Racked: All Posts by Angela SerratoreThe National Shopping, Stores, and Retail Scene Bloghttps://cdn.vox-cdn.com/community_logos/52809/32x32.0..png2015-07-17T12:30:02-04:00https://www.racked.com/authors/angela-serratore/rss2015-07-17T12:30:02-04:002015-07-17T12:30:02-04:00Britney Spears Ruined My Catholic School Uniform
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<p>Britney Spears wanted <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-u5WLJ9Yk4">the video for</a> "...Baby, One More Time" to reflect the day-to-day lives of her fans, she said. A teenager who wanted to relate to other teenagers, she nixed the idea to have the song be set to a cartoon and instead suggested it happen in a high school. She'd be in detention, or study hall, bored by a stern teacher, and fantasize about dancing in the halls in front of a Greek chorus of fellow schoolgirls, all hoping to catch the eye of the cutest member of the basketball team. </p> <div class="float-right hang-right">
<p><q class="pullquote">The idea that the Catholic schoolgirl is sexy by accident is one that's hard to avoid.</q></p>
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<p>It's Catholic, the school, and Britney and her friends are dressed the part—pleated plaid skirts that reveal perfectly tanned, taut thighs; sheer white socks that rise to the knee; a crisp shirt knotted to reveal a strip of bare teenaged flesh. The shirt-knotting, Britney says, was her idea: "The outfits looked kind of dorky, so I was like, 'Let's tie up our shirts and be cute'."</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>Looking back, I want to tell young Britney she ought not work so hard to sell the concept, which I'd bet a dozen hours in chapel was dreamed up not by our teenaged dreamgirl but by a middle-aged male executive at Jive Records. The idea, though, that the Catholic schoolgirl is sexy by accident, is one that's hard to avoid. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>The clothes she wears—it's what they don't say that speak so loudly, no? The pleats in the skirt, the tightness of a shirt, the sameness of it makes you wonder what kind of girl she really is. What kinds of things she likes to do after church. Whether or not a uniform, a garment selected for her by some kind of moral authority, can really contain her.</span></p>
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<p dir="ltr">I started as a freshman at a co-ed Catholic high school a few months after teenaged Britney filled out her uniform in a way that caused America to collectively gasp and sigh. I was excited to start wearing a uniform. I'd begun to grow in the way teenaged girls do, and I didn't entirely know what to do with myself. Now, I'd be restricted to a polo shirt in white, grey, or navy, with the school logo emblazoned on the upper right-hand corner—that is to say, directly above my rapidly expanding chest—along with a pleated skirt worn with socks and sensible shoes. Together, these pieces represented an opting out of the most stressful parts of young womanhood. I didn't have to style myself, which meant my style didn't define me. I climbed out of my father's car on the first day nervous but certain that everyone else would look just like me, and that in this we'd be the same.</p>
<p dir="ltr">I was sorely mistaken.</p>
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<p>Catholics have always had a funny relationship with clothes. ‘Twas finery of the church, some say, that caused the Great Schism—how could the Pope have a direct line to God clothed in silks and laces that cost more than an average family's food supply for a year? In vaguely anti-Catholic 19th century America, priests and nuns were encouraged to dress like laypeople for fear of harassment by Protestants who thought Latin was a dark tongue.</p>
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<p><q class="pullquote">In wearing the same skirt, we humbly submit to the idea that we are all the same.</q></p>
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<p dir="ltr">Sources differ on when the idea that students ought to be clothed in the same threads emerged in Catholic schools, but the idea is floating around by the early 20th century. Historian Sally Dwyer-McNulty's <i>Common Threads: A Cultural History of Clothing in American Catholicism</i> examines the writings of priests and teachers throughout the 1920s espousing the utility of the uniform, especially for girls. The uniform is meant (and still is, at many non-Catholic schools that have adopted the uniform policy) to deemphasize class—if we're all wearing the same thing, we all know how much it costs, and that's that.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The other thing the uniform is meant to squash is vanity. How could one take pride in one's appearance if one's sisters in learning were dressed no better or no worse? In the herd, there is strength. In wearing the same skirt, we humbly submit to the idea that we are all the same.</p>
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<p dir="ltr">Back to my first day of school.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The first thing I notice is that my skirt seems to be longer than those of my classmates. I'm short, so at first I assume it's because, at thirteen, my legs haven't yet reached their full potential. As the day goes on, though, I know that isn't the answer. My classmates (many of whom, I should say, are just as new to Catholic school as I) look grown-up in their outfits. Their shirts are fitted where mine is loose, their pleats twirl to reveal skin above the knee while mine barely move. I didn't expect to look like Britney in the video, but I didn't expect to be the only one who didn't.</p>
<p>What I would soon learn is that, flying in the face of the whole ‘let's all look the same so we can worry about Christ and AP World History instead of our earthly bodies' business, no two uniforms were actually alike. Depending on the permissiveness of parents, skirts would be professionally hemmed to just barely conform to the fingertip rule—that is, standing up straight, arms at your side, the skirt must reach past the length of your longest finger. Those unlucky enough to have mothers and fathers who took uniforms seriously would simply roll up the waistband until they were satisfied with the shortness.</p>
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<p><q class="pullquote">I didn't expect to look like Britney in the video, but I didn't expect to be the only one who didn't.</q></p>
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<p><span>Shirts could be purchased in adult sizes or in children's, and a boys' extra-small could be counted on to show off curves more efficiently than anything from the women's section. Knee socks, completing the look, were really only necessary a few months out of the year at my Southern California school, but the lack of that particular erotically charged accessory, during the warmer months, was made up for by the trend of wearing socks so low they didn't show at all, meaning from a distance all you saw were bare legs stretching, it seemed, to infinity.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr">Mercifully, my father caved on the skirt hemming, though I was never allowed to go as short as I'd have liked. My shirts, though, stayed appropriately un-molded to my body, and my socks were either to the knee but somehow always sliding down, or sensibly covering my ankles.</p>
<p dir="ltr">I didn't feel invisible, like the idea of a uniform had promised me I would. I felt dowdy, and immature, and like the boring stepsister to the glamorous squad of girls who quickly established themselves as the most popular and the most likely to get good-naturedly ribbed for uniform infractions by teachers who preternaturally understood which students were popular and which weren't.</p>
<p dir="ltr">I was more vain than I've been in the ten years since I left—a full face of makeup every day, an hour in the morning to blow-dry my frizzy hair. I agonized over the gulf between the way I looked and the way my classmates did. We were wearing the exact same thing, I'd think. Why do I look like this while she looks like that?</p>
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<p dir="ltr">I might not've been able to put so fine a point on it in 1999, but by ‘that', I mean sexy. Sexual. Hot.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Because that's the other thing about Catholic school uniforms, the thing I haven't said yet, the reason Britney's video was and is a piece not of pop-culture history but of pop-culture iconography. It's a sex thing.</p>
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<p><q class="pullquote"><span>The porny schoolgirl is oblivious to her charms while those charms literally spill out of her clothes.</span> </q></p>
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<p>Most of the men I've dated, upon learning I wore a uniform and had, just once, been cited for a too-short skirt, inquired about the current whereabouts of said skirt. And can I blame them? ‘Schoolgirl' is its own category on pornographic websites—I tried, in vain, to find some kind of estimate for how many clips feature the trope, but ten pages into a Google search the only links appearing were ones I certainly couldn't click on at work.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The porny schoolgirl is oblivious to her charms while those charms literally spill out of her clothes. She's been bad, and she's sorry, but, eager to please, will do anything if you don't send her to the principal's office (unless we're already in the principal's office, in which case all bets are off). The skirt and the blouse and the socks—they all come together to represent a sexuality that is just barely contained, just waiting to be unleashed, mostly for the benefit of the man doing the unleashing.</p>
<p dir="ltr">That, for a teenager, is a lot of cultural baggage to carry.</p>
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<p dir="ltr">If uniforms only do what they try to prevent, how did we (I) look to our male classmates? In the years just before the ubiquity of Internet porn, were they seeing our uniforms as signifiers of a certain kind of unbridled, bossy sex, or were they just admiring the changes summer vacation had brought to the bodies of the class of 2003?</p>
<p dir="ltr">Jason*, who dated a string of girls I envied and remained wholly unaware of the crush I'd nursed, says it was the latter though admits to thinking of the former more and more now that high school is over. "I think sometimes about how lucky we were—the skirts you guys wore were shorter than anything that would be allowed at a normal school," he said. "There was enough to look at without thinking too much about it, you know?"</p>
<p dir="ltr">"Of course I see it in porn now," says Chris, who graduated before I did. "I can't lie and say it's not hot. But it might have weirded me out to see it when I was actually seeing girls like that dressed every day."</p>
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<p><q class="pullquote">Most of us were at least peripherally aware that our uniforms were appealing to adult men in a way we couldn't quite understand.</q></p>
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<p dir="ltr">And what of my female classmates, the girls I'd envied so much? Most of us were at least peripherally aware that our uniforms were appealing to adult men in a way we couldn't quite understand. There was what we saw on television, sure, but there were also the whistles directed at those who didn't change into jeans before walking to the mall after class.</p>
<p><span></span></p>
<p><span>My friend Catherine was (and is) imperiously tall and always invited to parties with beer, but she deigned to hang out with me anyway. When I was needling her to answer questions for this essay, she reminded me of the week we were all forbidden from walking down a particular block near campus because a flasher had startled a couple of sophomores on their way to first period.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr">Sarah, who played a sport that required her to be awake before 7am, told me that a man who told her he was an agent (it was Los Angeles, but this is still a lazy line) looked her up and down one morning at Starbucks and suggested she play hooky with him. He'd write her a note to give to her teacher.</p>
<p dir="ltr">I can't not think about the actual adult men on our campus. I never saw, with my own eyes, anything inappropriate, but there were whispers. Teachers who seemed to take a little too much interest in skirt lengths stopping pretty girls and measuring the inches between kneecap and hem. Coaches who showed up at weekend parties and funneled beer alongside sixteen-year-olds.</p>
<p dir="ltr">One teacher was, after we graduated, intimate with a girl I haven't spoken to in years but think of fondly. She was eighteen, and her diploma was in hand, so it wasn't illegal. Had he noticed her when it was, though, sitting in a desk in his classroom, taking notes during his lecture?</p>
<p dir="ltr">Finding out what exists underneath a uniform is someone's fantasy. Was it his?</p>
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<p>I wore the same thing every day for four years and I still don't know if it did me any good.</p>
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<p dir="ltr">I kept wearing my skirt even after girls were given the privilege of pants. The ones sold at the uniform store were itchy, and the legs flared.</p>
<p dir="ltr">I'd be lying if I said I hadn't also become attached to my uniform, to the idea of it, though probably not in the way it was intended. I wanted, you see, to look exceptional. To somehow imbue the garments with the essence of my developing grown-up personality so that if someone interesting wandered into my Christian Principles class, they'd scan the room and know instantly that I was the one worth eyeing.</p>
<p dir="ltr">My childhood home is mere blocks from the high school I attended, and sometimes when I'm home I'll see girls leaving for the day. Their hair is better than mine ever was, probably because of Instagram, but they're still wearing what I wore, the skirt and the polo shirt and, if it's cold, the matching sweater.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Is it worth it, to dress them all the same? Do clothes actually have anything to do with how kids learn, with how they love and hate and envy each other all at the same time? I wore the same thing every day for four years and I still don't know if it did me any good.</p>
<p dir="ltr">I do, however, still have a neatly-folded uniform tucked away in the back of my closet. It's a curio, an artifact from another time. I keep meaning to throw it away.</p>
<p dir="ltr">I can't.</p>
https://www.racked.com/2015/7/17/8980733/catholic-school-uniformsAngela Serratore2015-05-13T13:00:02-04:002015-05-13T13:00:02-04:00In Praise of the Department Store Restaurant
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<img alt="Photo: Getty" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/WoQyTtzroQOQQuvr-xa0qbV67yg=/0x0:6656x4992/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/46321842/463377775.0.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Photo: Getty</figcaption>
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<p class="c-entry-disclaimer"><i>Racked is no longer publishing. Thank you to everyone who read our work over the years. The archives will remain available here; for new stories, head over to Vox.com, where our staff is covering consumer culture for <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods">The Goods by Vox</a>. You can also see what we’re up to by <a href="https://vox.com/goods-newsletter">signing up here</a>.</i></p>
<p>Sometimes, when I'm feeling unmoored, I find myself wandering the specialty departments at Bloomingdale's. There are few phrases in the English language more repulsive than "retail therapy," but I won't be the first (or last) woman to admit that surrounding myself with wholly unnecessary consumer goods does, at the very least, clear my head a bit. </p> <p dir="ltr">It's never anything extravagant I want to buy, and it's always something that allows me to advance whatever fantasy life I've imagined for myself that particular week—a lacy bra that might peek out of a dress, a candle that will make my living room smell like Vermont. These things help, much as I wish otherwise.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>What helps most, though, is an Arnold Palmer. Then a bowl of soup, then a chicken-salad sandwich on sourdough toast, all consumed at a table for one at the Bloomingdale's restaurant, known in most branch store locations as 59th & Lex. To pause in the middle of shopping and eat classic American fare—burgers, Chinese chicken salads, a dish of frozen yogurt for dessert—is restorative and indulgent, comforting and fantastical. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>It's a place to pause and just be amidst the organized chaos of all the things I might own, and also a place to cast off consumer anxiety, the terror of hearing "That doesn't come in your size" or "This lipstick is from France and you'll never pronounce the name correctly so don't even try."</span></p>
<p dir="ltr">Also, nothing on the menu costs more than fifteen dollars.</p>
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<p><q class="pullquote">Department store restaurants allowed middle-class women to pause and refresh themselves in a manner that was, above all, civilized.</q></p>
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<p dir="ltr">For years Macy's and Wanamaker's (RIP) fought over who could claim to have opened the first restaurant inside a department store. The shops themselves started appearing in American cities in the mid-19th century, a place to serve the purchasing needs (and wants) of a new class of women—not rich enough to see private French dressmakers, but wealthy enough to want to turn buying a new dress into an event. Afternoon luxury, you might call it: The indulgence is found and paid for and everyone's home for supper.</p>
<p>Department store restaurants allowed middle-class women in the throes of consumer ecstasy to pause and refresh themselves in a manner that was, above all, civilized. Since the department store was essentially a feminine space, there could be no harm in dining in its restaurant with other women, or, if one was feeling especially brave, alone (preferably surrounded by full shopping bags).</p>
<p dir="ltr">The food was fancy but not overly so—consomme, tongue sandwiches, and delicate fruit salads all appear on a 1901 Macy's menu—and nothing served would render a woman incapable of continuing to shop after she'd finished. It allowed for a minor expansion of the consumer fantasy; diners didn't have to leave the store, and could finish the meal in less than an hour. But it was more special than going home for lunch, just like buying a pair of silk stockings in a department store in the city was infinitely more special than buying them at the drugstore in town.</p>
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<p dir="ltr">The story of department stores is, by the middle of the twentieth century, invariably tied up with the story of shopping malls. Malls encouraged middle-class women who lived in the suburbs to stay there: why venture into a dirty, crowded city when just around the corner was an expanse of clean, brightly lit stores?</p>
<p>Malls were, and are, usually anchored by a Macy's, or a Nordstrom, or (in certain neighborhoods) a Neiman Marcus or a Saks, but are they really the draw? The mall closest to my childhood home in California has 72 stores. Rather than encourage me to stay inside one of them all day, the layout beckons me toward the middle, passing by windows selling jeans, dresses for teenagers, stuffed animals for children. At the center, of course, is the food court. The first food court (or is it Food Court?) appeared in Paramus, New Jersey, in 1974. It was no longer glamorous to park inside a stuffy tearoom next to the lingerie department. <span>People still got hungry when they shopped, but now, thanks to benevolent developers, they had options.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr">The last mall food court I was in had, if I counted correctly, twenty-one different food stalls, yet the feel of the place was singular. The ubiquitous smell of Auntie Anne's soft pretzels, the ubiquitous sounds of teenagers (malls are for teenagers, of course) using the space to practice at grown-upness.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The last time I was in one I ordered a bowl of orange-flavored chicken and white rice with a fountain Diet Coke from Panda Express. I sat a table by myself and tried to read, just like I do at Bloomingdale's, but it was different. Different because it was noisy, different because the food, while delicious, left me stuffed before I was even done.</p>
<p dir="ltr">I'd gone to the mall that day to buy a dress for a college friend's wedding, one I was dreading attending. In every dressing-room I looked in the mirror sulkily and, MSG seeping out of my pores, I wondered how I'd made such a terrible mistake. If I'd gone to Bloomingdale's and eaten a Niçoise salad I'd have been relaxed, serene. The kind of woman who never spills anything on her dress, and radiates goodwill towards former friends.</p>
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<p><q class="pullquote">I wondered how I'd made such a terrible mistake. If I'd gone to Bloomingdale's and eaten a Niçoise salad I'd have been relaxed, serene.</q></p>
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<p dir="ltr">Is shopping a chore? Is it work? Is it stressful? Is food consumed during a shopping trip food consumed because the body always needs fuel, or is it somehow different?</p>
<p dir="ltr">Answering yes to any or all of these questions turns my face red-hot with shame, but of course it is. Everything you pick up ultimately asks you to question how beautiful you think you are, and whether the thing you are holding will increase or decrease that beauty. (I'm willing to admit that there are non-neurotic shoppers who feel none of this. I am not one of them.) That's the rub of conspicuous consumption, isn't it? That everyone has to watch you consume and so you, in turn, have to think about how you'll look doing it?</p>
<p dir="ltr">The best department store restaurants manage to be spaces where this tension can be soothed with a salve of toast and jam, lemonade and miniature fruit tarts. In a space full of shoppers, I'm alone with my thoughts because I know every other woman (and sometimes my father, who loves a good Club sandwich) is lost in the same kind of purchasing reverie I am.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The restaurant takes care of us all.</p>
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<p dir="ltr">The other thing about department store restaurants is that they are, for better or for worse, kind of old-fashioned. The average age of the diners at my preferred location seems to be well north of retirement, and it is most crowded at 11:30am, for lunch.</p>
<p dir="ltr">I suppose it makes sense, then, that brands are trying to reimagine in-store dining as something a bit hipper, a bit more expensive. The New York Bloomingdale's location boasts a cafe attached to the celebrity chef David Burke, where balsamic reduction terrorizes perfectly ordinary plates and instead of BLTs, diners are encouraged to eat things like Duck Confit Banh Mi.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Macy's in Herald Square used to operate a restaurant called The Cellar, made even better for the fact that it was in the luggage department and there was no cell phone reception. It closed earlier this year. The store now runs an Italian restaurant I've been afraid of ever since I looked up the menu online and discovered they specialize in a brunch item called "hangover pizza."</p>
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<p dir="ltr">I'm going to California in a few weeks, within walking distance of my favorite 59th & Lex. It's been a strange winter. My anxiety has been heightened, and I've spent more time than usual fretting about my appearance as a stand-in for all the other things I can't fret about openly.</p>
<p dir="ltr">On the second or third day of my visit, I imagine, I'll walk to the mall in search of face masks, sandals, pencil skirts. I'll wander and touch and try things on, wondering if each object will make any kind of a difference, good or bad. <span>Eventually I'll get hungry and set myself down, halfway between Housewares and Intimates, and, for forty-five minutes, be cocooned in the spoils of capitalism, watching the finest mid-late-century casual cuisine arrive in front of me. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span></span><span>I'll tuck into my sandwich and, with the first bite, take my place in the long line of women who've sought something they were looking for and decided, at last, to have lunch instead.</span></p>
https://www.racked.com/2015/5/13/8595171/department-store-restaurantsAngela Serratore2015-01-27T12:00:43-05:002015-01-27T12:00:43-05:00I Was a Bratty Teen Beauty Store Employee, and I'm Sorry
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<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/p7IAyhqyjuFMkWHB-8vo2pkmCUM=/21x0:1377x1017/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/45646918/FF_CosmeticTeenPout_Final.0.jpg" />
<figcaption><a href='http://fahrenfeingold.prosite.com/'>Illustration by Fahren Feingold for Racked</a></figcaption>
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<p class="c-entry-disclaimer"><i>Racked is no longer publishing. Thank you to everyone who read our work over the years. The archives will remain available here; for new stories, head over to Vox.com, where our staff is covering consumer culture for <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods">The Goods by Vox</a>. You can also see what we’re up to by <a href="https://vox.com/goods-newsletter">signing up here</a>.</i></p>
<p>"Welcome to Beauty Connection.* Can I help you find anything."</p> <p>It was supposed to be a question, my greeting to customers, but in my desultory teenaged tone it was a bored statement. I hoped shoppers would pick up on my disdain for the whole concept of going out into the world and announcing publicly an interest in looking beautiful. Maybe that would inspire them to browse on their own. But the brunette woman who'd just walked in swinging a Marc Jacobs bag (bright purple!) and talking on a cell phone (also bright purple!) made a beeline for a display of shockingly expensive at-home peels, and I knew if she wanted to buy one I'd have to fetch it from behind the counter.</p>
<p>Sidling closer and eavesdropping on her conversation, I pieced together a few crucial facts: She was an actress, she'd just come from an audition, it hadn't gone well, and the primary reason she felt it hadn't gone well was because she was resolutely over twenty-five and the part was that of a high school cheerleader.</p>
<p>She hung up the phone and picked up the peel featured most prominently in the display, exactly the color and texture of algae. The label, if either of us had bothered to read it, would have boasted that it contained the highest amount of glycolic acid one could legally purchase outside a dermatologist's office. Strong enough to keep a face tight and red and shiny for a week.</p>
<p>"This any good?"</p>
<p>I looked at her purse. Her fingernails, square and French-manicured. Her sweater, purposefully shredded and then covered in sequins in what I imagine was a nod to the fact that it was July.</p>
<p>"Oh, I've never used one of those," I laughed. "I'm way too young!"</p>
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<p>I'd gotten the job at Beauty Connection not on my own merits or initiative but through a friend of my mother's. Having little else to do that summer, I could only put up halfhearted protests, and by the middle of June I was spending four days a week ringing up transactions, dusting shelves of nail clippers, and hoping, each shift, to convey to at least one person that even though I worked in a beauty supply store, I didn't work in a beauty supply store; that in fact I was merely taking a break from my chief occupation of trying to become an intellectual.</p>
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<p><q class="pullquote">There would be more people like me once I got to college, I was certain, and they were not the kind of person one was likely to meet at Beauty Connection.</q></p>
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<p>After work I'd spend hours poring over college websites, trying to decide where to apply and what those decisions might say about me. Did I want to be an English major at Brown? History at Wellesley? Philosophy at Swarthmore? I printed out a copy of the Common Application and pretended to work on it tirelessly during my lunch breaks, explaining to my coworkers with a heavy sigh that this was just the beginning—each of the schools I'd apply to would also have a supplementary application with as many as seven questions on it!</p>
<p>When I wasn't conspicuously planning my future, I was carrying around very heavy books, hoping someone would notice and perhaps wonder about me later, the serious young woman who sold loofahs with her nose charmingly buried in—my face flushes hot to admit this now—Infinite Jest. There would be more people like me once I got to college, I was certain, and they were not the kind of person one was likely to meet at Beauty Connection. In college, I'd read and write and have hair that shined in the sun and cheeks that flushed in the New England cold and a collection of large, unflattering wool sweaters through which handsome graduate students would still be able to sense a full and inviting décolletage.</p>
<p>Of course, none of my coworkers ever asked me to talk about David Foster Wallace, probably because they were too busy teaching me how to use the credit card machine for the hundredth time. Customers didn't much care about my inner life, either, and I wonder if it's maybe because I did my very best to make sure each of them knew their questions about what level toner you have to use to avoid brassiness or whether an at-home pumpkin enzyme peel will leave you red-red or just regular red were far, far beneath me. The vulnerabilities they exposed—and that's exactly what one does when one goes to a place like Beauty Connection and asks for help: exposes vulnerabilities—were shocking to me, and instead of choosing to be compassionate, I chose to act like a teenager, which is to say I chose to be cruel.</p>
<p>Beauty Connection wasn't (isn't, I should say, for it's still open) Sephora, which had opened the year before at the mall I passed on my walks to work. The dollars I've spent at that store in the last 10 years (which surely amount to a figure beyond my counting capacity) were (are) dollars spent chasing a fantasy, one in which my face becomes a soft canvas and each 24 dollar lipstick the most refined painter's brush. It's an easy fantasy to chase because it starts with the baseline assumption that you already are beautiful. There's nothing to correct, only things to enhance.</p>
<div class="float-left hang-left"><q class="pullquote">I was afraid that kindness would mark me as a fellow soldier in the fight against physical imperfection, when all I wanted was to be so naturally beautiful I'd never have to ask someone to help me look better.</q></div>
<p>There's something to Sephora's grouping of products by brand—sure, it's practical, but it also means that even the most embarrassing of items gets to be surrounded by its lovelier siblings. Thigh reducing cream next to lemony shower oil, thinning hair agents next to jasmine deep conditioners—the things you need, even if they're things you despair at needing in the first place, are hidden amongst tiny luxuries. There are no problems to solve, and the salespeople don't know your darkest, vainest secrets because they're not salespeople or even fairy godmothers—they're paid to be fun, friendly, and anonymous.</p>
<p>There's no 'Acne' section at Sephora. No one ever walks in and asks one of the futuristically-costumed employees where they keep the mustache bleach.</p>
<p>Beauty Connection had seven different kinds of mustache bleach, plus a waxing station in the back. It resembled nothing so much as a hardware store, and every day customers would rush in with emergencies chemical and physical and embarrassing. They'd think nothing of asking me what to do about hair dyed the wrong shade of red, or a unibrow that wouldn't stay gone, or how to make sure crow's feet weren't visible under strip-club lights.</p>
<p>I treated them contemptuously because I marveled at their ability to be so naked in their assertion that what they looked like was something that demanded time and money and attention, and because I was afraid that kindness would mark me as a fellow soldier in the fight against physical imperfection, when all I wanted was to be so naturally beautiful I'd never have to ask someone to help me look better.</p>
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<p>After school started in the fall I cut my hours to two evenings a week, then one, and, dreading a winter break stuck working the holiday busy season, I quit entirely, convincing every adult I knew that studying AP Economics AND working a mind-boggling 10 hours a week was simply weighing too heavy on my small shoulders.</p>
<p>I did think about Beauty Connection in college, though. I thought about Beauty Connection when I learned that hair really only gleams in the sun if it's been treated with shine spray, that New England cold doesn't so much flush a face as chap it (a chap requiring moisturizer at the exact right intersection of gentleness and strength, I might add), that thick sweaters are pulled off just as easily as delicate ones (and that the lustful glances of graduate students are more to be dreaded than solicited). Some of these things (the part about graduate students in particular) one has to discover through trial and error, but others were problems I solved by wandering into beauty supply stores not unlike the one I'd worked in and laying bare my skin and my anxiety to women who were knowledgable and kind—women who were everything teenaged me hadn't been.</p>
<p>And I thought about Beauty Connection when I saw a picture in a magazine and realized that the actress I'd indirectly called old had been in a movie. When I did the math based on the profile of her I found on the Internet, I realized that on the day she'd come in looking for a peel she'd been struggling not just with her career but with her boyfriend at the time, James Franco. I felt especially guilty that day.</p>
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<p>Home last month, ten years since my employment at Beauty Connection, I wandered in while I waited for some prescriptions from the nearby Rite-Aid. I pretended to smell some very expensive candles and wondered if I should buy one of those donuts that ballerinas use to make perfect buns. Casting my eyes around for an employee, I exchanged nervous smiles with a beautiful woman with mermaid-blue hair who stopped organizing a display of lip balms and sweetly asked if I needed any help.</p>
<p>"I'm so dry," I sighed. "Look how red this patch of skin is! It's scaly, almost! It's embarrassing!"</p>
<p>"Aw, you poor thing!" It's definitely the season for that, she told me sagely. "Let's look for a peel to get all that dead skin gone. I'm sure we have something that'll help."</p>
<p><i>*name changed, though very lazily</i></p>
https://www.racked.com/2015/1/27/7997785/beauty-store-salespersonAngela Serratore