Deprogramming 101: When will it be enough?

Most women start small. It's just lip gloss and mascara when they're a tween. Then it's dyeing or bleaching their hair. Then it's feeling edgy with particular bras, more and more makeup, heels, and suddenly that minimal routine has snowballed into a ritual you can't leave the house without.

I'm wary of any modification to our appearances that have escalatory tendencies. What is escalatory for some people will not be for others, so it's evaluating one's own personality and asking hard questions about your self esteem. For me, I tend to go all or nothing, so using just a few products is nearly impossible. There isn't a healthy relationship I can have with one makeup product, because I know one will feel like it's not enough.

The other side of escalation is desensitization. The "hit" we might have felt the first time we used mascara is no longer powerful enough to make us feel like the look is complete. We also need shadow, eyeliner, concealer, brows. Then that doesn't look right without full foundation, blush, bronzer, and lips. We find a new normal that is usually increasingly time-intensive.

Then there's the ever changing, elusive, impossible standards and trends. Freckles are a fantastic example of a skin type/feature coming in and out of style, and people being willing to undergo procedures to get rid of them, and sun damage or makeup stains to get them. Are you going to celebrate one of your features and then erase it next time it goes out of fashion?

Why are almost all of these trends pendulum swings away from each other? A woman would hardly be able to naturally change with them. If someone plucked her eyebrows thin for years, could she naturally grow back thick brows when that trend flips? Evidently not when we look at the high demand for microblading, variety of brow brushes and stains, and filters that will add them for you.

Do you know many women who are not always looking for a "better lipstick"? I don't know very many people who decide that they are totally satisfied with their products and aren't always excited to try new ones that promise even better results. And once you do find that perfect matte stain, the trend has already moved on to gloss.

Beauty regimens will never satisfy because their ultimate goal is to keep you unhappy and demanding external products to fill the hole in your self esteem that they created. As long as you ache for the skin of your 18-year-old self, you will emotionally get diminishing results every morning of your life.

You are already enough. So I hope you'll see that enough...is enough.