Ah, makeovers: those times we change our physical appearance, through clothing, haircuts, hairstyles, cosmetics, accessories, procedures, even surgeries. All to get that most wholesome feeling of looking better, or at least different, becoming the best you you can be. Contrary to what some people who police “shallowness” will tell you, beauty matters. A lot. The truth is a more beautiful you is a better you.
Makeovers, either as part of an upgrade or just for a change, are not uncommon, but I’ve noticed over the years that most makeovers people get aren’t nearly bold, imaginative, or creative enough to really take a person to their maximum potential. I guess it takes artistry, intellect, and talent in abundance to do that. More importantly, too few people really try to upgrade themselves. For women in particular I would add much more femininity should be brought to bear as well.
Girls: dress up, doll up, put in more effort, and don’t be scared to be vain or spend a lot of money; what better investment is there than an investment in you? Chances are you could and should be much more glamorous! If you’re a girl of even average natural endowments and actually put in a lot of effort to look good, believe me, you’ll turn heads almost everywhere in America; outside a few enclaves like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Miami, and New York, the country is a vast wasteland of ugly or plain people who let themselves go, and even inside those enclaves you’ll feel as glamorous as all the other pretty girls on the street. Either way it’s about the most wonderful feeling in the world: being envied and admired!
Some girls just need minor alterations, like putting on more makeup and wearing dressier things they already own more often. Others need more drastic changes, and there’s where it gets interesting: a whole new look! Often our images get stale, or don’t really suit us or who we want to be. Why not become somebody else? Why not play with your image and demeanor? Why not explore the frontiers of who you want to be?
Here I’ll explore three possibilities, a light, medium, and heavy makeover, for three hypothetical girls of white European ancestry. Call them Ginger, Bruna, and Flavia.
The Story of Ginger
Ginger is far from the kind of girl people gaze at and think “she’s so beautiful” when she’s out and about, but she’s not really ugly, either; just kinda plain. Her features are pleasant enough, but won’t turn heads all on their own. Though she has some development, she’s stick-thin and doesn’t have much of a figure. Worse yet, she wears dorky “casual” clothing, wears little to no makeup, wears her red hair in a hideous short bob (or perhaps puff would be a better word), and wears the most generic dorky glasses.
For Ginger I suggest some really heavy makeup, pink luscious lipstick, and dyeing her hair platinum blonde. Style what hair she has into a cute girlish style that frames her face. Toss out those dorky nerd glasses for some pairs that are more stylish, or perhaps start her on wearing contacts. I’d also put her in white crop tops and pink miniskirts a lot more, exposing her long legs and her midriff, the most flattering part of her figure. She should change her new wardrobe so everything is at least somewhat cute and girlish.
More radically, I’d give her platinum blonde hair extensions down to her waist, all shiny, wavy, and bouncy for her to wear long and loose all the time. Get her white go-go high-heeled boots to wear all the time, and wear pink heart-shaped glasses all the time. Together with the pink lipstick, the heavy makeup, and the long platinum blonde hair Ginger would look super cute!
Completing this moderate makeover into a super-cute girl, I’d have her chew pink bubblegum and blow bubbles all the time, cultivating a playful “I don’t have a care in the world” energy. This could be mixed with sucking on pink lollipops a lot of the time. To match her pink-and-white wardrobe I’d get her a pink or white girly totebag. The last piece would be big dangling earrings and choker and statement necklaces that are all heart-shaped.
The extreme makeover would be to give her a navel piercing to put heart-shaped jewelry on her good-looking midriff, and perhaps even a tongue piercing. In any case Ginger should get lip plumper to make those lips of hers luscious and the highlight of her face. The most extreme step of all would be to sate her envy of better-endowed girls by getting her breast and buttock implants, giving her a more voluptuous figure. Sprucing up her face would be part of the package; maybe Ginger was never quite satisfied with her nose, and so she gets some surgery done on that to give her the slimmer ski-slope nose she always wish she had.
However far she takes it, now that Ginger has decided to go for the change and completely upgrade her look she’s feeling a lot better, greater confidence and pride in herself with every passing step as she turns heads and is admired for her sense of style. She lets loose and has fun more easily, and that stokes her motivation for what else she could do to become the best her she can be.
So she starts taking better care of herself with a better diet; she might want to gain weight to fill herself out and put some pleasant softness on that midriff and in her face. She also finds the money in her budget for spa treatments like getting a massage every week, so she can always feel relaxed and at her best.
Except, that is, when it comes to having to work her humdrum job of being a human resources generalist; working the 9-5 office grind after college, she always put up with it because she was always told to pursue something she could break into that was stable and well-paying. Which she doesn’t really regret; it’s just that the poor little thing feels so bored and unfulfilled in that career. More than ever, Ginger wants to do a deep dive into music and singing, something she likes but has only ever pursued halfheartedly, and wants something better than that corporate office job.
So she researches, and discovers a path where she can build the life she wants. Tossing off the corporate job, she becomes an independent human resources consultant. The flexibility to choose her own hours and the freedom of choosing how she works permits her to explore music to her heart’s content; discovering her passion and talent lie in singing, she starts pursuing it on the side. Changing her budget to save and invest a lot more, she puts herself on track for financial independence and early retirement, as she knows she’d never want to be subject to the stress of depending on her passions for her sole income.
Researching the data, she summons the courage to be a bold girl and embraces the power of leveraged indexing. Fortune favors the bold, and her aggressive strategy is blessed by a roaring bull market, putting her closer to her FIRE number than she even expected. In addition to investing, she also prioritizes traveling; now that she’s no longer chained to a desk she can go to swanky and exotic locations, discovering her favorite are the warm beaches where she can show off her new look to the fullest.
Mixing near and far with a richer, hotter, and artsier crowd than she’s hitherto enjoyed, she might form a band with some other musical girls she finds. With her capital gains she easily affords her share of renting villas, her band’s equipment, and her other musical expenses, all paid for by low-interest margin debt. Why sell when you can borrow and stay fully invested?
With her feeling much more fulfilled now and vibing with her new friends and acquaintances better than she ever did with anyone in her old life, she’s even developing a new interest in men, especially how that men she actually likes are noticing her more. After spending her adult life feeling like it somehow wasn’t in the cards for her, she’s now starting to feel like she’d welcome being a wife and mother, if the right man came along. She has little to worry about; even if she falls in love and has a baby before she hits her FIRE number she’ll still be perfectly okay without having to take too big a drop in her living standard or becoming too dependent on her man.
The Story of Bruna
Next to Ginger Bruna is blessed, being naturally gorgeous without even needing to put in any effort, the one girl who soothes souls wherever she goes as she elicits thoughts of “she’s so pretty!”. You might think she doesn’t need a makeover; but you’d be wrong! One thought she doesn’t tend to stoke is a real “wow!”, and that’s because she doesn’t have much style. Her clothing, her brunette hair, her makeup; it’s all just generic and “blah”. She’s boring, and could use a change; sure, she could get by on her natural beauty, but why should she waste her youth by failing to achieve her full sensuous potential?
The first place for Bruna to start would be her makeup; she should make it her priority to learn makeup and how to achieve different looks. In the light version of her makeover she could learn how to doll herself up with light makeup; thick lashes, smokey eyes, luscious red lips, blushy cheeks, everything a pretty girl needs to draw attention to her lovely features or change up her look to something different but equally pretty.
Her brunette hair is already wavy, gorgeously shiny, and tumbling all the way down her back, so she should let no hair dye or treatment should ever mess with it. She wears her hair, though, in the same few blah styles all the time; she learns a lot more about how to style her hair, such as doing a Gibson girl bun and all of the easiest braids. One day she might be in braided pigtails, the next long and loose, the day after in a Gibson girl bun, then a French twist, then a Gibson girl with a lot cascading down long and loose, and the day after that who knows?
Putting more effort and skill into her hair and makeup already makes her beauty pop when you look at her day-to-day, but the biggest component of her makeover will be her clothes. Her clothes hitherto were generic; she invests in a basic wardrobe of feminine styles, plenty of cute dresses and skirts in bright feminine colors, all tailored to fit her soft and shapely hourglass figure perfectly. Investing in some ribbons and bows, she includes at least one ribbon and one bow in each day’s outfit. Bruna also will be investing in some jewelry to adorn herself, some stud earrings, dangling earrings, and statement necklaces.
The moderate version of the makeover will see her learning some heavier makeup and some more difficult hairstyles, and most importantly will see her expand her feminine wardrobe to yet more tailored outfits, to the point she has enough outfits to not wear the exact same one in a given month. Her accessories and jewelry also expand. She might also start adding real flowers onto her look; a flower crown one day, a flower pinned on her dress another day, and the like.
The extreme version would see her attain enough skill in makeup, or getting it applied professionally, to wear the heaviest looks that take an hour or more to put on. Her hairdos will rise to the most complex styles you can put on a girl; Princess Leia buns are a look she can rock in this version, among many others, including long loose hair with real flowers pinned all over its length, with more on the garments hugging her figure. Her beautiful body looks good in anything, so she goes all-out, getting a tailored wardrobe so vast she never has to wear the same outfit twice, with every single womanly and girlish look there is having a place in her wardrobe, every day being another glamorous game of dressup.
In her life more broadly Bruna works as a waitress, having stuck with it since her teens as she never saw much point in going to college and taking on a lot of debt for a career she knows she wouldn’t even like much. She’s toyed with the idea of being a makeup artist or some such, and she’s always wanted to get into horseback riding and skiing, but could never do any of these things anywhere near as much as she wanted to. Her true dream, though, is to be a model, even, in her most secret and deep-seated fantasies, to be an escort. She yearns for adventure, excitement, and new men, and knows she’d be good at it; she’s quite flirtatious in her waitering job, but that fire within her was always snuffed out by ideas of who she was supposed to be, by the fear of what could happen if she actually took the plunge and attempted it, by the fact she never quite felt up to it.
The tide of her makeover, though, sweeps away all those inhibitions, and she starts pursuing modeling seriously. Taking the plunge, she learns and devotes herself to being the best model she can be; building her skill and burnishing her reputation, over time she breaks through enough for everything to fall into place, where she gets real jobs and starts earning real money. Not quite enough to give her her dream life, but it’s quite a boost; she stops thinking of herself as Bruna the waitress and starts thinking of herself as Bruna the fashion model.
It’s practically intoxicating to her, and this stokes enough passion in her to continue her self-improvement; always being a smart and curious girl, she pursues a self-directed education, learning all about literature, art history, classic movies, and high culture in general, seeking to become a refined girl. She deliberately cultivates more femininity by smiling all her smiles, crying all her tears, and immersing herself in reception to new pleasant sights and sensations.
She cultivates a more sensual and even erotic way of being too, attaching a nexus of classy sexuality to everything she does in life, little by little cultivating her allure and giving her a thrill she’d scarcely dreamed of before. With her newfound boost in finances she goes on some traveling, at last learning and, from time to time, enjoying skiing and horseback riding, and even adding an increasingly refined taste for wine and perfume to her rotation of hobbies.
Her diet has changed too, not because she wants or needs to lose or gain weight, but because she wants to take good care of herself, eating only whole healthy nutritious foods from now on, leading to her glowing up as a result, radiating a wholesome energy she didn’t know was possible for her to achieve before she really started upgrading herself. She touches on dancing, singing, playing instruments, painting, drawing, photography, acting, physical disciplines, writing, blogging, and cultivating pleasant feminine sensual experiences like candlelit rose-petal bubble baths.
Deep down she knows all this is really because she wants to be the classiest sexiest little darling she can be to feel up to escorting the way she wants to do it, and after building herself and her confidence she takes the plunge, and after a while she spends most of her life having a fun time on exciting adventures and getting paid handsomely for it by her men, a drastic upgrade from her old life where she had two boyfriends she didn’t feel much of a spark or a connection to anyway. Turns out Bruna just needed high-quality companionship.
The Story of Flavia
Our third and final girl is called Flavia. She’s not a glamour girl like Bruna or a stick-thin plain-jane like Ginger; no, Flavia has the opposite problem. She’s too fat! Flavia was not unattractive in her youth, but her appeal was from her effortless wholesome girl-next-door beauty, and she has let herself go after she got married to her husband. The spark dimmed to an ember in him over the years, but Flavia never thought it too important, since she had to work so hard in college and then work even harder when she became a nurse. Having always been physically strong, possessed of a strong stomach, a good enough brain for the training, and something of a goody-goodie who wants to help people, she always thought nursing was what she wanted to do.
But now that Flavia is more established in her career, she’s feeling more and more like it’s a humdrum boring job; she’s had enough of it. She’s also had enough of her being a total mess in appearance and demeanor, and knows and understands why she doesn’t make her husband hot like she used to. It gnaws at her; a change is in order.
A light makeover for Flavia would be losing weight, but not so much she becomes stick-thin; just enough to reveal that svelte figure underneath that once showed itself. This is primarily accomplished by eating less, taking a few pounds off each month, coming closer and closer to unveiling an hourglass figure. And she does have an hourglass! Flavia goes for heavier makeup, mostly emphasizing her doe eyes, a big part of why her husband fell for her in the first place. She styles her hair much more glamorously, her go-to style now being Gibson girl hair with ringlets tumbling down from the top, evoking Evelyn Nesbit’s style, a girl she always thought was so pretty and does bear a vague resemblance to.
Continuing with the Edwardian theme, I’d put her in the full Victorian and Edwardian package: cool gloves, face veils, and especially wide-brimmed feminine hats she’ll wear on an everyday basis. Conservative yet flattering dresses in bright vivid colors will define her look. Accessorize with statement necklaces and other pieces of jewelry with big gemstones; the idea is to look rich and elegant.
A moderate version would be for her to grow out her blonde hair a lot more (it’s shoulder-length to begin with) or even get hair extensions, so as to achieve a much more glamorous Gibson girl look with more ringlets! The conservative dresses could also become much more figure-hugging, especially after she reaches her target weight; adding on ribbons, bows, and flowers to her look day-to-day would also upgrade herself a lot.
The extreme version might involve some cosmetic surgery on her face, to make her prettier like she always wanted to be, eliminating some of her more glaring flaws, and some surgery on her figure, perhaps getting rid of any loose skin, firming up and expanding her breasts and buttocks, and tightening up her delectably soft and shapely midriff. She’s got the body to have a very voluptuous figure and make it look good; after all this she might end up looking and feeling even better than she did when she was a teenager!
As for her job, her makeover will make her feel more glamorous, her husband more passionate, and that makes both of them feel more motivated for her to throw herself into her passion for ballroom dancing, which she had been pursuing on the side for years. Feeling more confident, she takes a leap in skill, and starts to think she really could be something in that scene. A thought she had dismissed as a fantasy before suddenly cries out to be realized: she should own her own dance studio! She appreciates the glamour of travel and performance for what it is, but being a bit of a homebody and liking her local community and the idea of being a fixture in it, she knows what role in dance world she wants.
As part of her self-improvement plan, together with her husband she saves, invests, and plans diligently, as both of them are the diligent type, and when everything is in place they take the plunge, both quit their jobs, and they make it work. Flavia might not be as pretty as the likes of Bruna, but she’s got enough charm and style to turn the heads of the men who come into their studio and see her around. She gets even more attention after she has a baby with her husband; both of them were too harried and overworked before to contemplate bringing a child into the world, but even though they both still have to put in a lot of hours the wholesome life of running a business with a baby at your hip somehow doesn’t intimidate or depress them like downgrading to a single income or putting baby in some corporate daycare center did.
Conclusion
Well, at over 3000 words maybe I should turn all that into a book or something! Ha! But the point is that makeovers are both very good in and of themselves for many kinds of people and can jump-start a broader program of self-improvement. Making over your outer appearance stokes thoughts of making over your whole life; when you look different, and especially when you look better, possibilities of becoming someone better than you are you would never have otherwise considered cross your mind.
Every one of these girls develop a signature perfume scent, either something mass-market or, in the most luxe version, actually getting a custom-made perfume. Yes, believe it or not, there is such a thing as bespoke perfume. Of these girls it sounds like only Bruna will be able to afford anything that rich, but even less-luxe versions are far better than nothing.
All of these girls also go to the hairdresser, go the spa, get massages, and get makeup professionally applied a lot more, not to mention, in the heavy makeovers, getting their clothing custom-fit. Another aspect unmentioned is that each of these girls could change their eye color too with the use of contact lenses, and can even make them seem bigger through circle lenses and the strategic use of makeup.
Romanticizing your life is a fruitful avenue to explore for self-improvement, as is change in general. Travel more. Try new hobbies. Get a new nickname for yourself even! Change your life around; remodel and redecorate your living environment! Get a new car! Get a new house or apartment! Get a whole new life, really.
Our abilities are often limited, and even when we could do something in theory the trade-offs involved might just be too steep to contemplate; that’s sad, but that’s life in the early 21st century. Nevertheless, if instead of giving up on our dreams and our fantasies we tried to find ways to realize them if only in a small way we would all be much better off.
Never let anyone murder your dreams. Hold fast to them. They’re what make life worth living.