Porcelain

What Betty knew about beauty (that I didn't)

I was sixteen when my mother suggested I start seeing her friend Betty for facials. Betty was an eccentric woman of indeterminate age in that particular way wealthy women achieve. Her short black Betty Boop curls framed a face with permanently widened eyes, as if she had just remembered she left the stove on or heard something truly scandalous. Her skin-care credentials were questionable; I was always under the impression that, it was more of a well-funded hobby than a profession.

Nevertheless, each month, my mom would drop me off with a check, and Betty would open the door to greet me. She lived in a house that looked like a maximum-security prison designed by someone who read architecture magazines. Raw concrete, sharp angles, and gray walls, but unmistakably fancy.

“Darling, come in,” she'd purr, with two identical gray poodles by her side, their groomed bodies so perfectly symmetrical they could have been reflections of each other.

She spoke in a way that suggested we shared intimate secrets, though we absolutely did not. The secret we actually shared was much worse: I was pale, and she knew it.

Betty led me through her concrete labyrinth, her poodles' nails clicking on the floors like tiny metronomes, to a room in the back. Many machines — far more than seemed necessary for a personal collection or possibly legal — lined the walls. There were vats of creams, bottles of serums, mysterious wands and metal probes.

“You've been wearing sunscreen?” Betty asked, as she smeared something thick and fragrant across my face.

“Yes,” I lied. I was pale as a ghost, and deeply concerned about this fact. It was 2004, and in the teenage hierarchy of Laguna Beach, being tan wasn't just desirable. It was mandatory, like wearing Uggs or pretending to enjoy volleyball.

“Good girl.” She wiped the cream away with a warm towel — stripping off layers of bronzer — and tilted my chin to inspect my bare skin. “Porcelain,” she murmured. “Exquisite.'“

I blushed, hating this assessment. In Southern California, “porcelain” was a diagnosis, not a compliment. I had spent most of my tween and teenage years trying to look less porcelain and more bronzed, more beachy, more like everyone else.

My attempts had been both desperate and disastrous. There was the fifth-grade incident where I convinced a friend to dust me head to toe with brown eyeshadow using a blush brush. I swaggered home, convinced I'd cracked the code to California cool, only to have my father ask if I was participating in a Grapes of Wrath reenactment.

I later graduated to Clarins self-tanner, eagerly rubbing it over every inch of skin I could reach. I strutted through the halls feeling transformed, even though I had to keep my orange-brown palms hidden under my sweatshirt sleeves when I raised my hand in class.

For my boldest attempt, I walked several miles to a tanning salon and requested their darkest spray tan option. I left feeling confident and beautiful, my skin glowing an unnatural orange. Then, catastrophe — it started to rain. By the time I got home, I looked like a leopard, irregular pale spots exposing my original hue. It stayed that way for weeks.

Betty, however, existed in a world untouched by early-aughts standards of beauty. As she ran a careful hand over my cheek, she spoke with the certainty of someone who had been beautiful long before spray tans were invented.

“Your skin is rare. Special.” She declared, her hands moving in practiced circles across my face. “You don't want to be like everyone else.”

I absolutely wanted to be like everyone else. That was the entire point of adolescence. But lying there as her poodles watched me from a silver velvet cushion in Betty's skin temple, something in her certainty made me pause.

“We enhance,” she said hypnotically, applying a cream that smelled like roses. “We don't erase.”

There was something almost religious about these sessions. Betty wasn't just a facialist (and, legally speaking, she might not have been one at all). She performed beauty like a priestess overseeing an ancient rite. The symmetrical poodles, the concrete fortress, the whispered proclamations — all part of a ritual that, despite my resistance, gradually transformed me.

Over time, my pores tightened, my skin cleared, and I learned the doctrine of proper skincare. I surrendered to being exactly what I was: translucent. I calculated how much time I saved by not fighting my natural color. Hours. Days. Years, possibly. All that time not spent applying bronzer or hiding orange palms or explaining why I looked like I'd been partially erased by rain.

The woman I am today is ridiculous about skin in ways Betty would appreciate. I wear hats with brims so wide they don’t fit on airplanes, own an extensive collection of sunscreens for different occasions, and apply my carefully selected serums AM and PM with precision. My skin looks, dare I say it, fantastic, which is the entire point of being this neurotic about it. Betty taught me that some obsessions are worth having.

Porcelain, after all, is meant to be polished.