“Nothing in the world resembles the luminous, untouchable smoothness an idea can hold in the mind, and nothing in the world satisfies the desire to find that idea and touch it”
Photo: Getty Images Perfection is a moving target. This week, the Cut explores the allure of trying to achieve the impossible.
Once when I was 19 years old, my mother came back from a trip to Japan with a gift for me: a small plastic container full of some milky-white liquid, which looked and smelled faintly like Elmer’s Glue. With my stunted grasp of Japanese characters, all I could read was the symbol for bright, a sun and a moon set side by side. “What is it?” I asked her, shaking the small vial. “It’s very popular right now,” she assured me. “It’ll help your freckles.
Lightness and brightness had always been at the center of the Asian ideal of beauty that I encountered growing up: The Mandarin word for pretty literally means “polished bright.” My mother’s Taiwanese-American relatives and friends would cup my face in their hands and tell me hen piao-liang , a phrase that I also saw applied to vases, bracelets, and small fluffy dogs. I knew to stay out of the sun, to wear wide-brimmed hats, and to seek cover whenever possible.
Reader, is it any surprise that I tried all of these products? Standing in the first floors of department stores, surrounded by cosmetics counters, I rubbed one thing or another onto my skin under the bland gaze of salesladies. I bought the tubes of grit and scrubbed them into my face, then went to my internet browser and Googled whether or not it was normal to feel a burning, stinging sensation afterward.
The trouble with perfection is that it doesn’t exist, but it can be imagined. Nothing in the world resembles the luminous, untouchable smoothness an idea can hold in the mind, and nothing in the world satisfies the desire to find that idea and touch it. Nowadays I try not to worry about my skin unless it feels itchy or otherwise alarming.
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