Looks are important. I hate that. It means that my lazy left eye will always preempt my efforts to “put on my best face,” “put my best foot forward,” not to mention (chuckle, chuckle) “look someone straight in the eye.” It means that my rounded tummy, crow’s feet and sagging jowls will always contradict my eager outbursts of “That’s just like totally awesome!” And, it means that my Facebook closings of “LOL” will always betray the gray-haired old lady trying to keep up in our abbreviated techno texting culture.
Looks can certainly undermine the message. They give us away in ways we would rather not disclose. I’d like to promote my well-trained, albeit phony, air of self-confidence; however, my chewed up cuticles generally give me away at the hand-shake. Bad habits, bad behavior and bad thinking are permanently stamped on our faces. Likewise, the good habits we develop, the good behavior we practice and the good thinking we follow are also imprinted on us. In other words, there’s solid reason behind both our laugh lines and our permanent scowls. We can wear disguises but these are fragile masks waiting to fall from the weight of evidence.
The good news is that, while looks are important, the degree of importance seems to diminish as we get older. This is not to suggest that people in their 70’s, 80’s and 90’s are not mindful of their appearance. On the contrary, I have family members in those age groups who look great and still spend time carefully coordinating the day’s attire. They are fashionable, healthy and continue to produce a polished appearance in their clothing and hairstyles. However, as we gain life’s experiences – the joys, the sorrows – we tend to prioritize differently. What’s a lazy left eye when your sister has cancer? What’s the big deal about sagging jowls when your father faces open-heart surgery? And, what’s so offensive about chewed-up cuticles when you lose your job?
While I’m convinced that, as a general rule, looks will remain important in our society, the importance to me personally proved to be somewhat temporary. I still compare myself to others … human nature, I suppose. But, that futile exercise has been superseded by an even more futile exercise of comparing myself of today to myself of yesterday. I now wake up each day and say “What’s this? Another new wrinkle? Damn, when did that happen?” And, then I say, “Aah, who cares?”
So, while there is still a shred of interest on your part to help yourself look good, visit my website MyLooksOnline.com. We will answer your questions about your looks, whether you’re 20 years old and highly invested in the answers or 90 years old and only mildly curious what others think!
http://www.mylooksonline.com/
Friday, December 11, 2009
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Looks Are Important
Looks are important. You’ll have to forgive me, but I’m too lazy to research and cite all of the evidence supporting this assertion. Just search the internet for Looks Are Important and you’ll find enough proof and dialogue on the subject to convince even the most skeptical.
Looks matter. We could ask “Should they or shouldn’t they?” We could even ask “Why do they matter, and if they matter, what can we do about it?” But, let’s leave all of these pertinent questions for future discussion. Right now, let’s just kick around the simple truth that looks do matter.
At the most obvious level, our appearance matters when we go to a job interview or when we try to impress a first date, an old colleague, an old schoolmate, an old flame, an old ex, you name it. Our looks are the first message we deliver. Before we open our mouths, our faces and bodies have already teamed up like a vaudeville act with top hat and cane to announce “HELLO!! THIS IS ME!! HOW DO YOU DO??!!”
Have you ever been startled to hear someone speak after you’ve been introduced? It’s because you already know this person based on their looks. You already formed judgments, opinions and expectations. When the looks don’t match the vocals, however, you find yourself momentarily off-balance and, during that second or two, you might even be a little perturbed that you’re now required to quickly make this perception shift. We don’t like being thrown for a loop, even if it is a brief little loop we concocted ourselves.
On immediate impact, looks will trump voice, personality and effort every time. And, they matter in less obvious ways as well. They matter every time we meet someone either for the first time or the fiftieth time. I’ve changed my opinion about people I thought I knew simply because they changed their looks. An old friend who for years sported nothing but jeans and tees arrived in a suit one day. Before he said a word, I thought “Who are you?” (Obviously not the slug I always knew you to be.)
Conversely, when I saw colleagues from work in jeans and tees, I knew I had been completely, if not deliberately, misled by them. They fooled me. The people I knew were suit people. They were suit people in dress, mind, speech, and as far as I could tell, religion to boot. These people, on the other hand, were jeans and tee people. These were fun people. How could I have gotten this so wrong? Again, time for that kick-in-the-head readjustment.
And, it’s not just a change in attire that can alter our preconceived notions about people. A relative who had rhinoplasty was an uneducated, unequivocal frump before the nose job, and a college-graduate beauty queen afterwards. How’s that possible, right? I mean, how could she have squeezed in 4 years of school, bought a new wardrobe and styled her hair while splayed out on an operating table for probably less than three hours?
She couldn’t. But to the rest of the family, it seemed she had. One day, self-conscious about her looks, she never mentions her college degree, and the next day, exhibiting her noticeably smaller snout, she can’t squeeze in enough excuses to blab to everyone about it.
So…if looks matter, is it simply a matter of self-confidence? Maybe, but maybe not. It isn’t until we receive feedback about our own looks – very often as early as childhood – that we form opinions about our looks. These early-developed opinions are hard to overcome. Ask anyone who was bullied as a kid about his or her looks. We may choose to ignore negative feedback and to defiantly present a façade of self-confidence, but any doubt or self-consciousness will always surface. B y its nature, self-confidence is not defiant. Instead, it’s quiet, assured and at peace.
Have you ever met someone who could only be described as “not comfortable in his/her own skin?” These are people who project self-confidence, but it’s a self-confidence mired in self-consciousness. This particular blend creates a powerful contradiction -- one that is, if you’ll pardon the expression, as plain as the nose on your face.
As a result, it almost goes without saying that looks matter most when we look in the mirror. We don’t have to be beautiful to see beauty, nor flawed to see areas of needed improvement. Before we got anywhere near the mirror, we already saw that. In fact, blindly, we knew it. We go to the mirror for confirmation only.
What’s most important about looks being important is that we have to learn to step up to the mirror with a developed sense of comfort, if not downright pleasure, about our looks. If we can do that, we can project a naturally pleasing and convincing image both to ourselves and to the world. Our features and bodies will combine to broadcast the message we want conveyed - well before our voices and communications round out the whole picture. The operative word here is, of course, “naturally.” Because, if we can do that, we needn’t be concerned that, as a matter of fact, looks are important.
My Looks Online.com will be launched soon. Visit our site and see how we are trying to help all of us project that natural good-looking image – to ourselves and to the rest of the world. Will keep you posted on launch date.
Looks matter. We could ask “Should they or shouldn’t they?” We could even ask “Why do they matter, and if they matter, what can we do about it?” But, let’s leave all of these pertinent questions for future discussion. Right now, let’s just kick around the simple truth that looks do matter.
At the most obvious level, our appearance matters when we go to a job interview or when we try to impress a first date, an old colleague, an old schoolmate, an old flame, an old ex, you name it. Our looks are the first message we deliver. Before we open our mouths, our faces and bodies have already teamed up like a vaudeville act with top hat and cane to announce “HELLO!! THIS IS ME!! HOW DO YOU DO??!!”
Have you ever been startled to hear someone speak after you’ve been introduced? It’s because you already know this person based on their looks. You already formed judgments, opinions and expectations. When the looks don’t match the vocals, however, you find yourself momentarily off-balance and, during that second or two, you might even be a little perturbed that you’re now required to quickly make this perception shift. We don’t like being thrown for a loop, even if it is a brief little loop we concocted ourselves.
On immediate impact, looks will trump voice, personality and effort every time. And, they matter in less obvious ways as well. They matter every time we meet someone either for the first time or the fiftieth time. I’ve changed my opinion about people I thought I knew simply because they changed their looks. An old friend who for years sported nothing but jeans and tees arrived in a suit one day. Before he said a word, I thought “Who are you?” (Obviously not the slug I always knew you to be.)
Conversely, when I saw colleagues from work in jeans and tees, I knew I had been completely, if not deliberately, misled by them. They fooled me. The people I knew were suit people. They were suit people in dress, mind, speech, and as far as I could tell, religion to boot. These people, on the other hand, were jeans and tee people. These were fun people. How could I have gotten this so wrong? Again, time for that kick-in-the-head readjustment.
And, it’s not just a change in attire that can alter our preconceived notions about people. A relative who had rhinoplasty was an uneducated, unequivocal frump before the nose job, and a college-graduate beauty queen afterwards. How’s that possible, right? I mean, how could she have squeezed in 4 years of school, bought a new wardrobe and styled her hair while splayed out on an operating table for probably less than three hours?
She couldn’t. But to the rest of the family, it seemed she had. One day, self-conscious about her looks, she never mentions her college degree, and the next day, exhibiting her noticeably smaller snout, she can’t squeeze in enough excuses to blab to everyone about it.
So…if looks matter, is it simply a matter of self-confidence? Maybe, but maybe not. It isn’t until we receive feedback about our own looks – very often as early as childhood – that we form opinions about our looks. These early-developed opinions are hard to overcome. Ask anyone who was bullied as a kid about his or her looks. We may choose to ignore negative feedback and to defiantly present a façade of self-confidence, but any doubt or self-consciousness will always surface. B y its nature, self-confidence is not defiant. Instead, it’s quiet, assured and at peace.
Have you ever met someone who could only be described as “not comfortable in his/her own skin?” These are people who project self-confidence, but it’s a self-confidence mired in self-consciousness. This particular blend creates a powerful contradiction -- one that is, if you’ll pardon the expression, as plain as the nose on your face.
As a result, it almost goes without saying that looks matter most when we look in the mirror. We don’t have to be beautiful to see beauty, nor flawed to see areas of needed improvement. Before we got anywhere near the mirror, we already saw that. In fact, blindly, we knew it. We go to the mirror for confirmation only.
What’s most important about looks being important is that we have to learn to step up to the mirror with a developed sense of comfort, if not downright pleasure, about our looks. If we can do that, we can project a naturally pleasing and convincing image both to ourselves and to the world. Our features and bodies will combine to broadcast the message we want conveyed - well before our voices and communications round out the whole picture. The operative word here is, of course, “naturally.” Because, if we can do that, we needn’t be concerned that, as a matter of fact, looks are important.
My Looks Online.com will be launched soon. Visit our site and see how we are trying to help all of us project that natural good-looking image – to ourselves and to the rest of the world. Will keep you posted on launch date.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Mr. Magoo on a Really Bad Day
I was in the banking industry for most of my 38-year career, but banking was never my expertise nor my passion. What I, and most of the female members of my family, excelled in was the art of critical observation of other people’s looks. It started when my sisters and I were kids.
While our friends were practicing the piano, guitar, drawing and gymnastics, we were practicing insult bombs. And, we got really good at it. It was never sufficient to toss out a lame “you’re ugly,” or “you’re stupid,” or “Mom & Dad hate you.” Those were o.k., but, let’s face it, they were tired and worn. We aimed for that single element of truth found beneath all sobering insults. “Your face looks just like a cardboard box.” Or, stretching our creative juices, “You look like an anteater from the back of your head.” And, directed towards me, “You look like Mr. Magoo on a really bad day.”
Most often, the attacks were met with equally brutal retaliations. “Oh yea? Well, at least I don’t have a pizza pimple face filled with pock marks!” Or “Oh yea? Well at least I (always began with ‘Oh yea, Well at least I’), don’t chew my toenails like a monkey!” (Like it would be o.k. to chew them like a human being…?)
There was certainly nothing ambiguous about our verbal punches. We knew the buttons to push and the soft-bellies to target. “Do something about your big toe – it looks like a bald man trying to escape foot jail.” “Did you know your face gets all weird and scrunchy when you laugh?” Not content with plain old verbal slams, we supported our accusations with animated mockery. To imitate the scrunch, we would crease our cheeks and force-fit dimples where none previously existed. “See? This is how you look. Nah nah nah nah nah.” The effect was powerful enough to make the accused never laugh again.
We would proudly extend sleek & slender toes and compare them to the sister sporting the hideous bald-man ones. “This is the way toes should look.” Oh, the shame and horror of having bald-man toes. We had taken the hippocratic oath, and put our own special spin on it “First, do harm.”
What we didn’t appreciate at the time was that poetic justice would soon kick in. The face that “looked like a cardboard box” was actually the early development of my sister’s strong, model jaw-line that the rest of us would come to envy. Or that the “anteater-from-the-back-of-the-head” resemblance was borne out of a beautiful, thick braid of hair that cascaded down my sister’s back. To this day, her hair remains thick and lustrous and never grew as thin and gray as our’s did. (The Mr. Magoo crack, on the other hand, stemming from my ultra-thick eyeglasses, was just plain mean and never really redeemed itself.)
As we grew into teenagers, we expanded our critiques to the rest of the world. No one escaped our ruthless observations. We didn’t see just a female student at school; we saw a girl who may have had beautiful auburn hair, but who really needed to do something about her makeup. We argued that her eye shadow was too blue or not blue enough, her nose was too big, her teeth too crooked, or that none of it mattered if she would only stand up straight instead of slouching like a squirrel hunting for nuts.
This is what we talked about. We were honing skills for careers in industries that hadn’t yet been invented, like the Inhumanities or Social Dis-Services.
Then, out of the blue, we grew up. We matured. And, Voila - we became kind. Our harsh words were now tempered with consideration for each other’s feelings. (We had feelings?! Who knew?!)
But, something was lost. Maturity breeds caution and caution is not always what the doctor orders.
One day, as I studied myself in the mirror, I thought “Your skin is too bland, your eyes too bugged, your jaw-line too weak, and that mile-long space between your nose & upper lip has to be surgically corrected. Face it, kid, you’re hideous.” My sisters were right all along – I DID look like Mr. Magoo, when he had a fever of 105 degrees.
So, I asked friends and family if any of this was true and, of course, the answer from all was a resounding “NO!” In fact, according to them - this mealy-mouthed, backboneless bunch of matured namby-pambies - I was fine just the way I was. Not even my trusted partners-in-abuse - my sisters - would confirm any of it. C’mon…some of it HAD to be true!
It occurred to me that we were all being too adult about this criticism thing. Too sensitive to each other’s feelings. Too invested. Too cautious. How can people get the truth about their looks in a world where adults - adults who had been so perfectly trained in honest ridicule since childhood - now fall victim to the paralyzed, politically correct?
It was then that I decided to create My Looks Online.com. I wanted a platform where frankness is not crippled by kindness. Where people can get truthful, honest answers to their sincere questions about their looks. The website does not invite rudeness (in fact, will remove it when found), nor insults. But, it does provide the opportunity for someone to ask, for example, if the outfit he or she chose for a class reunion is appropriate. I wanted my sisters, and the rest of the world, to be able to anonymously respond with “Please reconsider – that outfit is [fill in the blank] for a class reunion.” Or alternatively, “You look amazing. Knock ‘em dead!” Whatever the truth, as they saw it, might be.
The site should be up and running soon. In the meantime, I miss the “one-ups” that my sisters and I mastered when we were younger. However, being the mature adult I am today, I admit that I would have preferred a likening to Mr. Magoo on a really good day!
While our friends were practicing the piano, guitar, drawing and gymnastics, we were practicing insult bombs. And, we got really good at it. It was never sufficient to toss out a lame “you’re ugly,” or “you’re stupid,” or “Mom & Dad hate you.” Those were o.k., but, let’s face it, they were tired and worn. We aimed for that single element of truth found beneath all sobering insults. “Your face looks just like a cardboard box.” Or, stretching our creative juices, “You look like an anteater from the back of your head.” And, directed towards me, “You look like Mr. Magoo on a really bad day.”
Most often, the attacks were met with equally brutal retaliations. “Oh yea? Well, at least I don’t have a pizza pimple face filled with pock marks!” Or “Oh yea? Well at least I (always began with ‘Oh yea, Well at least I’), don’t chew my toenails like a monkey!” (Like it would be o.k. to chew them like a human being…?)
There was certainly nothing ambiguous about our verbal punches. We knew the buttons to push and the soft-bellies to target. “Do something about your big toe – it looks like a bald man trying to escape foot jail.” “Did you know your face gets all weird and scrunchy when you laugh?” Not content with plain old verbal slams, we supported our accusations with animated mockery. To imitate the scrunch, we would crease our cheeks and force-fit dimples where none previously existed. “See? This is how you look. Nah nah nah nah nah.” The effect was powerful enough to make the accused never laugh again.
We would proudly extend sleek & slender toes and compare them to the sister sporting the hideous bald-man ones. “This is the way toes should look.” Oh, the shame and horror of having bald-man toes. We had taken the hippocratic oath, and put our own special spin on it “First, do harm.”
What we didn’t appreciate at the time was that poetic justice would soon kick in. The face that “looked like a cardboard box” was actually the early development of my sister’s strong, model jaw-line that the rest of us would come to envy. Or that the “anteater-from-the-back-of-the-head” resemblance was borne out of a beautiful, thick braid of hair that cascaded down my sister’s back. To this day, her hair remains thick and lustrous and never grew as thin and gray as our’s did. (The Mr. Magoo crack, on the other hand, stemming from my ultra-thick eyeglasses, was just plain mean and never really redeemed itself.)
As we grew into teenagers, we expanded our critiques to the rest of the world. No one escaped our ruthless observations. We didn’t see just a female student at school; we saw a girl who may have had beautiful auburn hair, but who really needed to do something about her makeup. We argued that her eye shadow was too blue or not blue enough, her nose was too big, her teeth too crooked, or that none of it mattered if she would only stand up straight instead of slouching like a squirrel hunting for nuts.
This is what we talked about. We were honing skills for careers in industries that hadn’t yet been invented, like the Inhumanities or Social Dis-Services.
Then, out of the blue, we grew up. We matured. And, Voila - we became kind. Our harsh words were now tempered with consideration for each other’s feelings. (We had feelings?! Who knew?!)
But, something was lost. Maturity breeds caution and caution is not always what the doctor orders.
One day, as I studied myself in the mirror, I thought “Your skin is too bland, your eyes too bugged, your jaw-line too weak, and that mile-long space between your nose & upper lip has to be surgically corrected. Face it, kid, you’re hideous.” My sisters were right all along – I DID look like Mr. Magoo, when he had a fever of 105 degrees.
So, I asked friends and family if any of this was true and, of course, the answer from all was a resounding “NO!” In fact, according to them - this mealy-mouthed, backboneless bunch of matured namby-pambies - I was fine just the way I was. Not even my trusted partners-in-abuse - my sisters - would confirm any of it. C’mon…some of it HAD to be true!
It occurred to me that we were all being too adult about this criticism thing. Too sensitive to each other’s feelings. Too invested. Too cautious. How can people get the truth about their looks in a world where adults - adults who had been so perfectly trained in honest ridicule since childhood - now fall victim to the paralyzed, politically correct?
It was then that I decided to create My Looks Online.com. I wanted a platform where frankness is not crippled by kindness. Where people can get truthful, honest answers to their sincere questions about their looks. The website does not invite rudeness (in fact, will remove it when found), nor insults. But, it does provide the opportunity for someone to ask, for example, if the outfit he or she chose for a class reunion is appropriate. I wanted my sisters, and the rest of the world, to be able to anonymously respond with “Please reconsider – that outfit is [fill in the blank] for a class reunion.” Or alternatively, “You look amazing. Knock ‘em dead!” Whatever the truth, as they saw it, might be.
The site should be up and running soon. In the meantime, I miss the “one-ups” that my sisters and I mastered when we were younger. However, being the mature adult I am today, I admit that I would have preferred a likening to Mr. Magoo on a really good day!
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