Ladies: get the right mirrors
Stop staring at your pores, make money instead
Like everyone else, I was so impressed with Paulette Perhach’s essay A Story of a Fuck-off Fund that I wanted to share the best advice I’ve ever gotten as a woman of the world.
Many years ago I read some random sewing book that said something like, “Get a full-length mirror, and hang it so you can see yourself well at a distance of no less than one yard [or meter]. Ignore any real or imagined flaws that you cannot actually see at that distance.”
The advice was intended to remind beginning seamstresses that literally no one can even tell if the topstitching on your skirt is a little bit crooked. But the more I tried it out, the more I realized this was a pretty canny metaphor for being female in this culture.
Let me just put it out there, ladies: if you are staring at yourself from a distance smaller than this, you are holding yourself back. In professional life you should rarely if ever be seen from a distance of less than 3 feet. That is the distance that should exist across a board of directors’ table, at a networking event where people are not sexually harassing you, in a one-on-one interview (in-person or via video), and certainly when you are giving a public presentation.
I have never met a man who owns a magnifying makeup mirror. Most males of my acquaintance would not be able to tell if a petite explosive device went off in their kitchen — do you really think they will be judging you for having a few hairs that you haven’t tweezed from under your eyebrows? Honestly, I have worked with men who have used fake hair from a spray can or worn a corset and think we can’t tell! The time that we women are wasting thinking about stretch marks, blending eye shadow properly, and the classifications of different pores… men are not wasting that time because they literally can’t see those things.
This is not to say that men can’t discriminate at all. In my experience they are very attuned to differentiators like large vs. small bust size, long vs. short hair, and color of lipstick. But again… those are things you can tell from a meter away. When women obsess about their perceived “flaws”, those aren’t usually the things they are making themselves crazy about.
I get it that a lot of this may be about perception vs. reality. Hey, maybe everyone is actually staring at my pores and I just don’t know! But who cares? I’m not wasting time WORRYING that they are staring at my pores — and more importantly, I am not staring at my pores myself — because I only have full-length mirrors. I don’t always like what I look like in those mirrors… but at least it isn’t because of something only I can see.
