Last year, I got a fringe.
FF takes the rip out of me constantly for it. She says I’m always touching it, flicking it, smoothing it, pushing it out of my eyes.
I just push it back up off my face and ask her if she prefers me with a MASSIVE forehead.
I’d been thinking about getting a fringe for a long time before I did it, and then once I had my fringe, I discovered fringe envy.
Other people’s fringes seemed more voluminous, neater, more controlled, better shaped than mine. So I would touch it, flick it, smooth it, push it out of my eyes until I felt like maybe other people would envy my fringe too.
Getting the fringe trimmed at the hairdressers became a little bit of a gauntlet to a fringe novice like me, since I didn’t know what I wanted them to do to make it look better. I had a couple of too-short fringe trims and a couple of too-straight trims until I learned to be more directive.
I was on a quest for the ultimate fringe. And when I watched 500 Days of Summer, I knew I’d found it. Zooey Deschanel, the object of my fringe envy. If only I could look like her – starting with the fringe.
Yesterday I came across this letter on Twitter.
Sent by Zooey Deschanel to Vogue Magazine when she (and I) was 17, she’s railing against the pressure girls/women feel to match up to an ideal of beauty.
I imagine she has the ideal fringe and that if I had her fringe, perhaps I had somehow have the rest of her good looks too. But I bet she gets as frustrated with her fringe as I do. I wonder if she looks at someone else’s fringe, say Gemma Arterton, and feels a pang of envy?
The moral of this story being something we already know but maybe don’t believe – that no woman is perfect, that beauty is unique and found in the most surprising of places, and that it’s always in the eye of the beholder.
Three fabulous fringes!
