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I used to believe that she saw all that because she was my mom, but as I have gotten older, I have learned that beauty radiates from the inside out. She saw that no matter how many bigoted questions I got, I answered them honestly, but still made friends with anyone and everyone. But she also saw an incredibly gifted young lady with a big heart, who was willing to help someone out whenever the opportunity arose. Sure, my mom saw my olive complexion (“that so many women pay tons of money to have”), and my crooked smile, and even saw beauty in my straggly hair. What I didn’t realize then is that the saying “beauty is skin deep,” isn’t actually true. She would tell me that they were just intimidated by my unbelievable beauty. I used to lament to my mom as a teenager that none of the boys at school liked me because I was nerdy and wore unfashionable clothes and didn’t hang with the popular kids. I poured over the pages of my teen magazines that showed my teen idols (Tiffani Amber Theissen, Candace Cameron, and Paula Abdul, to name a few) and their beauty routines and style choices and truly believed that those were the things that I needed to feel beautiful. Struggling to identify with a race or culture left me with just as obscure a perspective on beauty. “What nationality are you?” (American.) “No, I mean, where did you come from?” (Arizona.) “Is that your boyfriend?” (No, that’s my dad. “Is it true that you can’t wash your hair?” (Um, why not?)
#Beauty isn t skin deep how to#
“Do you know how to make chitlins?” (I didn’t even know at the time what that was.) In elementary school, I used to get questions from classmates that were so unbelievably ridiculous to me.Īs I got older, the questions were more random and bizarre. By sixteen, it seemed that I was in the midst of a never-ending awkward phase. Add to that enough Portuguese blood that a regular wax is necessary to keep me from looking like a Mexican boy. Growing up not white enough to be white, but not black enough to be black, I wasn’t ever sure where I fit in. No matter how I longed for just one token of socially acceptable fashion, it just wasn’t happening on my parent’s budget.Īs the eldest child of a mixed-race couple at a time when such a thing was seemingly foreign to a vast part of society, it took a while for me to realize that it wasn’t my clothes that made me different, it was the fabric of my ancestry. It was a repeat of the year prior, when I begged for a pair of LA Gear high tops, to no avail. My mom even humored me one day and took me to the mall, only to loudly proclaim how ridiculous it was that a t-shirt would cost $50. I recall longing for a Hypercolor t-shirt in seventh grade-I yearned for one of those shirts more than I did for my crush to notice me. I was never what one would consider “stylish,” since my clothes had generally been worn by three other girls before me.
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We always had what we needed anything more was a treat. Most of my clothes were hand-me-downs from the girls at church, so they were often out of style and far too short for my gangling limbs (when capris came back in, I cringed, recalling all of the jokes about waiting for a flood that were banal in my childhood), or too big for my tiny waist-I actually went from ages 10-14 without a back belt loop. I was tall and scrawny with big, frizzy hair and a gap in my front teeth wider than the Grand Canyon. Growing up, I can’t say that I ever felt beautiful.