Revelations in a Rosy-Glow Mirror

remembering Kenneth's Salon

When I consider the mentors and noteworthy persons who contributed most to my life, they are the mirror-holders.

As soon as I could afford it, I started having my hair cut at Kenneth’s, the swanky, but slightly dated, Old World style salon at the back side of the Waldorf Astoria. The arched ceilings, soft lighting, and white columns depicted a more glamorous time when white gloves, sterling serving trays and crystal water glasses debuted on a daily basis.

Source: Waldorfstories.com

It was sometime in the early 2000’s that K, my stylist, regaled me with stories of famous ladies who had frequented the establishment, such as Jackie O, and her sister, Lee Radziwill, one of the Capote swans. Black and white photos of glamorous movie stars such as Marilyn Monroe graced the walls. My appointment occasionally coincided with Happy Rockefeller’s time, as she still frequented the salon.

Truman Capote leaves a reception at The Four Seasons with Lee Radziwill on November 5, 1969 in New York City. (source: People.com)

I knew none of them but I was proud to afford the price of their rarefied air.

At one of my appointments, I mentioned to K that I liked my reflection in the mirror.

He proceeded to tell me that Kenneth’s passionate dedication to the peach (actually on the more orange side of the palette) colored paint on the walls optimized most skin tones. In Kenneth’s rose-colored world we all looked a bit more beautiful, as we were shampooed, conditioned, colored and trimmed.  

For an hour and a half, once a month, I could be the elegant swan moving gracefully over the water. Somehow my worries and concerns felt smaller at Kenneth’s; they were beneath me, not beside me or ahead of me. The graceful lives of his other clients felt possible for me while I was there. It was a world free of deadlines, one filled with abundant funds, and nary a worry other than where to lunch and which designer ensemble to don.

My first years at the salon were not happy years of my life. I had not yet reached the pinnacle of what was possible in my career, so I carried the angst of ambition and possibility with me everywhere. My late husband had crossed over the threshold to very ill and would live nine more years in a debilitated state. I had just moved out of Manhattan to provide an easier life for him.

All that turmoil churned just below the surface of the still pond where I did my swan glide. All the Capote ladies had their stuff and many of them found their confessionals in Kenneth’s. He and his staff were known for their discretion, so it made me feel safe, maybe even a little highbrow to tuck my secrets in the same little booths that they used.

Every four weeks, no matter the hysteria at work, my assistant shoved me out of my office and pointed me south. Nine blocks later, on Park Avenue, while staring at my reflection in the mirror, often with a coffee and a glass of lemon water, or an infrequent glass of champagne, I talked to K and my peachy-pink reflection about the haphazard pieces that made up my life. When I left, the fragments felt less jagged, and my harried life a little less frenzied.

More than a quarter century later, I still talk to K. After Kenneth passed away, K moved to a different upscale salon in Midtown. But the peach walls, the dim lighting and the carpet-clad stillness of the old salon have been replaced with bright lights, buzzing blow dryers, and the perpetual murmur of fast-talking staff and clientele.   

But the intimacy is still alive. A combination of choppy/lip-read mirror talk is the medium of choice, and the abundant blue light provides the perfect inspection field for beauty flaws.

“Does my face look uneven?” I whispered to K on a recent visit. After he lip-read the question in the mirror he bluntly answered.

“Yes.”

I gasped! 

My gulp of air was as reflexive and instinctive as drawing my hand from a flame. I probably would not have noticed the same imperfection at Kenneth’s Salon, where the soft glow and my younger age would have dimmed the imperfection.

I had asked the question looking for reassurance that my face was, of course as even and oval as it had ever been.  

After a long, slow moment of silence, I proceeded.

“Is there anything I can do about it?”

“Yes, ignore it,” K directed. “Go home. Look in the mirror and find the three prettiest elements of your face, study them, love them, and feature them.”  

With only a slight hint of impatience, he also assured me that while my face was a bit uneven, no one else in the world would notice it, unless I started asking them about it.

Furthermore, he added, everyone’s face is slightly uneven.  

An itch provoked by K’s ignore-it and let-it-go advice stuck around, after the visit. The focus on what’s right inspired me to give my face the once-over he had suggested. In a mirror with an imagined peach-colored poster board behind it, I set myself up to take a long look.

With seven decades of routine behind me I went right to the repairs-needed scan. I looked for new age lines around my eyes or lips. I saw the gray sprigs poking through my eyebrows, already, since the last salon color, and a dark spot that I determined had gotten a bit darker while being in the Florida sun.

To view and register God’s natural and positive assets with no veritable stop signs posted in the process takes conscious willpower.

I blinked, re-focused and made myself take in the positive. I landed on my eyes, again having to consciously divert my attention from the scar underneath the left one. Wide-set and large, I re-observed (can’t say I had never noticed). I looked, truly looked, at the color, which I had never closely observed.

I had always thought of them as the hazel designation on my driver’s license.

And then, like the light of a July Fourth sparkler, I saw a piece of my mother. Interspersed throughout the lazy hazel were blue-gray splashes. They were sprinkled everywhere, while the iris was suspended in a steely gray liquid circle. 

I concluded that my stiletto cheekbones and aged, super skinny lips were also gifted from my mother’s DNA.

I gave nary a thought to my lips, though.

I smiled.

I’d never looked at my face in a loving way. I’d always been on a repair mission.

I’d also never noticed my mother smiling back.  

I picked up my eyeliner brush and drew a perfectly fine, thin line from the outer corner of my eye to the inner and back again. I repeated the application on the bottom lids, before brushing mascara slowly, several times from top-to-bottom and side-to-side. Like an important and well-loved passage in a beloved book, I was underlining a significant point.

Photo by Anastasia Anastasia on Unsplash

The exercise brought back one of the many department store business calls that I’d made years before.

The counter I visited on that particular day became very busy. I found myself face-to-face with a walk-up customer, as the associate who had been shadowing me became occupied. I had no choice but to conduct the transaction alone.

My makeup application skills might not have been the best thing to put on display for our business, but I knew it was important to set an example.

I invited the customer to take a seat. She did.

She was wearing no makeup. She had no smile, and I suspected she didn’t have enough energy to lift the corners of her mouth to shape one.

With cotton doused in cleanser I stroked her forehead.

She winced.

I concluded that her face had not been softly touched in a long, long while, as the tender tap bore likeness to a cold splash of water.

“I don’t spend much time on myself, never had the time,” she mumbled, perhaps to excuse the flinch.  

She went on to say that she had never worn makeup.

As the process continued, her shoulders eased. Although a makeup chair is not designed for comfort, she found a way to sink into the hard back. She was grateful for the opportunity to close her eyes while I brushed a swath of light color across her eyelids.

Bear in mind here, I was not Pat McGrath or Bobbi Brown doing professional makeup work.

My career visits were intended to understand, at close range, the dynamics of the consumer mindset. They were not intended for direct interaction with the customer, but it had happened before, on occasion, and I always learned something when it did.

Right around the lip gloss moment, I learned of the client’s divorce.

She was in the middle of it.

“I don’t think he ever much loved me,” she said.

“He left about three months ago. I actually don’t blame him so much.”

My heart kicked into gear, my professional shroud slipped off my shoulders, and I took her hand.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

She shrugged her shoulders and pulled her hand away.

She wasn’t inclined to share more.

My mini-makeover complete, I reached for the hand mirror.

She held the mirror for a few seconds, her face as blank as a new white paper. Then, to my horror, her face collapsed, before she broke into sobs that left her gasping for air.

I stood helpless in front of her, vowing never to touch another makeup brush for anyone other than myself for the rest of my life.

I brushed the top of her hand as I pulled away.

I thought she looked much better, bordering on pretty, but based on her reaction, I knew she did not feel the same way.

I offered to remove the light trappings I had just applied.

She held tight to the mirror and looked hard at herself.

Through her tears and sniffles I finally deciphered what she was saying.

She never knew she could look beautiful.

There have been few things in life that have rendered me speechless.

That stranger, whose name I never learned, stunned me into silence and momentary immobility.

Except for the above revelation, I never personally experienced a woman seeing herself as beautiful for the first time, but I’ve heard hundreds of similar stories from the sales people in my industry. The phenomenon became their psychological reward, and they told follow-up stories that were considerably more profound, as the experience changed some of the women’s lives. Many obtained new jobs or careers, and talk of revived marriages and relationships was abundant.

Michelangelo said that “Every block of stone has a sculpture inside and it is the task of the sculptor to find it.”

What I love most about his concept is that beauty is revealed, not built, or painted, or created by disguise or camouflage. For all of us, our loveliness is there to be discovered—whether directed by someone to reflect on ourselves in a rose-tinted mirror, or to bask in the flushed glow of our first maquillage application by an outsider.

Makeup is meant to show off our best stuff. Our moles, our larger noses, or our skinny lips find their just-right position in the lineup. A master sculptor knows how to position those perfect flaws. But K actually said it the best, when he told me to ignore it and go search for my good stuff in the looking glass.  

Revelation in a forgiving rosy-glow eases our barefaced and genuine selves into a safe place, because the negative cannot singsong itself into prominence. Without the gift of K’s pink halo in my bathroom mirror, I would have never gotten past my repairs.

There’s a lot about life that is the same.

When I consider the mentors and noteworthy persons who contributed most to my life, they were, and still are the mirror-holders. They are the folks who took the time to see the pretty features. They are the sculptors who had the handiness to highlight those qualities and then hold the rosy-glow mirror at just the right angle so that I could see them myself.