NOT BY THE HAIR OF MY CHINNY CHIN CHIN!

My third great grandmother's
chin hairs ca 1885.

The purpose of this posting is not to ridicule women in the 1800s.  By way of introduction, I will tell you that, while scanning beautiful old cabinet cards and photographs passed down to me by my grandmother and great aunt, I noticed something "a little extra" on one of my third great grandmothers.  After scanning the photo, I sectioned it into eyes, mouth, nose, and chin.  (I often do that to see if any of the parts that make up the whole resemble any relative that I have met.)  So back to the chin -- I kept enlarging it on my computer until . . . yes, it was . . . a fine crop of chin hairs on my third great grandmother's chin.  Aghast, I immediately focused on myself and saw what lay ahead for me if I did not pluck and pluck and wax and wax.  Then I started checking other photos of women from that time period and realized that, more often than not, they too sported nice crops of chin hairs.


By coincidence, while thinking of a way to work chin hairs into a blog posting,  yesterday morning on PublicRadio.org's Performance Today, an acapella song, written by Ysaye Barnwell and performed by Sweet Honey in the Rock, called "No Mirrors in my Nana's House" was performed.  Fast paced and heartfelt, the song tells about a little girl who lives with her grandmother.  Her grandmother has no mirrors in her house.  Each day, the little girl's grandmother describes to the little girl how she looks and tells her how wonderful she is.  She looks at the little girl with love and that's how the little girl sees herself.  She grows up with no negative image of herself.


Then, again a coincidence, there was a recent article in the 28 Oct 2010 The New Yorker by Ben McGrath about Gawker's Nick Denton.  In the article, Denton says that "he is a staunch believer in the primacy of vanity. . . . calling someone ugly will always trump calling him incompetent or a thief."  How true.  We remember the negative things that have been said about us, rather than the positive.


Harper's Bazarr is credited with beginning the marketing campaign for hair removal on women between 1914 and 1915.  And while that campaign's focal point was mainly underarm hair removal, it knocked over that first domino in our march toward the ultimate goal of being as smooth as a baby, no matter our age.


Today we are pounded and hounded with images of how we should look. People in the public eye who are "of a certain age" have their faces stretched until they are no longer recognizable as the people they once were.   They get that desperate look about them. And it's sad.  None of us appear willing to "go gentle into that good night."  We will color, stretch, smooth, and medicate, attempting to stave off the inevitable.


I do wonder how it must have been to have not worried so much about one's physical appearance. There were, of course, fashion standards to which people in the 1800s tried to adhere, but I don't think they were hounded and pounded by images quite as much as we are in the 21st century.  If the study of genealogy teaches us anything, it's that human beings are the same no matter what century -- it's just the tenor of the times that is different.


So, all that being said, my hope for you today is that the ones you know will look at you through the eyes of love and that you, too, will look at others with the same eyes.  Life is so short.  


A life without mirrors.  Think about it.