Maine beauty standards are different from the rest of the country

Nevertheless, my skincare routine persists

I’ve always found this early 1970s photo of two young women working at a gas station in Bangor to be particularly emblematic of a certain type of Maine beauty. It’s included in my book, “Downtown, Up River”!

I have a skincare routine, the current iteration of which I’ve followed for the past year or so. I switch between various face washes in the shower (an exfoliant, a gentle cleanser, a gel), followed by a toner, a serum and, finally, one of several moisturizers, depending on the day - I’m partial to the Truly brand, either Glazed Donut or Glass Skin (I own both), but I also like SKIN1004’s Centella cream. I’ll do a mask every week or two (pore refining in the summer, moisturizing in the winter). If I had some disposable income, I’d get some laser hair removal. I would even consider Botox, since the lines in my forehead are starting to show up in photos.

Not a day goes by as I’m applying my lotions and potions and unguents and poultices and whispering benedictions to various beauty goddesses that I don’t think - for a second, or for a while - that this is not only stupid and a waste of time and money, but out of step with nearly everything else about me. “What am I doing?” I say to the person in the mirror. “Who fucking cares?” she answers back, as she rubs grape-scented cream into her temples, in a circular motion to stimulate blood flow. “You’re better than this, right?”

I’m a feminist, and proud of it. I’m profoundly aware of the toxic, capricious beauty standards that keep women perpetually in a state of self-doubt and self-loathing and in thrall to society’s impossible expectations. My own complicated relationship to my gender aside, I’m living in what’s generally perceived to be a ladybody, and am susceptible to all the stuff that comes with that.

Equally as important, however: I’m a Mainer. And, as I’ve come to understand we hardy folk, these kinds of vanities and impracticalities simply do not jive with our whole thing. Unless you’re one of those people that comes to visit their second (or third, or fifth) home for two weeks in August, or you grew up with a mother that read beauty magazines, I’d say that, for the most part, the beauty standards in Maine are pretty different from other places in the country. I’m not saying they don’t exist - it’ll never be easy to be fat anywhere, and straight men will always, always have something to say about your body and how it looks and performs. I’m just saying those standards are nowhere near as pronounced as in other places. It’s hard to feel underdressed in Maine.

If you’re not from here, it may shock you to learn that the beauty norm for Maine women, generally speaking, is that unless you work at a bank or a law office or something, or you’re going to a fancy event, you likely don’t wear much makeup - if you wear any at all. A tinted Burt’s Bees lip balm is makeup. Wearing heels will get you stared at - not because you’re sexy, but because what are you doing wearing heels? What are you, a millionaire? They’re going to get all dirty, anyway. And in the winter? Do you have a death wish? There’s a reason Maine’s most iconic (and pretty much only) contribution to the fashion world is L.L. Bean. Practicality is everything.

I have a skin routine now, yes, but for most of my life, I did not. Nobody ever told me I had to. It’s not typically part of the conversation in Maine. I was well into my 20s before anybody told me anything about moisturizer. If I put on makeup, it was thick black eyeliner, mascara and glitter, because I wanted to be David Bowie or Siouxsie Sioux - and to be fair, makeup has, for me, always been more of an exercise in playing dress up and feeling transformed into a slightly different version of myself. That’s probably why I love and identify with drag queens so much. But the more regimented, expectation-heavy forms of beauty care - tightening and waxing and pore-refining and all that jazz - I learned in my late 20s and 30s, from YouTube and my few friends who knew about that stuff. Before that, it just wasn’t on my mind.

I did not have many - any? - role models for glamor and that kind of performative femininity growing up. Maybe it was different when she was younger, but by the time I came around, it seemed like my grandmother went to get her hair washed, dried and shellacked into an old lady ‘do every two weeks or so, and that was that. I recall my mother’s makeup in the medicine cabinet when I was a kid being a three-color eyeshadow palette in various shades of brown, one of those pink and green tubes of Maybelline mascara, and a lipstick in a sensible shade of neutral, likely purchased at LaVerdiere’s or Shop n’ Save. Did anyone wear makeup at my high school? Not that I can recall. If they did, it did not register with me. I was too busy brooding in the computer lab, reading “The Communist Manifesto.”

This person doesn’t know what moisturizer is. Me, circa 2000.

But that’s par for the course for women in Maine. If there is a standard of beauty here, it’s one based not on trends, or money, or handed down on high from a magazine editor or influencer. It is based, instead, on your contributions, your actions, and how those might manifest physically - regardless of your outward femininity or whatever work you might put into appearing a certain way.

I’d trace some of this back to two strains of cultural norms that are present in Maine. The first is that old double-edged socio-cultural sword - the Puritan value system that makes some of us both incredibly hard workers with a moral backbone, and uptight and self-righteous and, sometimes, afraid of people deemed to be outsiders. Fripperies and superficialities like makeup and clothing are of the lowest importance, when there are fields to be tilled and barns to be raised. God is watching you, and you’ll be judged on the content of your character and the deeds you do on Earth - not on how dewy and glass-like your skin is.

And then, more recently, the back-to-the-landers that began arriving in Maine in the late 1960s brought a rejection of the shallowness and wastefulness of the current beauty standards. Pantyhose? Girdles? Helmet hair? Toss it out the window of the homestead you’re building in the Maine woods. Liberate yourself from society’s expectations. Return to the goodness of the land, and let your inner beauty shine through your work and your community. Wear Birkenstocks to your daughter’s wedding. Just as L.L. Bean is Maine’s contribution to fashion, so don’t we produce eco-friendly, fairly unglamorous brands like Burt’s Bees and Tom’s of Maine as our beauty products. Second-wave feminism and the back-to-the-land movement went hand in hand, and the legacy of those folks is still felt strongly in the communities where they settled.

Both strains of values - the Puritan, and the granola - present alternatives to the prevailing attitudes about what mainstream culture considers beautiful, and acceptable in a woman. You could argue they also enforce their own kinds of orthodoxies, in that they view those beauty standards as so stupid and meaningless that they paint those who partake in them as hopelessly shallow and disconnected from what truly matters. That’s not fair either. I know lots of people who dress the part who aren’t like that at all.

It’s complicated, of course. Here I am, a dyed-in-the-wool Mainer and a feminist, with my skin care routine and my Botox-curious feelings about my forehead. How did it come to this? Why am I like this? I do place a majority of the blame on social media, of course, and the constant stream of beauty content and Get Ready With Me videos and images of emaciated, nipped and tucked celebrities shoved in front of our faces. It gets in your head - even me, a hyper-aware person who knows it’s not great even as I actively do it. I worry, deeply, about younger people and how they internalize these messages. The cycle of self-doubt and self-loathing continues on, as ever, and even worse, somehow.

The question, then, is will Maine manage to hold onto its decidedly more chill attitudes toward how women and feminine people are supposed to look? Even as the digital monoculture insists that they must spend hundreds of dollars each year on various beauty products, and then use them, religiously, unless they want to look completely chopped? Can Maine resist being transformed by an algorithm bent on smoothing out our rough edges and buffing away our wrinkles, until we’re all the same yassified version of what an A.I. thinks is human?

I sure hope it can. I hope people can do whatever they want, quite frankly - another fundamental Maine value is live and let live, after all. You should be free to wear as much or as little makeup as you want. You should be able to get out of the shower and do nothing afterwards - or spend however long it takes applying all the stuff in your skin routine. Cut your hair short, or get it colored every six weeks, or let it grow long and gray and wear it in a big thick braid. Wear Birkenstocks to your daughter’s wedding - or wear those nice gold wedges you splurged on.

Just don’t wear heels in the winter. You will slip on the ice, and you will fall. Don’t be stupid, bub.