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Excerpt from the book:

Am I Turning into One of the Smith Brothers?
You spend about fifteen minutes in front of the mirror every morning trying to see yourself in a new light.

To be more precise, you are trying to see your chin in a new light.

Armed with tweezers, reading glasses, and a mirror, you are a woman on a mission.

Once you begin, you are unstoppable. You have the kind of concentration envied by army generals and nuclear
physicists. Nothing can distract you or dissuade you from the absolute necessity of your pursuit. Small children can scream, alarms can wail, windows can shatter, the earth
itself can move beneath your feet, but you cannot, will not, look away.

You will get that rogue hair. The one you can only see from a certain angle in a certain light. The one so fiercely connected to your person that it must be part of your skeletal structure. You will pull it and triumph. In so doing you will feel a mixture of vindication and exultation both, a sense of victory almost unparalleled. Holding the hair up to look at it more carefully is like ridiculing a vanquished foe.

It is like winning a fabulous prize. It is an accomplishment, a final thwarting of an enemy, a valedictory.

Except, of course, that women are not supposed to have chin hairs. This means that a person, however bold in alternate venues, would collapse instantly if somebody caught her in the act of plucking. Imagine her guy walking in and saying “Hello sweetheart! Gee, what are you doing?”
The woman would have to say, “I’m trying to do my own root canal. That’s the only reason I had my lower jaw stuck out this way” and she’d start tugging on her molar with the tweezers to make the whole pantomime look real.

Life, as you know, is not fair. Some men have backs so hairy it looks like they’re always wearing angora sweaters. Yet a couple of little white hairs and suddenly a woman feels like she should be auditioning for the
opening scene of Macbeth. Like Blanche DuBois, she’s afraid to be seen under a naked light bulb even if the guy looking at her is Karl Malden.

So while, historically, women hid behind fans and veils, we now cup our chins in meetings and keep our faces pointed downwards in what might appear to be an attempt at flirtation but what is really an attempt not to attract glare. See how many women you can catch staring at their chins in the rear view mirror when stopped at a light.

There’s always one hair you can only see when you’re in the car. I’ve seen women trying to use the Velcro from the back of their E-Z pass to remove that one. You have to get it while you’re in the vehicle itself. You can never see it anywhere else. But once in the car, it looks like you’ve been grooming it for years, nurturing it along so that it’s grown luxuriantly and with gusto, like you’ve been feeding it fertilizer and intend to do a comb-over with it.

Women live in fear that everybody else has been looking at that hair for years while she’s been oblivious, going along, lalala, concerned one day about the size of her ankles and the next about the size of her bank account, when all she should have been obsessing over was The Hair
That Could Strangle Pittsburgh.

In contrast, there are ads during prime-time network television for men’s razors; there are devices, for goodness’ sake, just to get the hair out of men’s noses and ears. Can you imagine if women had vast quantities of hair growing in our noses and ears? Men would be shrieking and waving their hands in the air, running away as if from
werewolves.

Men would not, for example, buy women little nose-hair clippers on our birthdays. They would not say with a little affectionate laugh, “Hon, do you think maybe you should trim your ears before we take the family
photograph?”

If women had tufts growing from our noses and ears, men would bring exorcists to the house. They would hire professionals to drive the evil spirits from our bodies. And the ones doing it would be seen as optimists because most men would move away and keep the shades down lest a
hirsute babe walk by without warning.

But the time has come to admit this much out loud: I’ve got a couple of lousy, almost invisible hairs on my face. And I want them to stop making me nuts.

For years I hid my tweezers the way alcoholics conceal bottles, stashing them in the top drawers of ornamental cabinets and hiding them inside bags so that nobody could unwittingly stumble across them and know what they hide. I mean, you might have one cheap pair for your eyebrows, but when you get out the Swiss-crafted stainless steel,
everybody knows what’s going on; you can’t hide from the
unsightly hair police.

In my house, every mirror has a pair near it. Every pocketbook. Every suitcase, too, despite my worry that a T.S.A. security agent will one day shout to a fellow officer: “Hey Ralphie, are the LEATHERMAN IRONGRIP TWEEZERS IN THIS HERE LADY’S LUGGAGE permitted on the flight?” ”What is she, Wolfman Jack’s sister?” That scene would be followed by outright prolonged laughter from the other 3,437 fellow passengers gathered around me. Including George Clooney.

Magnifying mirrors--starting at 3x and going up to 10x-- have proved harder to hide. But I have lots of these as well, having developed a particular fondness for the ones with sticky-adhesive cups on the back so you can attach them like reflective starfish to any shiny surface. I
stare into them as if gazing into a crystal ball.

Ah, self-reflection: if only it ended with the chin. But life is not so easy….

Have you ever looked into one of those magnifying mirrors and discover your pores are so huge that your face looks like something from the lunar landscape? Or perhaps you have, as I do in my office, a full-length mirror that makes you look four inches shorter and twenty pounds
heavier than you actually are?

Do you spend time scanning your face and your body the way a proofreader scans a legal document? Do you have days when you think you looks are pretty good and other days when you think it would just be easier to put a bag over your head and a tent over your body before you leave the house? Does it matter when people tell you that they perceive no difference whatsoever between how you look on one of your really “good” days and how you look on one of your really “terrible” days? When they say such things, do you want to smack them?

Have you ever said to anyone, “Does this barrette make my head look fat?”

If you answered yes to any of these questions, my bet is that you’re a girly woman; this particular brand of selftorture is supremely girly behavior. I wouldn’t call it womanly because I reserve the word woman for the more mature, practical activities I associate with being an adult. When I’m driven to distraction by the fact that I’ve only just noticed that my eyebrows seem crooked, however, I’m just living life as a girl.

It doesn’t change much with age, either. I’m getting puppet lines around mouth like a ventriloquist’s dummy; that’s new; that’s glorious. And also, after a few hours, no matter what brand I use, my lipstick now starts to feather. That’s the word they use—“feather”-- but what is really happening is that my mouth seems to be seeping or spreading into the rest of my face like a stain. Think Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? I’ve turned into one big advertisement for industrial strength lip liner. Terribly attractive.

As far as I can tell, men don’t do this to themselves.