Top 11 Filthy Beauty Secrets for Youths
1. Don’t rub at the delicate skin underneath your eyes while frantically trying to clean the dregs of last night’s maddened house party make-up out of your skin before going out into the world. This will cause the infinitesimal fibres of your body to tear, releasing the inexpressible self-loathing that is the unnecessary but gross counter-balance to the wild egotism of your drunken self, causing you to age faster than your teetotaller best friend.
2. Stretch every night in a dark room. This releases the tensions of the day and relaxes your sinews for the troubled sleep and worrisome dreams to come, so that you can wake springing, without physical soreness, and amaze friends and colleagues with your youthful, swinging stride. The effect is almost more psychological than physical, and comes from knowing that even if your mind could not truly be at rest, at least your hamstrings slept in peace.
3. Once a month, after midnight, restless: spend hours meditatively examining every inch of your body on the bathroom floor, and trialling the strength of your ability to do no harm. Consider, then refrain from pressing down with the weight of the universe on blocked pores, read the stories of missed opportunities and sliding door moments in the split ends of your hair, see the faded lightning bolts of your growth into your place in the world in the stretch marks and scars, smell the uneasy brine of your hidden parts, and layer cream upon cream on top of yourself, as if you are the ocean crashing white and fresh at the high tide mark. Wake up, and wonder where your time has gone.
4. Get new sunglasses. Stare.
5. You know how your skin always looks perfectly airbrushed in your early morning blurry bathroom visit (before your eyes have adjusted into the daytime and the realities of the day ahead have set in, accompanied with the dread and knowledge that you will be constantly observed, analysed and responsible for an array of unnatural and finicky tasks, while always maintaining a presentable surface impression despite a roaring need to run under your cool surface)? To fix this, let yourself roll heavy with sleep back into bed, alone all day, periodically going to the bathroom as needed. Within weeks, you will see all the damage of years in the sun and human company magically reverse.
6. Go and see a doctor about what’s bothering you, even if you feel stupid or like it’s such a tiny thing. Worlds of relief and solutions open when you ask for scientific, rather than propagandised, help about those little bumps on your arms, these terrible recurring pains in your gut that nobody will speak of, or tell them how much trouble you are having with acne.
7. When you have a big party to go to, or even a small one, or even a date in a bar, reserve half your Saturday to prep time. When I say that, I don’t mean reserve it for the motions of styling your hair, your eyes, your body, your lips and your fighting teeth and nails, though these acts may be integrated. Reserve half your day to become slow and seductive in anticipation, drawing yourself baths, or lighting up conversations in with your friends, reading half a chapter of that book you always mean to read, then five chapters of an online story you are addicted to, play beats on as loud as they will go and fling open all the doors while you roam like a wild creature from the last millennia around the rooms of your house. Prepare your own soul for the face you want to wear tonight.
8. If you are having trouble with your sensitive, skin, particularly in gross sensitive places, try going commando for a while. Start with just in bed if this makes you uncomfortable, then if it’s working, graduate to day time. This may mean learning the art of the midi, the long camisole or the flowing pant. As a bonus, you learn how so much of what took for granted is not even necessary at all. The resulting look in your eyes will scare old friends and attract strangers with new ideas.
9. Exfoliate with a scrap of muslin cloth and the sense of scrappy, sloughing peace that you found in the garden of a woman who is either your mother, or who you wish were your mother. Tell her you love her, even though maybe you don’t particularly feel the truth of love in that moment, because you will eventually feel it at a time when it is impossible to say out loud. The sense of security from having expressed love in this future-oriented way will give you a glow the following night. Replace the dead skin cells with a muddy mixture of expensive dirt and chemicals marketed by a company founded by a woman you are moderately sure is actually a hedge witch from 1605 in disguise. When you start looking, you will soon realise there are many such companies. Don’t let this stress you out. Choose the one you can afford best, with the smell that best lines up with that one time you fell in love with your best friend, and the packaging that looks best in your bathroom trash.
10. Realise that when someone gives you a physical compliment, this is a fairly rude thing to do, and is usually a reflection of that person’s surprise at something about you that does not line up with their pre-conceived idea about you. In fact, many times the person is using the compliment as a Trojan horse to comment on the change, and does not even mean that new lipstick looks particularly nice, just that it is different from the nude lips you wear every other day. As a result, learn to style yourself in the way that you have road-tested through the process of catching your reflection in shop windows and realising how good you look, or noticing someone copying a particular element of your style, or the amount of pleasure looking at a particular Instagram post of yourself gives you. These are much better indicators of what physical choices suit you. Note that this type of road-testing usually requires refreshing when either you experience a change in climate, city, career or level of irony about being a warm body in an exploding universe where the only truth is entropy.
11. Adapt or die. Die eventually anyway. Contribute the creative crumbling of your beauty to the garden of the women you love.
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