Blue Contacts

Some essential truths; women like to look good. Women like to try new things. Women like accessories. I’m a typical woman and I like looking good, trying new things and I love accessories. If it hits the cover of a magazine, and I find it appealing and fitting for me, I’m going to run out to eBay ( because I’m cost conscious) and find it. There is one thing that has alluded me since I was a Tween though; colored contacts.

When I was in my early 20s, everyone had a pair. I used to hang out in the clubs and we did trends. It was important to have style, your own style and to look FABULOUS! Part of that fabulous at the time was having colored contacts. Everyone did it. Celebs, Moms and Pops, and the girls in the clubs had a set for every day of the week. Hazel, Blue, Green, Brown, dark brown, we changed our allure with the wink of an eye.

But there was on thing holding me back then, money. I didn’t have a lot of it and what I did have was spent on buying new outfits to wear to the club each night. Mind you, there was rent to be paid, but lucky me, my parents helped out a lot. I was in school and I was spoiled as all hell so the rent got paid…most of the time anyway.

Fast forward 15 years, I’m 35 years old and people are still wearing colored contacts. They’ve expanded the line and you can have purple eyes if you want. You can buy the cat’s eye that Michael Jackson wore in the Thriller video. No one is going to speak to you, but you can buy them at will. However, I can’t and the reason is complex and maybe even self imposed.

You see, I’m a black woman. I’m a Black woman married to a White man. There are enough connotations to that and I deal with enough judgements and stereotypes that I don’t often just walk right into one only to be peeled apart layer for layer because of it and just the act of buying a set of colored contacts would do that.

I fear the reaction from Sistas, to be honest with you. Because of my skin tone, the accent I have ( that it totally a product of my education and environment in a Midwestern state and has little or nothing to do with ethnicity), and the fact that I’m in an interracial marriage, I think the appearance of colored contacts would look as if I’m trading in my blackness. Sounds like a lot for a colored contact to do, but it’s how I feel.

We all judge each other. We can pretend to be perfect and pretend that we actually measure people by the content of their character, but the truth is that you do look at people and your brain—whether you are party to it or not—does make decisions for you based on how people look. You can look at someone and your instinct will tell you whether or not you should trust them let alone speak to them. Your instinct is set into motion by your brain sizing up that person’s appearance.

I admit that when I see Tyra Banks, who I adore, with her blonde weave and colored contacts, I tsk and bristle at the root behind that look. Tyra has admitted that to be successful in her industry, many times she had to appeal to White/Majority senses. The Blonde haired, blue eyed, well shaped woman is at the top of the visual appeal totem pole for all intents and purposes. We can dismiss that all we want, but magazine sales and box office returns tell us differently. Blondes have more fun, they say. Ditsy or not, Pamela Anderson, Marilyn Monroe and all the other “bombshells” appealed to America’s ideal of beauty.

It’s not my ideal. I happen to find beauty in every woman. I think hips add character. I think a roll or two after childbirth is a battle wound that I’m proud to have. It gives you membership to a club of millions to not fit into a size 2 and the size 14s on the other side are very welcoming. But make no mistake, there is a standard and it’s not typically ethnic and it’s not typically any dress size in double digits.

So already, I’m against the grain of the Majority beauty standards. Where I do fit is within my own community. Being overweight isn’t a cause for ridicule. Well, it is and we tease each other plenty, but that’s in the family jokes. In the Black community, it’s well known and well documented that our teens don’t face the same issues of appearance that White/Majority teens experience. We don’t have the same rates of eating disorders. Where I see my overweight Caucasian friends fearing they will never find a life partner because of their size, my Sistas don’t feel that weight will prevent them from finding love. For them, it’s that someone will love ALL of them, including the rolls and cellulite, which by the way I’m not sure if that’s a problem for most of us or if that’s just a White thang. For the same reason that little moles on your face as you age isn’t a problem for Whites as it is for Black women, there are some differences in our ethnic make up.

But back to the original issue…from the time I was a child up to today, I’ve felt very much as if I was straddling two different worlds, one black and one white. Certain attributes of mine put me apart from both worlds. My interests, my diction, my culture and most importantly my choices in mate are all viewed and judged by both worlds. If I were to run out and get Blue contacts, I think my sistas would view me as a Black woman that doesn’t want to be black. Maybe if I went natural with my hair I could make the contacts work.

All of this is far too much thinking about what others think and as Oscar Wilde once wrote, “You’ll think a lot less of what people think of you when you realize how seldom they do”. The truth is that people might not even notice the change in my eye color and others simply won’t care. It’s not them I’m worried about because as grown as I am and as self assured as I am, I want to be accepted and I want to be liked. I admit it.

I don’t want to put distance between myself and my Sistas because we are one and we are far more united than what I see amongst Majority women. When we show up in a meeting at work and there is another Sista there, there is a nod (The Nod, to be written about later, stay tuned) and a look that we give each other that says so many things but most importantly it says “Thank God you’re here. I know what you’ve been through to get here, girl. I got your back”. I don’t want to lose that from a first impression.

So to me, it’s about way more than just appearances. Putting on a set of contacts is something that makes me feel like I AM turning my back away from my culture and away from the perfection that God has already made and thus approved of. Who am I to mess with God?