Essay

Just Silvia

by Silvia Hartmann

It's a fascinating thing ...

Whenever I appear in public, there are some people who come up to me all excitedly and they say, "Oooh! Let me give you makeover! We'll do something about THAT hair, show you how to do make-up, get you some new clothes! And finally, your real beauty will be revealed!"

I am sorry, but time and time again, this leaves me absolutely speechless.

My "real beauty"?!

"Will become revealed"?!

Now look guys.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I don't wear make up.

I don't believe in it in principle.

I have *never* worn make up, not even when I was a teenager. I would stretch to a bit of lip gloss and some mascara just to fit in and have something to do when stranded in a toilet with girls who would be there for half an hour, doing I really don't know what to themselves in order to accomplish I really don't know what either.

Let's face it. Plastering all that stuff on your face and feeling "undressed" if you don't and incapable of leaving the house without it is nothing but a CULTURAL ENTRAINMENT.

So round here, females don't tattoo themselves all over, wear a permanent personal tent or stick giant plates into their lips - they just plaster themselves in paint.

And the other thing - whatever your hair is, it's wrong and it needs to be corrected.

Thus if you have curly hair, you have to buy hair straighteners; should your hair be straight like mine, then of COURSE you need a perm to "give it more volume" or to make it curly.

If you have brown hair, you better dye it blond or red or black; and now, please run that same sentence again, just switch through all the colours until we have covered all eventualities.

Now, of course, if your hair is going GREY - oh my GOD!!!!

PANIC!

Now ANY colour is better than THAT - even the long despised original colour, last seen in childhood ...

How do you like it, guys?

Hell, I'm not saying if you're a desperate housewife that I want to rain on your parade and say, "Scrub that shit off your face and let's see what you REALLY look like ... oh, sorry, 17 plastic surgeries too late ... oh, alright, just get on with it then ..."

So I don't know what's wrong with me.

I just don't feel any more beautiful with a half dozen layers of paint on my snozzle which has to be layered on in the morning, painfully scraped off again at night, and in the interim, precludes me crying, wiping the sweat of my brow, blowing my nose, rubbing my eyes and licking my lips when they get dry.

I don't.

I never did and I still don't.

I'm nearly 50 and I guess you could call me a WYSISWYG woman - what you see is what you get.

So for this self portrait, I washed my hair, and that would be that.

No photoshopping, no vaseline on the lense, no funny lights, just my trusty camera on a tripod and a remote shutter release.

I can't even find it in me to try and defend it further.

Sure, if I'd partied less in my teens, 20s, 30s and 40s, I guess my skin might be a bit better (although frankly, I am perfectly happy with it. It keeps the rain out, and the blood in - what more could you ask for?) and who knows? I might have a few less strands of silvery hair. If I ate less and exercised more, I wouldn't be so fat!

But I don't know. I like this picture. It looks like what I see in a mirror, first thing in the morning and last thing at night.

It's "Just Silvia".

And you know what?

That's pretty much EXACTLY how I like it.

Text/Image © Silvia Hartmann 2007