The Reformed Beauty Addict

Claire is a stay home mom who has just turned fifty and thanks to the experience of menopause she now claims proudly to be a reformed beauty addict.

"I think I deserve a medal for surviving fifty years," laughs Claire, "and I want the next fifty years to be relaxed. I want to be 'me' not someone scared of mirrors."

One of the reasons why she changed from being a woman who actually went to bed with makeup (so neither she nor her husband would get a fright in the morning) to a woman who wears no makeup has a lot to do with getting real about what her misguided mother had taught her.

"Despite women chaining themselves to parliament gates in the 1900s - and burning bras in the 1960s - to free women," explains Claire, "my mother clung to the idea that women were put on earth to be beautiful and to snare a guy."

"I just woke up one day, saw lipstick smeared all over my face from a passionate interlude during the night and literally saw red. I felt a complete and utter fraud."

"If an overwhelming desire to be beautiful had anything to do with survival of the fittest, guaranteeing the most beautiful women the most handsome and virile mate and more children to carry her genes down the centuries," says Claire, "then I can understand vanity."

"The truth is far from that ideal. My husband was bald and paunchy when I married him and the last thing I ever wanted was another child - so why was I so vain? Why was I afraid of looking a fright in the morning when the guy beside me looked worse than a fright? Why was I behaving so stupidly?"

Claire wasn’t trying to attract a new and handsome partner. She was very happy with her husband and he, presumably, was very happy with her - with or without make-up.

Was she trying to keep up with the Jones’ girl?

"Now we’re getting somewhere," laughs Claire. "I used to hang around a lot with similarly vain women and felt that if I didn’t keep up my image then I would be seen as a loser - a frumpy housewife."

A lot of women are seemingly frumpy housewives and are quite happy being who they are, so how did this extraordinary coterie of vain women come about?

"Like a lot of vain women," explains Claire, "my mother had been similarly obsessed with looking good and had instilled into me from a very early age the importance of being a pretty woman."

Claire believes that her mother had received similar instructions from her mother, and so on, meaning that generations of women had been infected by a way of thinking that has no meaning in today’s world and is, in fact, destructive.

"In the 19th century," explains Claire, "such an instruction was necessary because being a pretty woman was the only way a girl could snare a rich husband and survive. Women didn’t have a choice in those days. It was either marriage or the gutters."

This reminded Claire of a story she once read about a woman who was asked why she cuts the ends off every slab cake she bakes. Apparently she had learned to do so from her mother who had learned to do so from her mother. Why? Because her grandmother baked in an open oven which burnt the ends!

"Nobody bakes in open ovens these days but the tradition passed unthinkingly from mothers to daughters throughout the centuries," explains Claire. "It's the same with plastering ourselves with make-up and perfume. Women needed to do it centuries ago but we don't need to do it any more."

"Mothers have a lot of responsibility in bringing up daughters," says Claire, "and teaching them the things their mothers taught them is not always a wise thing to do."

"Teaching a little girl, like I was taught, that she’s got to be pretty," says Claire, "is the most destructive thing to do to daughters. It teaches them that what they are on the outside is far more important than what they are on the inside. It perpetuates a male dominated culture that enslaved women for centuries, and it sets up these little girls for misery around the age of 40 when their looks start to fade."

"I’m teaching my girls to be beautiful inside, and the best way I can do that," explains Claire, "is how my mother taught me - by being a role model."

"My mother was the prettiest lady in town. I’m going to be the lady in town with the prettiest insides!"