Have It Your Way

Sandro Botticelli's Madonna of the Magnificat is one of the few paintings showing the Madonna in the act of writing.

The Madonna with pens, paper and writing is not a very popular subject. As Virginia Woolf rightly pointed out, women meet with difficulties when they love letters, writing and books.

Nowadays, this is gradually less true. After all, beauty is a form of writing.

I think that we use beauty rituals and tools to write our own beauty, to make our face even more beautiful than it is. I agree with the poet Charles Baudelaire, who said that make-up helps women achieve perfection, and even add my own adage: "make up helps women reach their own idea of perfection"! Yes!

This amazing photo by Carrie Mae Weems (from the Kitchen Table series) shows that beauty is a legacy going from one woman to another. The picture features three persons, not two: the mother, daughter, and the spectator, expected to take the third chair -- you, me, all women, Every Woman. 

I am not saying that all women should use make-up: I don't use any myself ("maybe that's why you admire the women who do so much!" my inner goddess whispers). What I am saying is that beauty is special for us all and something which can be fun for us all. As the poet John Keats has famously said, "beauty is truth, truth beauty".

Like the poet's saying, beauty can be viewed in many ways. And each woman can have her own! Her own way!