Becoming Blonde
Making Oneself Over
Is the impulse to make oneself over a peculiarly feminine
one? I hesitate to generalize, especially in matters of gender, but the very term "makeover" has currency
primarily among women. When I was a child, I was intrigued by the fact that although my father and I went to the barber
shop when forced to, my mother and sisters went with apparent eagerness to a place called the "beauty shop."
Imagine that, a shop where beauty might be shopped for, purchased! I was a little frightened by that place, to tell the truth,
where I saw women with their heads stuck into large chrome helmets, or else ministered to by other women who twisted their hair
around bunches of long tubes or brushed onto their fingernails sharp-smelling red paint. Hair, my father solemnly told me,
was a woman's crowning glory. Such an elaborate ritual to maintain that glory!
The concept of a makeover, though, of having one's face redone as well as one's hair,
implying a re-imagining of oneself, a change in the design of one's identity, is as boggling (and appealing, of
course) as the idea of bought beauty. It's not, I think, so much an expression of dissatisfaction with oneself as a
curiosity to see oneself anew, surprised suddenly by the image, as if in the renewal has also come rebirth. "It's
you!" the excited agent of this makeover might well exclaim, and who is to deny the truth of such
vision, if it contain a modicum of what one would like to see in oneself, a shimmery signal from within,
a hint of some raw, golden beauty.
(photograph
taken in October, 2003)
