10 Warnings About Looking into a Mirror
Without Mirrors We Are the Fairest of Them All
It’s something we do several times a day — look into a mirror.
Add to that number self-staring moments all the quick glances when passing a window outside and realize that gazing at oneself is a national pastime.
But it’s a pastime filled with danger.
Be careful when you choose to look into a mirror because:
1) If you are a certain age, there will come a morning when you look in the mirror and see yourself transforming into your mother or father, or maybe a weird combination of the two. For those who think their parents are, or were, really handsome, well, good for you. That morning look is a sentimental pleasure. But for the rest of us, it’s a horror to see your face starting to look like a person who used to yell at you when you were bad and powerless.
2) That same morning glance will also visually demonstrate what no one ever explains — the progress of wrinkles. They start out a faint line that seems, at first, to be just a temporary fold. You then blithely say to yourself, “I must have slept on my face funny. It will puff back out after I have my coffee.” But no. Within 12 hours that line will be a permanent wrinkle, and it will deepen and settle in right before your eyes. The mirror shows that a wrinkle announces itself then goes full bore. Trust me on this, I am living it every day now.
3) Some of the worst moments in life come from clothing store mirrors. Do I need to say, “bathing suit shopping”? It’s as if stores get their mirrors from a funhouse supplier, mirrors concave and convex, that make you look 15 pounds heavier with a much fatter face. And they confirm what you secretly thought all along — nothing fits and it all looks horrible on you and you stay dressing room a few more minutes alone to cry. For places that make money after people try on clothes, this makes no sense.
4) Mirrors in make-up stores are especially scary. First, you have to deal with the clerks who are apparently made up to look like clowns. Does anyone ever think, “Man, that clerk look like a cheap and artistically incompetent whore, do I want to look like that?” No, we let them slather our faces too and then we look like clowns too.
5) The problem of make-up and mirrors leads to the more intimate problem of those mirrors surrounded by lights that are supposed to help with eyebrow plucking and zit popping. In them, every pore on your face is magnified to a frightening level. Do we really need to see the electron microscope version of our skin? Who does that benefit?
6) Be wary of lights and mirrors in general. One day my father was renovating our bathroom and he installed lights on either side of the mirror instead of a row of lights over the mirror. When I asked him why, my Dad said, “Your mother looks better when the light comes from the side”. Smart man. My parents were happily married for 54 years and this is why. I now follow that rule and I look absolutely fabulous — and 10 years younger — in my bathroom mirror but like a haggard witch in other people’s bathrooms with overhead mirrors.
7) It’s a real snake pit if you need to use a mirror to scout out some usually inaccessible place. I’ve heard people scream from the bathroom because they tried to use a mirror to look at their private parts. It’s also extremely difficult to identify exactly where you are and what you are looking at while being over with a flashlight in one hand and a mirror trembling in the other hand. A move that started as an exploration of a concerning bump into a nightmare of finding more than you bargained for.
8) A full-length mirror can be a great help when preparing for an important meeting or date. Supposedly, the big advantage is that you can see yourself from top to toe, and from three sides. But that maneuver can also end in an expensive disaster that changes your life, or at least your closet. One day I spent a lot of time in front of the full-length mirror trying on everything I owned and the next day I had no clothes because I had taken them all to the charity shop. Obviously, I am anxious about buying replacement clothes (see number 2 above).
9) Handheld mirrors are their own special nightmare. As you move one of these tiny shinny things closer and then back again, you lose all perspective about what is going on. Think of the woman how whips out a lipstick mirror and then colors outside the lines. Using the car rearview mirror in this way is also a no-no. I once heard of a woman who had a car accident while trying to put on mascara using the rearview mirror. Treating it like a handheld, she angled it toward her face and got close, only to crash. Worse than texting and driving, I’d say.
10) Mirrors should also be off-limits for couples. Sure, every new couple has that romantic moment when they get out of a duel show and stand together to make faces at the mirror. But what if that new partner doesn’t even show up in the mirror? You know what that means. Run.
Mirrors in homes or stores should be outlawed. Just think how nice that would be. We could just go with our own personal image of ourselves, an image that would never be confronted, never subject to change, and always at its best and most beautiful. If we wanted to know what we looked like, we’d have to rely on the judgment of others. But that’s easily ignored.
Why act like the stepmother in Cinderella and keep asking the stupid, lying mirror who the fairest of them all might be.
You are. I am. No one needs to look in the mirror to know that.
