I’m going solo on this blog posting because as those who know me know, the last year of my life has been an emotional hurricane that I never saw coming. I certainly didn’t have time to evacuate. But rather than dwell on the crises, I want to talk a little bit about what they have yielded for me: a new independence that I have never known before and have come to treasure.
I’m on a Costa Cruise through the China Sea from Singapore to Shanghai with stops in Vietnam, Hong Kong, Okinawa and Taiwan. Amusingly, I’m eating spaghetti Bolognese while seeing Asia. It’s one of the greatest adventures of my life, and I’m sharing in with more than 850 other passengers (only 63 Americans), including my own incredible group of eight women and girls and two kids with disabilities. As we were passing over these waters on the Fourth of July, it occurred to me that this marvelous journey would not have been possible had I not rediscovered my own independence through the most painful emotional experience of my adult life.
In the last year, my marriage came to an abrupt, agonizing end. But even as my world was turned upside down and shaken, I slowly came to realize that this experience had the potential to become a blessing if I chose to make it so. There’s the key word: chose. That is where this comes back to my favorite topic, Inner Beauty and the Beauty-Brain Loop. Because one of the most vital aspects of Inner Beauty is choosing a healthy, self-affirming way to respond to the things that happen to us as women. We have little control over the things that will happen in our lives; we have total control over how we prepare and respond. In fact, those may be the only things we have control over.
When divorce shatters the world you knew, your Inner Beauty dictates how you respond. Do you blame yourself or sink into a self-recriminating depression? Do you lash out in anger at everyone and anyone who crosses your path? Or do you use the crisis as an opportunity for self-discovery and self-reinvention, clearly the healthiest path? If your Inner Beauty—your self-love, compassion, empathy and belief in your own strength—is robust, you can choose to make a dark time into a time of renewal.
After a natural period of anger, grief and confusion, that’s the choice I’m trying to make. I think I’m doing pretty well, and that brings me back to independence. In the past year I have tried new things and had new adventures I might never have tried before. I truly didn’t know what I was missing until I realized that the only factor limiting me…was me. In doing things like this cruise, I’m spending time in the company of loving, beautiful women and literally testing new waters. I’m free to become who I want to be at a stage of my life when many of us cannot or will not evolve. Talk about a blessing.
As you know, everything flows from Inner Beauty. I’ve tried to give some attention to every aspect of the Beauty-Brain Loop. I saw a new dermatologist and got some new skin products that I adore, exercised, saw my doctor, and made sure I got the kind of healing sleep most of us busy people deny ourselves. I gave up my occasional glass of wine and spent more time in deep talks with friends. I spent time with family, talked with my therapist, made some new friends, cleaned my house…cleaned the cobwebs out of my mind and my life. Spring cleaning for the self.
My new sense of independence and possibility has helped me focus on taking great care of my Health and my Outer Beauty, and certainly when I look around me and see the people I am with, I am deeply grateful that my Environment is starting to reflect what I feel inside. It’s been a difficult road to the deck of this ship, but it has most certainly been worth it.
Coming from different aspects of the beauty continuum as we do, we’ve both had a longstanding interest in beauty and the perception of beauty and how they can impact how people feel about themselves and one another. Two of the biggest things to impact teens’ psyches are weight/body issues and acne, so we decided it would be interesting to conduct an image-based study quantifying exactly how acne can alter others’ perception of teens. The study coincided with National Acne Awareness Month, and the results were very interesting.
Working with the American Acne & Rosacea Society (AARS), we asked thousands of teens and adults to offer their first impressions of teens based only on photos of their face. One face was without acne and one had been digitally enhanced with acne. The results showed that teens with acne are more likely than teens without acne to be perceived as shy (39% vs. 27%), nerdy (31% vs. 17%), and lonely (23% vs. 13%). Perhaps not surprisingly, the opposite also proved true: teens without acne were more commonly perceived as self-confident (42% vs. 25%), happy (50% vs. 35%), and leaders vs. followers (49% vs. 29%).
We were expecting the results of the study to show that having acne would be difficult for teens, which it does, but what we both found most distressing was the extent to which acne can really skew the way society perceives teens. We live in a very visual society and based on the survey results, people do make snap judgments about teens with acne. The results illustrate the fact that unfortunately, acne does play a role in how teens are viewed by both their peers and adults. So, what starts as a purely medical condition can have emotional and psychological implications for young people who are often already dealing with social, sexual and cultural chaos.
Our colleague Dr. Diane Berson, Assistant Professor in the Department of Dermatology at Weill Medical College of Cornell University and a founding board member of AARS said, “What surprised me most about the survey was confirming the length teens will go to improve their acne and what they are willing to sacrifice.” According to the study, if they could have clearer skin, 59% of teens would go cold turkey on Facebook for one year, 30% would give up dating for 12 months, 13% would take their mom or dad to the prom (now that’s a sacrifice), and 11% would be OK with seeing their grade point average drop. That’s testament to the desperation with which teens view acne and its role as a kind of marker of social stigma—a modern-day Scarlet Letter, if you will.
To us, this indicates a strong and urgent need to connect with teens about what acne is and who develops it so that we can bust the myths surrounding it and foster greater self-esteem in those unfortunate enough to develop it. Human beings of any age have a hard enough separating appearance from intelligence and moral character. How much more difficult must it be for youths who are in the process of slowly (and sometimes painfully) discovering who they are and developing own their body image? By teaching teens that acne is a disease, not a verdict, perhaps we can help foster greater understanding and kindness while making one of the obstacles on the path to adulthood a little easier to climb.
Back to some skin issue for a couple of posts. Since our skin is the most visible aspect of our Outer Beauty, it’s always going to be an important subject. Our consistent advice from Day One has been: protect yourself from too much sun exposure. Solar radiation dehydrates, damages collagen, and causes skin cancer, as you know. One remedy has been to wear broad-spectrum sunscreen right?
Well…
Now news has come out from the Environmental Working Group (EWG) that the majority of the 1,100 sunscreens they tested did not work as well as claimed. In particular, they worried about broad-spectrum products, which are supposed to offer protection from UVA rays (which penetrate the skin and cause damage) and UVB rays (which cause sunburns). Basically, sunscreen makers don’t have to tell you how much protection their products offer from UVA and UVB rays, so they don’t. You have no idea if you’re blocking the burning rays while the UVA wreaks havoc on your skin.
The other concern the EWG found was that people who regularly used sunscreens had levels of the UVA blocker oxybenzone in their urine. Now, the FDA requires that sunscreens be topical, which means their ingredients can’t be absorbed into the bloodstream. So how does this happen? Clearly, some sunscreen makers aren’t formulating their products safely, and that’s a problem because oxybenzone in pregnant women has been shown to affect birth weight.
There’s more about oxybenzone. Back in the 1980s, a chemist for Warner-Lambert cosmetics company found that oxybenzone had anti-inflammatory properties. It’s taken this long for the industry to publish his findings, because if your sunscreen reduces the pain of the sunburn you get after too much exposure, then you might spend more time in the sun and do some real damage.
So what now. Do we go back to white dabs of zinc oxide or titantium cream, which don’t go really well with a toned beach body? For one thing, you can lobby your representatives to demand that the FDA adopt a more precise SPF rating system. Sunscreen makers are fighting this, as they always do, but consumer pressure helps. For another, you can contact smaller companies that make sunscreen (presumably, they will be more responsive than a major corporation) and tell them you would love to buy and recommend their products if they a) contain no oxybenzone and b) have a totally transparent SPF rating that reveals both UVA and UVB protection.
Otherwise, use common sense. Wear UV-resistant clothing. Limit your sun exposure. Check the ingredients. There are sunscreens without oxybenzone: Natural Sun SPF 25 for Active Lifestyles by Aubrey Organics, Vanicream’s SPF 30 and Oat Protein SPF 30 by Kiss My Face are three examples. However, they use minerals like zinc and titanium dioxide to block rays, so they may not be as invisible as you’re used to. And if you must use sunscreen, reapply it every two hours and use something with at least 45 SPF. If you’re not sure you can trust the companies who make your sun protection products, at least you can trust your own sound judgment.
We’re creatures of the physical as well as the mental and emotional, and so it’s not surprising that we are hard-wired to find certain qualities attractive based on their implications for passing along our genes. We’ve talked about this at some length in our book. We know that men are drawn to a certain hip-to-waist ratio and to glossy hair because both suggest that a woman is healthy and fertile. We know that women tend to be drawn to size in a man as well as maturity and material wealth because both suggest the ability to protect and nurture offspring. We might not love the idea that our perception of beauty hinges on ancient evolutionary imperatives, and that’s not what we’re suggesting; there is clearly much more to attraction and romance. But initial, visceral attraction is clearly fueled by primal instincts. We’re not really all that far from the veldt and the savannah, after all.
But when matchmaking takes its first tentative steps into basing the art of the hookup on the science of evolutionary biology, some folks get uneasy. We find it fascinating, because anything that casts new light on why we find some people magnetic and irresistible…well, it’s our raison d’etre. In the latest issue of Time, we found a story about a Swiss company called GenePartner that uses genetic matching to help people find that partner who makes their heart go pitter-pat.
The company partners with several matchmaking websites to test the DNA of applicants and matches people based on their genes for creating HLA, or human leukocyte antigens, a key component of the immune system. The idea was sparked by the famous 1995 experiment in which women who were not taking birth control pills (and so were experiencing their normal hormonal levels) preferred the scent of men who had certain genes that were different from their own. Based on the notion that “opposites attract” has a genetic component, GenePartner thinks that people will be attracted to others with different HLA genes than their own, because the couple’s children stand to inherit a more robust immune system and therefore be more resistant to disease. It’s that survival of the fittest thing again.
The company has developed a computer algorithm that matches the lovelorn with ideal potential mates based on HLA profile. This concept is hardly demonstrated conclusively, but it’s certainly interesting. From a scientific perspective, it may not explain attraction but it could certainly shed some light on why some parents have better luck with healthy offspring while others seem to have nothing but health disasters. What about HLA screening to predict the chances of immune disorders like lupus and multiple sclerosis? Dating is peachy, but that seems more important to us.
If nothing else, this technology could save a lot of people the time and trouble of filling out a long questionnaire or writing up a charming profile while trying to locate that one photo where they’re not making a funny face. Just pony up your $99, get your kit, swab your cheek for a tissue sample, mail it to Switzerland and get your very own GenePartner ID. Sweaty t-shirt not included.
The global news cycle has been dominated by one name since June 25, of course: Michael Jackson. Our deepest condolences go out to his family and friends, and especially his three children. What a sad end to a brilliant and troubled life.
But we come here to dissect the King of Pop, not to praise him. More to the point, to take a look at Michael Jackson from a beauty perspective, because it’s hard to think of another person in recent times who better embodied the self-destructive power of a cancerous sense of Inner Beauty. As you know from our many discussions, Inner Beauty is the core of all true beauty, and it’s within our minds and hearts. It’s the most vital aspect of the Beauty-Brain Loop, the interlinked quartet of Inner Beauty, Health, Outer Beauty and Environment that creates every person’s total beauty picture.
The foundation of Inner Beauty is self-love. Call it self-esteem, self-worth or whatever you like, the idea is the same: you must cherish who and what you are and find yourself precious. That’s not to say you can’t and shouldn’t improve yourself, but if you’re healthy that improvement will stem from the desire to be the best person you can be. When self-change comes about as a result of self-hatred, desperation to please others, or the desire to change and leave a poisonous past behind, that’s when it can mutate into something dangerous. We see that regularly in patients who have substance abuse problems. It’s all born of the same impulse, to become someone else, anyone else.
It’s not a stretch to say that the late Michael Jackson was the patron saint of such self loathing. Just look at how he changed physically from his 1979 Off the Wall album to the bizarre and sad years and months before his death. In 1979, we saw a young, slender and handsome African-American man. But over the years, Jackson slowly whitened his skin, shaved down his nose until there was almost nothing left, and seemed not only to want to shed his tumultuous family past but his race, his gender and even his humanity. What was left in his later years was a pale phantasm who rarely went into the sun, wore a surgical mask over his face, and looked more like a figure at Madame Tussaud’s wax museum than the stunning, beautiful young man who brought us Thriller in 1982. Eva lived not far from the Jackson family and witnessed Michael’s overworked childhood and meteoric rise to success. That cold, disruptive upbringing most likely led to an inability to develop a healthy self-esteem.
What was Michael running from? What had corroded his sense of Inner Beauty so terribly that he could not stand to be who he had been born as and seemed to be obsessed with morphing into something new each minute? What had caused him to develop not just body dysmorphia but what could be called “self dysmorphia?” When he looked in the mirror, what did he see? The sad irony is that, even as he became stranger and stranger in what seems to have been a desperate attempt to transform his identity—to be happy, one assumes—popular culture began to see him less as a genius and more as a sideshow. His obvious self-hatred overshadowed and eventually eclipsed his incredible talent. He was a casualty of life, unable to see in himself the beauty and electricity we had seen in him.
The global pop culture machine will mourn for a while. Quick books will be turned out. Commorative DVDs and plates will be stamped out. Spontaneous shrines will linger for a while. Television retrospectives will air and perhaps a tribute concert will be staged. Eventually, something else will dominate the news. But while we won’t ever forget Michael Jackson and his music, we should also never forget his lesson. Success is defined within, not by record sales. If the King of Pop couldn’t find joy and self-love with his riches and fame, no one can. Inner Beauty is more important than money or notoriety.
