What Price Vanity?
Days after moving into a retirement home, my Grandmama demanded to be moved to a single-person dining table that faced the wall. Asked why, she said the sight of all the old people was putting her off her food.
Telling my Mother about it, the centre manager looked apologetic and said Grandmama just needed time to adapt to her new environment and would be back to her usual self in a week or two.
Mother didn’t care to tell her that this was Grandmama’s ‘usual self’. She was the Beauty Police, still obsessively well-groomed and wearing killer heels at 90 years of age, and as quick as ever to impose her standards on others
She took it upon herself to instruct me on the importance of moisturising when I was about 10. Apparently, unless a girl has a milkmaid complexion, she has no chance of catching a man.
Well, what to make of that when you’re 10? Milkmaids are somewhat uncommon in downtown Harare and I was a bit young to have read Tess of The D’Urbervilles so I thought she was talking about ice-lollies. And my imagination went mad with “catch a man”. Such a strange expression. Do people still say that? I had visions of hordes of women with cold milky faces invading rugby clubs armed with cattle prods and huge butterfly nets.
Indoctrinated from an early age about the importance of being beautiful, Mother didn’t stop at moisturising.
I had a big shock going through her papers after she died a few years ago. So many memories; some regrets; some laughs. Then the Big Shock… an awful picture of her with black and bloodied eyes. She looked as though she’d been beaten. I shrieked. Brother and Sister came running.
‘Look at this! What happened? Why didn’t I know?’
Brother and Sister looked at me pityingly.
‘Looks like she had her eyes done,’ said Sister condescendingly. ‘See these stitches – they’ve removed the bags under the eyes and lifted her eye lids to make them less hooded.’
I was consumed with envy.
I’d been mildly rattled the previous Christmas. Four pairs of siliconed boobies bristled in every happy family photo (one set of which were Mother’s); rhinoplasty had changed a distant cousin’s almost perfectly beautiful face into 100% spectacularly beautiful; and cousin-in-law smiled creaselessly at the camera, thanks to a dramatic face lift.
I became increasingly aware of how my face was seeping slowly down towards my naval like glacial streams leaving deep grooves in their wake. Every morning, my bathroom mirror highlighted further erosion and my ego silently shrieked: ‘Do something …’
To make things worse, I had a Pilates client Zoe who was Grandmama’s spiritual heir. She had done the works. Face lift, breast enhancement, tummy tuck, capped teeth… At 67, she looked fabulous. Forget about Botched Up Bodies. As far as I can tell, you get what you pay for and she had paid a lot. The best surgeons in the land had done a beautiful job in preserving the looks of a beautiful woman.
She started one of our sessions saying that the tops of her arms were getting loose and her husband had said she should do some extra exercises to tone them. I started a routine of tricep extensions, bicep curls… She stared at me in astonishment.
“What are we doing?” she demanded.
“Toning your arms.”
“You weren’t listening. My husband said I should do exercise to tone my arms … so we’ll leave it for three months, then I’ll go to my surgeon and he’ll sort it out in no time.”
One day she cast a critical look at my face.
“You’re a beautiful women, Maddy,” she said. That surprised me. Like Grandmama, Zoe wasn’t one for gratuitous compliments. I thanked her.
After a few moments, she added: “…beautiful, for a woman who hasn’t had any work done.”
Here we go, I thought. Women like Grandmama and Zoe don’t get the concept of body shaming. They think they’re being helpful and caring when they tell you that you look like shit.
“Perhaps now is the time you thought about doing just a little work. Nothing big. Just freshen up a bit.”
“Can’t afford it right now,” I said. “Maybe in a year or two.”
She dropped the subject, until she went to leave then turned back and said: “Do you really have to wait for a year or two? Maybe you could borrow some money from your brother …”
Weeks later, I had lunch with Groomed Friend, who I hadn’t seen for months and months. I couldn’t help but comment how good she looked. Not radically different, but the best she could be … relaxed and happy… maybe a teensy bit younger.
After a couple of gins, the truth came out. She’d had some ‘fillers’.
What the heck was she talking about? I was filler-illiterate.
She prattled on about marionette lines, laughter lines, bunny lines, cheek augmentation, tear troughs…
I couldn’t wait to get home and google my newfound vocabulary, following links to YouTube to watch fillers being administered. If you’re needle phobic, don’t go there unless you’re drunk or drugged. But scary though it looked, the results were great and nowhere near the cost of a face lift.
Groomed Friend phoned to encourage me to take the plunge. She made an appointment and escorted me to meet her delightful Dr Akel, a charming young dentist with a serenely engaging manner. He brought out a mirror and told me to smile.
‘You smile a lot,’ he said. I smiled in agreement, then realised Dr Akel’s forehead was attempting to frown. And failing. Botox ruled okay. Blimey – he was only about 30! I was well behind in this game.
‘You have pronounced laughter lines around mouth and eyes,’ he intoned, his voice heavy with disapproval.
Minutes later, with Groomed Friend egging me on, I had agreed to three sets of fillers – one split between tear troughs and cheek augmentation: one for nasolabial grooves and a third for marionette lines (also known as drool lines). Ah – that vocabulary… cleverly designed to undermine what’s left of fragile self-esteem.
A syringe appeared with a very long, very thin needle. Wishing I’d had gin for lunch, I closed my eyes and held my breath. A sting, then strange tingling as Dr Akel gently massaged the collagen into place, then numbness.
A few more stings and numbed patches and the mirror reappeared. The result was amazing. Even to my critical eyes, I looked a thousand times better. I was delighted… and hooked. More … I wanted more …
Then came the bill.
I really wish that reality would fuck off just once in a while.
(More reality later that evening when my face felt as though it had been stung by every killer insect on the planet. Dr Akel had used anaesthetic cream during the treatment. No such thing as a free lunch…)
Six months later, having scrounged another filler budget, I returned, instructed by Zoe to ‘tidy up’ my mouth and jawline. (Yes, I’d told her about Dr Akel and learned that she was augmenting surgery with collagen.) This visit didn’t go as well as the first. Possibly because of a disastrous visit to a new hairdresser the day before.
Bad karma is a Thing… being vain is not cosmically good.
My request that Mr Hairdresser ‘texturise’ my hair had been interpreted as ‘make me look like an orang-utan that escaped a forest fire’.
Random tufts of short ginger hair bristled around my head, interspersed with patches of apparent alopecia.
This time Dr Akel’s facial muscles triumphed over his Botox and his expression registered wide-eyed horror.
Perhaps it was the shock that put him off his aim. He hit a capillary vein while ‘enhancing’ my lips, giving me a purple-black bruise on the right top lip which bled up to my right nostril overnight, then seeped into my cheek. No amount of concealer could hide it.
I was mortified. My guilty secrets of vanity and extravagance were about to be revealed. How to explain to family and friends? They weren’t going to be kind or understanding.
So I told everyone I’d got drunk and fallen over. Everyone was ever so kind and understanding.
That kind of cured me of my short-lived filler addiction. Now I’m saving to go under the knife…what could possibly go wrong?
