A Certain Kind of Beautiful

Tonight I met a gorgeous blonde. Well, we didn’t actually meet. She was eating dinner with her mother and grandparents and I spent my dinner hour tracking her moves and extracting bits of her conversation from the silences in mine.

Her kind of pretty rolls out of bed that way. Far from being the equivalent of the beauty precision in magazines, she had enough flaws to keep things interesting. Her eyes were too big, her nose had a distinctive bump, and her chin just a bit short for her face.

I’ve always been taken by certain women. If I had a type it would be The Gamine, a moniker coming from the French gamin meaning “street urchin, waif, or playful, naughty child.” Audrey Hepburn is the classic gamine. She took the part of urchin and playful equally well. She demonstrated tremendous range of character within a tiny shell of a woman.

If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve no doubt caught strains of my girl crushes on Feist and Zooey Deschanel. Newcomer Katy Perry is what I’d call a Gamazon, and I have to be honest, I’m fascinated by her former Christian Gospel Singer turned Pop Bad Girl (even though I find her “I Kissed a Girl” a hackneyed portrayal of girl-on-girl taboo, it's my latest guilty pleasure.)

When I see unconventionally beautiful women, I often wonder why some strive to alter their looks with dramatic plastic surgery. (A nip and tuck, I can understand!) I have always wanted a large nose. I have a teddy-bear-like version I inherited from my great-grandmother. I like it, but there is something noble about a large nose. It gives a face a tremendous amount of character. My mother and father both shared this trait and I wanted one too. My mother, on the other hand, spent her teens pinching her nose with a clothes pin in hopes of shrinking it.

I sometimes wish I were an artist. I’d loved to have been able to draw women I admire, but I suppose my words will have to suffice. My grandfather had been an artist and I remember the huge nude that hung in our sitting room. My mother has a box of his sketches, many of them women. Apparently he had one model he preferred over the rest. My mother referred to her as his “Helga.” That name might not mean anything to many of you, but Helga Testorf was artist Andrew Wyeth’s secret muse for over 15 years, the subject of his constant study. He’d place her in various scenes, landscapes, nude on white paper.

Watching and appreciating the beauty in other women actually makes me less aware and less judgmental of myself. I am less likely to focus on my flaws when I begin to draw in the range of features out there. If I can appreciate a bump on a nose, there must be someone who appreciates what I would consider my own flaws.