Deborah Blumenthal | What Do You Think Of The Face You See In The Mirror

If a beauty genie dropped down in front of you and granted you one wish, what would part of you would you opt to improve?

Would you ask for clearer skin? Thinner thighs? Thicker hair? If Allie Johnston the 15-year old protagonist of my new young adult novel, A DIFFERENT ME, was granted that wish, she wouldn’t hesitate for a second: Take away the bump on my nose, she’d say.

Beauty genies are in short supply, but that doesn’t stop most of us from wishing they existed. In their absence, we take making magic into our own hands. It’s called plastic surgery, or Botox. It’s called cellulite creams and lasers.

When I was sixteen I would have killed for clearer skin. There was no Accutane then, no Retin-A. My friends and I avoided restaurants with bright lights and we combed the pharmacies for the latest camouflage creams. I don’t think we ever totally recovered from the pain. Today my skin is clear, but when someone says, you have such good skin, my first reaction is study their face to see if they’re making fun of me.

Granted, the world is photoshopped. Even supermodels have things that need fixing. But why let truth get in the way of our fantasies? We want to look like those models even if the real models don’t look like the models.

Makeup artist Bobbi Brown’s doesn’t buy into the Barbie doll look, and her take on perfection is an appealing one:

“I find beauty in the flaws,” she says, “those characteristics that don't fit society's narrow definition of beauty. Sadly, women who have these characteristics have been taught not to like them. The challenge is to reverse this way of thinking.”

But can we? Maybe what it comes down to is attitude. “Darling, the legs aren’t so beautiful, I just know what to do with them,” Greta Garbo said.

And Diana Vreeland: “The only real elegance is in the mind; if you’ve got that, the rest really comes from it.”

Not liking yourself is hard work, so Allie finally decides to cut herself some slack. “I want to try dwelling less on perfection,” she says, “and work at Google Mapping the way to finding out who I am.”

Maybe that should be a goal for all of us.

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Deborah Blumenthal is a former beauty and fitness writer for The New York Times Magazine. A DIFFERENT ME is her latest young adult novel, published September 1 by Albert Whitman & Company.