natural beauty

What would I have looked like if I lived in the 1800's...before the invention of contact lenses, professional hair straightening, eyebrow waxing, anti-aging cosmetics?  I would have been not so cute, me thinks.

I suppose by age 33 I'd already have nearly grown kids...I could even be a grandma....so I'm attractive for an early elderly woman. I'm an 8 out of 10 in the Gold Rush Grandma circuit.

If I think about how I looked at age 15, which is sort of a poor-girl married age for the early 1800's (I'm thinking Jane Austen's times, maybe), I would not have married with any land holding aristocrat. I'd be Charlotte Lucas, begging the weird guy to take me off my parents' hands. Ouch! Maybe not so bad. I'd probably be the governess falling in love with all the mysterious, emo older men. I'd end up in unmarried, spinster disgrace, selling apples to sailors on the wharf and coughing. Or maybe I'd be the clever, non conformist political suffragette type. It wouldn't be a bad life.

I don't mean to berate my looks. I'm just saying that much of my cuteness is strictly 21st century. In the future, will everyone be very cute, making cute...well...ordinary?

It's all relative. I mean, obviously beauty standards are constructed by the times (ie, no one is Jane Austen's England tweezed their brows even if they looked like chubby inchworms; my ridiculous hair was perhaps made for the ten thousand hairpins required for a Victorian pompadour thing.)

I can't shake the notion that it just plain sucked for women before the invention of modern beauty products like clever razors with shaving soap stuck to it. I know, I know: they had much more important things to do then worry about their legs and hairy legs probably were just as natural as unpainted toes.  Their lives were an endless rotation of labor and children and keeping the house together and pleasing their husbands and, most likely, had few pleasures besides needlepoint, reading, and family. When they washed their hair on Saturday nights in preparation for church the next day, did they think, "aaaaaah, finally some 'me' time!" or did they simply not think of themselves at all? 

Their world was small, but it's not like they thought of it like that. Did they?