-old witness to history hidden beneath a disguise.

What is the iconic person hiding behind the disguise you and I put on?

What is the difference between restoration and renovation?

My wedding pictures have the old Rotunda in the background. I couldn’t help but notice that, almost two decades later, I have changed more than that Rotunda.

No wonder. I am not made of stone, and my face isn’t meant to be frozen in time. How else would it acquire character?

Ancient Rotudna, one of the few in Europe, is wearing a disguise. She was not appealing to the beauty standards of the times and was made to look more classical.

The same building was restored carefully to its original Romanesque glory. Raw and rare monument that is featured on Polish currency.

Part IV Imperfect Things.

I’ve always been fascinated by Wabi-Sabi, the Japanese love of imperfect things. It is only those imperfections that make anything memorable.

Why should I pay someone to fix mine?

Where does anti-aging end and identity-changing begin?

Do you feel pride and love when you see your parents and grandparents in your face?

How many people fell in love so that you could be here today? Your face is a cocktail of their genetics and their generosity.

In a cookie-cutter beauty culture of identical faces made by the same artists, individuality is truly iconic.

Amy Winehouse was such an imperfect icon.

Her imperfections strengthened the narrative, drew out the character, and wrote an unforgettable story.

“You know I’m no good,” she sang, always unapologetically, with her thick eyeliner messily drawn on.

I wrote this while listening to her sing.

And I’ve come to the conclusion that beauty has very little to do with what the eyes can see. We have other senses, too, attuned to recognize it. Character. Presence. Warmth. Humanity.

It takes far more than what meets the eye for anything to become truly beautiful and iconic.