:: All that glitters ::

Like most modern Eves of my time, I have lost every inkling of what it means to be natural. I have coloured and treated and straightened and waxed off most of my untamed feminity; these days the word natural doesn't seem too out of place in a bottle of peroxide, and I'm more than happy to convince myself that purple eyelids, glitter on the decolletagé, pencil-thin eyebrows, nails the colour of dried blood―all these, and more―are but symbols of modern womanhood.

'Woman's lib?' I remember the smirk on SY's face when she presented my birthday present in all its push-up, French-laced glory, 'for-fucking-get it.'

'I broke a date to be here,' I beamed at Bec, my trusty hairstylist. Not a date by your girlie mag standards; I had made plans with Col to meet his best friend ('A wanker of a Spaniard,' Col had gushed over the phone) José, but it appears that Don Juan preferred chicks to chicken rice, and I had no wish to wind down another insane work day looking at this messed-up world from the bottom of an empty beer bottle. ('You have reformed!' Col had wailed, but for this I have no regrets).

'It's about time!' Bec said grimly, parting my hair with a deft flick of her pretty wrists. The kinks of my natural curls showed with their vicious vivacity. As she gathered her arsenal of tools to treat, neutralise and straighten my hair into the sleek, chic 'do, into that salon-perfection that always seemed to border on clinical, I stared long and hard at the mirror and wondered, not for the first time, who the fuck was the person staring back at me.

It's not a question dragged kicking and screaming from the twenty-something existentialistic funk we're all cursed to go through; it's just a question. The white light of the salon washed like astringent over me, and my reflection was caught like a microscopic rhetoric on the large mirror. All of me―all―stared back with their hollow realities: the scars, the dimply skin, the purple half-moons of my late night responsibilities kissing the bottom rim of my eyes.

In my reflection, I am the beauty and the beast; there was nothing to congratulate and nothing to spit on, nothing to love and nothing to despise. I don't care to be labeled―I care to be known. There is nothing more intimate than showing your scars and the way your skin creases and crinkles the way skin on real women do―I'm not a mannequin, and I've never wanted to be one, but I understand the paper-cut allure of the women glittering in the glossy pages of Vogue. Yet I can never stop to hope that someday my scars will be loved along with my sass, even if I look in the mirror and see nothing but that overweight 15-year-old adolescent.

Another flashback of SY―she's as chic as she's caustic―'We want to be them, and the boys want to do them, so we're all fucked by this,' she said, jabbing a perfectly-manicured nail at some hapless magazine with Uma Thurman flaunting those bronzed, sculptured lines of her lithe body in an LV ad.

'You're pretty darn perfect yourself,' I'd replied, running an envious eye over her slight Oriental frame.

She curled her lips up into a mirthless grin. 'He's not going to leave his wife, is he?'

I turned my attention now to Bec; her tired eyes hinted at something more than physical exhaustion. Those long, lovely locks that she had lovingly permed for her husband of two years have been snipped off―she now has a spunky pixie-cut that was adorably girlish, but those eyes of hers, hued with green and golden glitter, were undeniably wary.

Womanly woes―our beasts of burden, I thought. 'Something wrong?' I asked her.

She didn't meet my eyes and she went right on combing her slender fingers through my hair, smoothing the treatment cream onto my scalp with polished practice. And then: 'I found a condom in his wallet,' she said.

Her words hung heavy in the air, limp and languid. I met her eyes in the mirror. 'And?'

'I cut off one corner as a marking; if he uses it then I'd know.' She shrugged. 'Men. All bastards, all looking for thrills, all wanting the next affair to happen round the corner. Bastards.'

My own conscience tingled with disquiet. I glanced again at my reflection and wondered why the woman in the mirror makes the sort of choices that she does, why she's excited about the illicit, why she cares for someone who doesn't have the capacity to care. Who are you?

Modern Eves and our modern pain: our garden of Eden is planted with forbidden fruits of all kinds, and the most sinful serpent is nothing more or less than our own vanity, which we would all later learn cannot take away betrayal, and cannot account for any other truth than the peroxide promise of store-bought beauty.

'Ash highlights?' asked Bec, while blow-drying my hair. 'It'll give you some colour,'

'No thanks,' I said, thinking of the red and the blue of the biggest chink in my armour. 'I think I have enough.'