Lipstick and Powder

Even in her earlier years, Grandma Mary Jean wasn't a beauty by most people's standards. She was a bit too pear-shaped in body and bit too irregular in feature to earn herself that title. But I never got the impression that bothered her too much. In fact, I sometimes wonder if she was secretly glad she wasn't more classically beautiful. Being who she was left her free to focus on things other than her physical beauty: like her family.

In all her years on this earth, she never wore more on her face than her eyeglasses and, occasionally, some lipstick and powder. That's all. No foundation, no blush, no eyeshadow, no mascara. (And no moisturizer to my knowledge.) Just lipstick and powder.
Did this show a kind of confidence on her part? A lack of caring? A compromise for frugality?

I'll never really know. However, I find something simple and honest in this fact from my Grandmother's life. I've always seen make-up as a kind of burden; a necessary evil that I'm, more often than not, happy to do without. And I wonder if she felt the same.

I sometimes think that truly beautiful people have it harder in life than the rest of us. When you are defined at an early age as "beautiful," you are forced to adopt a lifelong struggle to maintain that beauty against impossible odds. Those of us who are more average in looks have a kind of gift in being free from this burden. And we have the added blessing of knowing that we've earned our place in life--our loves and our triumphs--not because of our appearance, but because of our other (and I'll argue, more important) qualities.

But then again, what is beautiful?