It’s not often that I’ve had to suffer for beauty, or to pull off the kind of extreme looks that I sometimes embrace—but as an undergrad on the dance floor in Chicago, I did wear size 26 raw denim that I’d slept in for a week so they would hug and squeeze every nuance of my hips as I swayed them. Later, though, when I worked at Barneys in LA, many of the men I attempted to sell this process-dependent denim to found even the thought of wearing jeans two sizes too small for days (or even weeks) before they gave way to be abhorrent, that extreme labor for aesthetics akin to torture. Imagine, then, having the patience—or is it the endurance, the fortitude, or, maybe, the sheer swing-for-the-fences attitude—to pull off the kinds of wild nails, or lashes, or even lips with the gravitational force seen on these pages? Having grown up in a land of women—my mother, sister, grandmother moving around me like glamazons—I feel the idea that one must labor to be beautiful is simply a fact of beauty: When something has the power to make you otherworldly, a minor deity, that is something worth working to attain.
