Weekends, I work at a shop that brings in a diverse clientele, from students and artists to society matrons and tourists. A few weeks ago, late in the afternoon when the store was quiet, a woman came in looking for Chinese lanterns. She was tall and lumpy and didn’t wear makeup. She wore a strange hat that curved around her face, a satin baseball jacket embroidered with flowers, and striped pants that had seen better days. She carried a Prada handbag worth more than my car.¹

Was the woman conventionally pretty? No. But she was riveting. Besides owning her own style, she was kind and authentic. (I later discovered she’s a famous photographer. You’ve probably seen her work on album covers.²)

Why am I telling this story? Because it made me realize how banal beauty can be. Look at the covers of celebrity magazines. The actresses look almost exactly the same. Thanks to dieting, plastic surgery, stylists, and personal trainers, Hollywood is an assembly line of interchangeable starlets. Worse, a lot of women on the street spend a lot of money to to achieve this kind of banality…

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