Laura on Life

You are beautiful

By Laura Snyder

[September 25, 2010]  If you've ever walked into a pharmacy, you know that 50 percent of the place is dedicated to making a woman smell better, feel better and look better.

There are perfumes, spritzes and powders. There are cremes, rinses and pastes. There are lotions and serums and elixirs for every conceivable and imagined malady that a woman might face.

Common tools for basic feminine care might include an eyebrow plucker, a waxing kit and a special stick that pushes back your cuticles. These are things that might be considered torture devices by Third World countries.

Women, for some reason, also must be more colorful than men, so there is blush, lipstick and nail polish in every color of the rainbow.

Why? Why are there so many products aimed to make woman more attractive? Because women buy them, that's why. Why do they buy them? Because women think they need to smell, feel and look better than they do.

Why do we think that way? If we were alone on a deserted island, there is no way we'd punish ourselves by glopping on one product after another until we are convinced that somehow we are prettier. There is only one reason we do this: Subconsciously or instinctively, we want to be attractive to a man.

News flash, ladies: Men are not all that picky. If truth be told, we are much pickier than men.

The facts are, men are the nastier gender here. They are the ones who should be primping in front of a mirror for hours to make themselves more attractive to us. He should be plucking stray hairs from his facial orifices, not us. They are the ones in need of a makeover into a decent representation of the Marlboro Man: the guy who could rope a steer to save your life, but his breath smells like mint and his body smells like something other than strong chicken soup.

Instead, women wear a battery of makeup to make themselves more attractive, while a man simply throws on yesterday's jeans and whatever T-shirt smells least offensive and he's good to go. This is wrong on so many levels.

First of all, most men will say they don't like makeup on a woman. This is not precisely true. They like the way we look when we are wearing it; they just don't like to kiss a woman who has it on.

So what do we do? We spend years perfecting the art of applying makeup in such a way that we won't look like we have applied makeup.

Celebrities pay good money for artists who can pull it off.

Secondly, being attractive, by its very definition, attracts people. Many men are under the impression that if we are attractive, we must want to attract them. This doesn't mean that we cannot be attractive to make ourselves feel good, but if we do not want the attention of men, why are we trying so hard to attract it?

Just sayin'...

We are fickle creatures, though. We want people in general, and men in specific, to simply think we are stunning without actually mentioning it or acting as though they are thinking it... unless, of course, we are intimately involved with one. In that case, we want to hear that we are stunning, even if we look like pond scum in the morning. Men, are you writing this down?

Thirdly, women don't need makeup to attract a man. In fact, if a woman even hints that she might possibly, if the stars are aligned correctly, think about maybe going to bed with him... she is instantly gorgeous.

That's why a man's ears, no matter how much hair is in them, are attuned to the slightest double-entendre, whether real or imagined.

So ladies, don't waste your money on all the beauty products out there. They are not worth the trouble. You are beautiful just the way you are.

[By LAURA SNYDER]

Laura Snyder is a nationally syndicated columnist, author and speaker. You can reach her at [e-mail] or visit www.lauraonlife.com for more info.