Vice Week
Spray tans, Botox, facials, filler, and falsies?
Ill take the lot.
Hold up your arms, the woman tells me.
Im naked, freezing, cornered in a tile booth, no escape.
So I do what Im told.
Im getting a spray tan.
Beauty, yes; a sort of pornographic hotness, yes.
Also: leisure, fitness, a life lived outdoors in endless balmy weather.
Coveting beauty is my deepest-seeded vice.
I crave and find comfort in beauty, pursue and study it, love and hate it.
The feminine quest for conventional beauty, on the other hand, is often framed as self-optimizing.
Todays spray-down isnt my first rodeo, not by a long shot.
I was fundamentally lacking, I believed, and required drastic change to be fixed.
Pain is beauty and vice-versa, right?
Or so weve been told by the suits whove long sold women on the myth of our inadequacy.
Since I can remember, Ive been a mark.
No wonder Americanspour billionsinto their appearances every year.
And yet, here I am, standing in the booth.
My body feels like a walking strip of fly paper, tacky and toxic.
I still have to pee.
Beauty can be an inconvenience and a pain.
I wanted to cosplayBaywatchand now I can; I am C.J.
But in an existential sense, the tan fixed nothing.
Im still me: a woman in a body trying to move peacefully through a world of contradictions.
Intellectually I knew something as banal as a spray tan wouldnt change all that.
I take out my phone and book my next appointment.
source: www.bustle.com
