I’m not wearing nail polish today. I’m watching my unpolished nails tap, tap, tap at the white keys of my computer. They’re so bare looking. My nails nearly blend into my fingertips! There might as well be no nails there at all!

This summer, I have two jobs. One is in a coffee shop, where the uniform is all black and the health and safety rules tell me that nail polish (even clear!) is, by all means, prohibited. The other is in a clothing store where I’m encouraged to express my own style (which most often happens to include, you guessed it, nail polish). I work the first half of the week at the former job, and the second half at the latter. There are no in-between days. My head spins and my two personalities are neatly divided. On Wednesday afternoons, I leave Job #1 and head for #2, applying nail polish in the hours between, if there’s time. If there isn’t, I do it before working at Job #2 on Thursday. Then it comes off on Sunday morning before I dutifully show up, clean-tipped, at Job #1.

Before this summer of two jobs, I never realized how much a small rule like “no nail polish” could feel like a constraint on my freedom of expression. I also never realized how hopelessly addicted I am to nail polish - maybe in the same way that someone else may be addicted to bright blue hair dye, but that’s not allowed at Job #1 either.

- Stephanie Fereiro

From Mommie Dearest
Photographers Sofia Sanchez & Mauro Mongiello
Stylist Samuel Francois, Model Siri Tollerød
For Numéro 97

When I was small, maybe eight or nine, my mother bought me my first makeup kit. A cheap drugstore affair, it would serve the double purpose of keeping me out of her “good” makeup while teaching me how to use the stuff before I took it out into the world. In the last few months, celebrity mom Katie Holmes has been taken to task for allowing her daughter (age four) to walk around in ballroom dancing shoes – essentially child-size high heels. In my mind, giving little girls (or boys) the tokens of adulthood is mostly harmless; an amusing gesture, a little parental indulgence.

Right?

Created in 2001 by a Parisian digital arts collective called Pleix, the video below shows a series of four imagined “Beauty Kits for Little Girls” containing DIY beauty treatments. But rather than the customary cheap-makeup-and-nail-polish combos, these kits promise breast implants, liposuction, rhinoplasty, and cosmetic dental surgery.

Part kitschy vintage ad, part modern infomercial, the piece takes you through step-by-step guides, juxtaposing playful music, simple images and rudimentary drawings with creepy flashes of bloody scalpels and bone fragments. It’s both amusing and disturbing – an apt commentary on an increasing appetite for and obsession with (arbitrary) aesthetic perfection that, at this point, seems to claim its acolytes almost in infancy.

This work is already nine years old (just a little older than its implied target market), but I think it might actually be getting more relevant over time.

- g.

You’re not getting any younger. It might be important to add that, in fact, you’re only ever going to get older. So if that’s true — and if that’s true for everyone — why is it such a struggle? My sister, ten years my senior, once told me that eventually, everyone has The Year. It’s the year you realize you’re aging; you actually see it in the mirror. For some people it comes earlier, for some later, but it happens. Last year it happened to me.

I’d always been cavalier about aging. It seemed pointless to rail against something inevitable. There was no way to know the evidence of it would throw me the way it did. I’d always loved to see other faces carved with the character of time and experience, but seeing the change in my own was jarring. I didn’t feel any different, my life was as disorganized as ever, my future as uncertain, but suddenly it was as though my corporeal self was pushing on without me. It was the sensation of lost time. My first, absurd reaction was to try and go back.

Don’t believe everything you see. It might be important to add that, in fact, when it comes to fashion images, you should believe even less. Most of us have seen the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty video documenting the evolution of a fashion photo. In the world of Photoshop, age has no dominion. But if we all know this, why is it so easy to believe the lie?

A couple of days ago I was browsing my favourite fashion website, foto_decadent, and found an editorial with Madonna and the lately-famous Jesus Luz. In it she plays the quintessential cougar, perfectly glamorous and impeccably dressed, surrounded by half-or-totally undressed young men vying for her attention. It’s racy and suggestive — but no more or less so than most of what’s out there. She looks perfect. But attached to the bottom of the post was a link to another site with a much more interesting shoot. Madonna un-shopped.

After seeing the second shoot, the first one started to look ridiculous to me. Madonna is 50. In the retouched photos she looks beautiful but not real and, to be honest, nothing special in terms of fashion imagery. In the untouched ones, she is actually sort of astounding. To think that is what 50 could look like is incredible — and possible. All of these images are meticulously designed visual projections of our desires and ideals. Wouldn’t it make more sense to have a vision of ourselves we could work towards instead of against?

And this is where the discussion began. I sent the links to the WORN girls and asked their opinion.

Why are we so afraid to let beauty be human?