Generally, I don’t spend much time grooming myself. It’s not that I don’t care about my appearance; I just don’t understand how girls my age spend hours perfecting every little detail of their outer shell.  I spend about five minutes putting one product in my hair; the most makeup I wear is chapstick; I don’t own Ugg boots.

However, upon hearing about the opportunity to have a makeover for Eastside purposes, I jumped at it, just because I figured out of all the Board, my appearance would be the most drastic. The idea of my characteristic curly hair, glasses and no makeup changing to straight hair, no glasses (briefly) and lots of makeup, if only for a day or two, seemed very appealing, just so I could see people’s reactions.

And reactions I saw…. The next day, we had an Eastside issue to hand out. Just the Board’s reaction was enough for me to know that the rest of the school day would be filled with several comments of “oh my gosh you look so pretty” or “wow, you look great.” Typically I walk down the hallway and say hi to about ten people at least between classes; that day, people said, “it looks great” instead. In fact, more people called me pretty that day than I have heard in my entire life put together.

That afternoon, I made my facebook default picture a picture with my new look. I kept it up for a few weeks, just to see how many people would comment on it. For the record, about ten people “liked” it and about forty people commented things like “gorgeous” or “love it.” These were facebook friends from all walks of life: camp, school, where I used to live.

What I learned from this experience was that my change from looking like I usually do to looking like I came to school prepared for the prom for a day didn’t necessarily alter people’s perceptions of my personality, they just saw the potential I had to look like that everyday. I learned that no matter what my outside is, people still appreciate whom I am within.