BEAUTY IN WRINKLES??

  

All women want to be beautiful! It seems to be a desire that’s deeply embedded in our feminine psyches. We are most confident when we feel that we are at our beautiful best.  I don’t think anything’s wrong with this desire we women have.  But I do feel there’s something wrong with the way beauty is presented to us in the American media.  We have been fed alot of ideas of beauty that are impossible for us as black women  in particular and all women in general to keep up with.  We well know that there are literally millions of beauty products out there, selling us a dream of the narrow definition of the American beauty standard.  And truly, haven’t we women tried many times to reach for that lofty ideal of beauty as it is presented to us in the media?  I know I’ve tried many products, vainly reaching for that beauty ideal.  Thank God we have learned to accept our own beauty on our own terms. 

 

We women have experienced so much joy and pain as we reject the media’s standard, and seek our own beauty, sometimes blindly,  because there are so few depictions of our beauty being reflected back to us in the all powerful beauty industry that we can emulate and be proud of.  So I want to give us a round of applause for struggling and succeeding to be who God created us to be.  But I want to go one step further.
This blog is about a MATURING sistah girl, so I want to mention something that we don’t talk much about.  Wrinkles.  I know, I know, we black women have been told that we don’t have to worry about wrinkles the way other women have to, because of our richly melanated skin.  Well that’s only partially true.  We don’t have to worry about wrinkles as early as some women have to, but most black women will get wrinkles eventually.  So how should we feel about them? How to you feel about wrinkles?  In our western culture, we are trained to dislike and even fear wrinkles. I think it has to do with looking older, and the negative connotations associated with aging in this culture. We are poised and ready and encouraged to go to war against wrinkles because we believe that aging means a loss of beauty and femininity and sexuality and desirability. So we start our daily moisturizing regimens to smooth out our faces. Some ladies (and men) will go as far as plastic surgery to eradicate those awful wrinkles. We’ve seen how some celebrities are willing to have multiple plastic surgeries just to kill those wrinkles!  I wonder if there is another way to approach this process of aging.  Is it possible to be beautiful with wrinkles?  Maybe the word “wrinkle” is too negative. I think they should be called “wisdom lines”.

 

I have noticed a few wisdom lines on my face and I realize that I have to come to terms with getting older. I don’t want to be one of those women who lament the aging process every steip of the way.  I will continue to use my jojoba oil moisterizer to keep my face properly balanced, (I’m not going to sit out in the sun encouraging the aging process. either) but I hope not to become obsessed with trying to fight wrinkles.  Maybe if I work on how I see these wisdom lines, I won’t feel any negativity when they do come, and come they will.