This is a hilarious and courageous book about one individuals authentic battle to find her self worth in the midst of all the inner and outer messages, subtle to blatant, sacred to profane, that assure us of our failure to be good enough, worthy enough, attractive enough, etc. That fear of rejection lies so deep in our hearts and minds that we seem endlessly vulnerable to any variety of fear monger from playground bully to the political scold, to advertising promisers of making us better if we just buy that thing. This author has the toughness and determination to take a hard look at where all the manipulation is coming from as she also discovers her own goodness, strength and yes, beauty that always has been hers. I love that she took a stand, held her ground and through that stubbornness and fight learned so much about where those scary voices come from. The challenge to become authentic is universal and timeless for men and women, whether it's over the matter of make-up, or about carrying weapons, what to do with ones life, or how to serve the country, none of us escapes this gauntlet of life. Thank you Ms. Baker for giving us such a crisp, funny and honest look at how you managed. Bravo!
If you ever checked yourself out in a store window's reflection or tried on 15 coats only to leave the store empty-handed, you've finally found a sympathetic soul and a great read. Now in the AARP zone, I can tell you that the issues really don't go away ... because now you get to worry about being fat AND old AND invisible.
Unless, like Phoebe, you just pull the plug on the ridiculous beauty treadmill and start living instead. Reasonable maintenance and hygiene, of course, but then ... you look how you look? What a revolution!
She also shines in this book with her take on being an expat trailing spouse. Her experience is exactly how it really is to be the wife/appendage in an alien place. Again, no one is supposed to admit that what appears to be an "adventure" is actually often a bleak, lonely, depersonalizing domestic struggle, but it is, even if you don't have new-baby stress, as Phoebe also does.
I could hardly resist reading this book straight through, because I wanted it to last.This book really isn't just about the no-makeup, no-fashion experiment; it's about the struggles of an exhausted young wife/mother living in Hong Kong with a husband who's frequently away. She writes really well and I enjoyed the book a lot, but it seemed to me that she got off-topic. I sort of got the impression that she originally wrote it as a general memoir, but maybe the publishers decided that the beauty/fashion boycott idea was a good marketing hook. SPOILER ALERT: In the end, she goes back to using makeup and shopping again, and I didn't get the sense that the big "experiment" had really changed anything for her.Had the author not jumped back and forth between time zones, but detailed her beauty experiment more chronologically, this book may have sustained my interest a little better, because the basic premise--forcing oneself to eliminate make-up for a year--is interesting.It's one thing to sit down after New Year's begrudgingly with a book that looks like it might be a list of to-do's or a "guide to a better you". But surprisingly, The Beauty Experiment is not that. It's a beautifully woven tale about a woman confronting her demons, and they just happen to be the same ones that many of the rest of us also have lurking in our closets. What makes this book so powerful is that while it is a thoughtful expose of ideas that are hard to buck, and perceptions in society that are powerful windmills (even if they are just windmills), it is also a fascinating story. Almost immediately I found myself thinking about how I see myself (beautiful? plain? old? flawed?) alongside a sense of wonder at the vivid descriptions of streets and life in Hong Kong. Perhaps what this book does best, through its exquisite writing, is allow the reader to confront big ideas while sinking into the kinds of characters and places that make reading so worthwhile.
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