Why should I wear make-up?

Yesterday I was dismayed to find an article on the BBC Ouch Disability blog entitled, 'How do blind people put on their make-up?'. The first problem I have with this article is its title. This apparently innocent question in fact positions 'blind people' as curious objects with even curiouser habits. It invites the sighted reader to marvel at their 'innovative ways of doing daily chores' and seems to encourage the kind of inquisitive staring which comes from most people's total ignorance of what it is like to be a blind person in a sighted world.

(In fact the article's title is misleading. The piece does give some good advice on how to apply make-up by touch and I'm sure that some people will find it useful.)

The main problem I have with this article comes from what it does not say, rather than what it does.Throughout the article there is an unspoken assumption that wearing make-up is both important and necessary. It is what 'normal', 'successful' women do. Apparently, it is only whilst wearing make-up that women can 'look their best'!

I do not like make-up. I used to wear it regularly as a teenager (blame peer pressure) but now I probably wear it only once or twice a year, on very special occasions like birthday parties, weddings and funerals. I wear it on such occasions not because I want to 'look my best' but because I understand that it is a social convention to make an effort for significant life events. I wear it as a sign of respect, a sign that I have noted the momentousness of the occasion.

The main reason I do not like make-up is because it is dishonest. It covers up your flaws and helps you pretend to be something you are not. It is also shallow. It says I care how I look. I care how people see me. I want people to judge me by my appearance rather than by who I really am.

My face is far from perfect. My eyes are more like cats' eyes than human eyes. But I am proud of the way I look. I refuse make-up for the same reason that I refused to wear cosmetic contact lenses. It would be deceitful to artificially enhance my complexion; it would seem like I was ashamed of my appearance.

Our obsession with make-up is in fact an obsession with how we look and how we are seen. So perhaps it is understandable that I don't like make-up. After all, I can't see peoples' faces well enough to notice all those little imperfections that they may or may not be hiding. I value people for their spirit, their mind, their sense of humour. I don't care (or even know) if my friends wear make-up.

As a manifestation of our desire to look better than we are, make-up is an example of our privileging of the sense of sight. By caring more about how people look than how they sound, smell or feel, make-up wearers reinforce society's misconception that sight is the most valuable sense. But it is precisely this over-valuing of sight which encourages sighted people to see blindness as a tragedy. This article's no doubt well-intentioned assumption that blind people should wear make-up to boost their self-esteem, in fact ironically reasserts the very supremacy of sight which causes blind people to feel so bad about themselves in the first place.

What I See when I look in the Mirror

According to its press release, the What I See Project is 'a global online platform that recognises and amplifies women's voices'. I was delighted to be asked to be part of this fascinating project, but I was also worried by the project's apparent emphasis on the visual. As I say in my video reflection, modern society's obsession with how we look has the unintended consequence of privileging sight over all the other senses. This in turn has the nasty effect of turning blindness into a tragedy. 

I have found that society's obsession with the misery of blindness makes it very difficult for the blind and the partially blind to feel happy and confident about themselves. When pity is the prevailing emotion you encounter in strangers, it is easy to think of yourself as a victim. Self-pity is a destructive state of mind; it leads to low self-esteem and depression. But until society stops pitying the blind, how will the blind learn to stop pitying themselves?

I want to use my part in the What I See project to encourage women to think critically about our relationship with sight. Why do we care what we see in the mirror? Why is appearance to crucial to us? Do we really learn important details about a person from how they look to us? My face-blindness means I cannot recognise my family, friends and colleagues by their facial features. Instead I recognise them by their general shape, their unique style and their voice. This can have its disadvantages but it also has its uses. It constantly reminds me that we are much more than what we appear to be: we have experiences, history, memories which are not necessarily visible on our surface. As another contributor to the What I See project, Karen Morris at Beyond the Bathroom Scale reminds us, bodily appearance is overrated. Karen writes eloquently about the need to embrace the reality of how our bodies look here.

The communicator videos and ambassador profiles on the What I See webpage are reassuringly resistant to the purely visual. It turns out that I needn't have worried. Most women see much more than their surface appearance when they look in the mirror. But society at large is still obsessed with sight. Hopefully this will change in the wake of this exciting project.

Upload a video describing what you see when you look in the mirror and you might win an invitation to the What I See launch event at the Science Museum on October 1st.

Cooking Blind

I was making some flapjacks the other day when my husband found me sitting on the kitchen floor with my left ear turned towards the open oven door. When he asked me what I was doing I explained that I was "listening to see if they were ready". He was amazed that I judge the readiness of food by what it sounds like; I was amazed that it has taken him 10 years to notice my way of cooking.

When I was a child I was scared of cooking. I was forever being told to take care of sharp knives and hot ovens by my understandably over-protective mother. And at school I remember being given a D- for Cookery because my efforts never looked as presentable as my peers' and my workspace always looked like a bomb had hit it.

Perhaps I would have been a more confident cook if my teachers had privileged the non-visual elements of cookery. Who cares what the food looks like as long as it tastes good? My cakes never look perfect but they are (almost) always delicious. And as someone who spends her life arguing against myths of beauty and symmetry, surely I should be the first to celebrate the 'different' appearance of my culinary creations.

Recently I have realised that despite cookery books' tendency to emphasise the visual nature of cooking through references to the desired colour and consistency, smell, touch, taste and hearing are in fact all I really need. I can tell whether a sauce is thickening by the way the spoon feels, and if a cake is ready by how springy it is. I listen for the sound of bubbling on the hob, under the grill and in the oven and always know if I've misjudged things when the smoke alarm goes off. Since I've started wearing glasses, they steam up horribly whenever I am leaning over a hot stove and my eyes water terribly whenever I peel an onion. I've tried all the old remedies, but have decided that chopping onions glasses-less and with my eyes closed is the only way to go. This is much easier and safer than it sounds: touch is all you need to feel the difference between skin and onion; in fact working out which layers to peel off with my fingers makes cooking a much more sensual experience. I've been chopping blind for a few months now and still have all my fingers intact.

Cakes and pasta are all very well, but meat is a different matter. I haven't yet worked out how to tell if a chicken is safely roasted without sighted help. And I'd worry about serving my children any kind of meat that I wasn't sure had been properly cooked. Much as I like to check the progress of my meals by having a quick nibble, food hygiene dictates that I shouldn't really snack on half-raw pork. So when I do cook with meat I tend to go for mince or well chopped pieces which I can be sure have been thoroughly cooked. I think I'll leave the more inventive meat cooking to others. After all, isn't that what restaurants are for?

Superhumans at the Wellcome Collection

Lord Sebastian Coe was right when he said that the success of the London 2012 Paralympic Games means 'we will never think of disability the same way'. Outmoded notions of 'normality', 'beauty' and 'perfection' have been shattered, or at least called into question, by the sheer diversity of the elite bodies competing during the Games.

Oscar Pistorius's Blades

Shaun Botterill, Getty Images

The controversy over the 'Cheetah' blades used by T 44 sprinters Pistorius and Oliveira at the Paralympics brought the issue of 'normality' to prime-time television. The prosthetic running legs used by these athletes are designed for their optimum performance. Unlike early prosthetics - such as those produced for the Thalidomide children in the sixties - Pistorius's legs do not try to blend in or 'pass' as actual legs. They privilege functionality over 'normality', announcing rather than hiding Pistorius's difference from the 'norm'. As such they force us to question why we hold the 'norm' in such high regard. Why should disabled people feel compelled to hide their differences behind artificial replicas of a perfect body part? Why shouldn't a children's television presenter have one arm? Why would contact lenses be used for cosmetic reasons to hide a deformed eye?

The Superhuman show at the Wellcome Collection demonstrates that human beings (both able-bodied and disabled) have been enhancing their bodies for thousands of years. In a provocative exhibition which includes a bronze statue of Icarus, an iphone, packs of Viagra, false teeth, eyes and noses, films about cosmetic surgery and details of how Thalidomide children refused clunky prosthetics in favour of their stumps, we are asked to rethink the ethics of enhancement and the reasons why we feel the need to strive towards a bodily perfection which rarely, if ever, exists in nature.

Superhuman is on at the Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London until 16 October 2012.

Changing the Face of Disfigurement

Yesterday I saw a cinema advert that will stay with me longer than the film I watched afterwards. A man with a badly scarred face is sitting in a car. Outside it is dark and rainy. He is watching a house. A pretty woman enters the house. She is alone. She goes upstairs and starts cooking dinner. The man in the car can see her through the window. She doesn't know he is watching her. The music she is listening to on the radio is the same music that the man is listening to in the car. She pours herself a glass of red wine. The sound of the door knocker startles her. She goes downstairs and opens the door cautiously. She sees the man with the badly scarred face and stares at him in horror. If you want to see what happens next, watch the advert here.

What did you think was going to happen next? This ad is part of campaign for face equality on film. it is fighting against the ease with which the film industry uses facial disfigurement to represent evil. When a character with a disfigured face appears on screen, he or she is almost always a baddie. Cinema is incredibly lazy in the ways  it uses bodily appearance. Anything which departs from the perfect Hollywood body generally becomes part of the character's essence. But facial disfigurement is only skin deep: it doesn't change the way a person loves, laughs or thinks. How can the facially disfigured expect to be treated equally in the street, at school,  at work, or on the beach when there are no positive images of disfigurement at the cinema?

As the Face Equality on Film website points out: "these long-held and inaccurate beliefs are completely at odds with the reality for most people with disfigurements - who are lawyers, teachers, comedians, DIY lovers, parents, feisty teenagers, doting grandparents. They worry about their children, love cooking programmes, have affairs, worry about the rent, dye their hair, hate commuting - just as other characters do who are portrayed on the big screen."

This advert was shown at the cinema. But perhaps it should also be shown behind the scenes. For it is only when casting directors, producers and writers stop obsessing over stereotypical ideas of beauty that the cinema-going public will have the chance to see disfigurement presented in a more positive light.

Would you rather be blind or fat?

A recent US survey revealed that 1 in 6 women would rather be blind than fat. The more I think about this statistic, the more I wonder what it is actually saying.

At first I was outraged by the superficiality of these women: how dared they compare the massive hassle of blindness with the trivial issue of body shape? But of course it is much more complicated than that: obesity has health and well-being implications that blindness does not; but, on the other hand, obesity can often be treated where blindness usually can't. Because people think that obesity can be self-imposed, the obese are often labelled as greedy, compulsive, lacking in self-control, lazy. In contrast, because society sees blindness as a tragedy which happens to someone through no fault of her own, the blind are seen as victims and are pitied rather than criticised. None of these labels are accurate or helpful, but this is the way these conditions are usually seen.

As I thought more about this tricky statistic, I found myself agreeing with this blog which argues very convincingly that the assumption behind this response is that the women questioned see blindness as a condition which although tragic, would have a less negative impact on their body-image than obesity. Presumably these women are imagining themselves as one of those stunningly beautiful blind women you find in films. They probably don't know any actual blind people. If they did they would know that blindness doesn't necessarily lead to beauty: indeed being blind can cause feelings of self-hate very similar to those provoked by obesity. (Or maybe they were wrongly thinking that blind people doesn't care about their body-image because they can't see themselves, and are thus immune to low self-esteem issues...)

Of course there is a different way of reading these statistics. What if these women are right? What if being blind is preferable to being fat? Not because of something as superficial as appearance, but because blindness is an exciting and interesting way of being in the world. Without my blindness I would not have discovered erotic braille, experienced the kindness of strangers or embarked on my current research project.  Sure, blindness has its inconveniences, but it is certainly not a tragedy.

After much thought (and discussion with my statistic-cynic husband) I have decided that the biggest problem with this survey is that it happened in the first place. The very fact of asking such idiotic questions posits both blindness and obesity as negatives. This survey perpetuates the assumption that a woman's value comes from the way she is seen, and consequently the way she sees herself. What about paying a little less attention to appearance and a lot more to what is going on in the inside?

Palindrome or Left of Centre?

I am a palindrome. Or rather, I have a palindromic name. A palindrome is a word or phrase that can be read backwards as well as forwards. I have always been very proud that Hannah is one of these magic words. Palindromes work because they are symmetrical. When you reach the mid-point of the word, it becomes a perfect reflection of itself. Symmetry is immensely satisfying. Think of the beauty of rainbows, butterflies, snowflakes, the human eye.

We usually expect the human face to be symmetrical too. The nose represents the mid point or the mirror line and symmetry dictates that the right and left sides of the face should be perfect reflections of each other. Traditional notions of beauty seem to prize symmetry extremely highly. And I once heard Robert Winston explaining that humans are most attracted by pleasingly balanced countenances: this is why the most popular children at school tend to be those with the most symmetrical faces.

But where does that leave those of us who do not have a reassuringly symmetrical appearance? My right and left eyes do not look or behave the same as each other. I know that this can look odd and make people I am meeting for the first time feel uncomfortable. I blame the frequently perfect symmetry of the natural world for this reaction.

But my asymmetry is not limited to my appearance. I have almost no sight in my right eye and do almost all of my looking out of my left. As a consequence, I do not see my nose as the centre of my face, but its edge. Indeed, I have never seen the right-hand side of my nose. My left-of-centre approach to life is emphasised by my left-handedness. My palindromic name sits uneasily with my bodily asymmetry. And I think this tension is an interesting reminder than symmetry is not always a good thing. Like the narrator of Suzanne Vega's 'Left of Centre', I relish my own marginality:

When they ask me
"What are you looking at?"
I always answer "Nothing much" (not much)
I think they know that
I'm looking at them
I think they think I must be out of touch.

Big Blue Eyes?

Everyone in my family has big blue eyes. Except me. I am probably genetically entitled to big blue eyes but my coloboma has changed the way my eyes look.

My eyes, with bilateral congenital coloboma.

(Photo by James Kent)

I don't mind. I can gaze into my sons' eyes whenever I want and anyway, I like my eyes. They look a little bit like cats' eyes and I think they are striking and interesting. They fascinate people and are a great way of starting a conversation. Their size and shape means that I am particularly prone to 'red-eye' and generally don't photograph well but I'm not really that bothered about not being recorded for posterity in such a resolutely visual medium.

When I was about 14, my optometrist suggested that I might like to wear cosmetic contact lenses to make my eyes look like everybody else's. Even as an image-conscious teen I was instinctively appalled by the idea. It felt a lot like hiding, that I would be at once denying the reality of who I was, and acknowledging that I felt ashamed or embarrassed about the way I looked. I refused and the matter was dropped. Now I wonder whether the implications of that offer were perhaps more sinister. Would the contact lenses be for my benefit or the benefit of those around me? Sure, they might reduce the number of upsetting comments I received from strangers. I'd have been grateful not to have experienced the pity of the American lady in a hotel in New York in 1989 who stared at me in horror before addressing my parents with a sympathetic 'I'm so sorry'. Or the lady on a French train near Narbonne in 1992 who delivered the devastatingly double-edged 'Sans vos yeux, vous seriez presque belle'. ('Without your eyes you would be almost beautiful'). But was the well-meaning optometrist really thinking about the self-conscious teenager trying to make sense of her place in the world? By hiding my eyes behind a pair of big blue contact lenses, I would have been an accomplice in the dissemination of the widespread belief that perfection is better than imperfection, the normal better than the abnormal. These contact lenses would have been purely cosmetic. They would not have changed the way I see, only the way I look. They would have made me less aesthetically offensive to strangers encountered on trains or in hotels, allowed me to 'pass' as a completely sighted person.

The only way of challenging the myths about superficial perfection which govern our society and which the optometrist's offer reveal is to expose people to difference in a non-negative way. At the age of 14 I only had a very dim sense of why wearing contact lenses was wrong. Now I see that it is important not only to show people how my eyes look, but to show them that I am happy with how they look. That I wouldn't change them even if I could. That although big blue eyes are beautiful, they only represent one interpretation of beauty.