It’s been awhile since I’ve thought about the concept of pretty. Not as in, “What a pretty vase!” or, “It’s pretty to think so, isn’t it?” but “Is she pretty? I can’t really tell.”

Lately, it’s come up several times in conversation. “She’s pretty, but not really so pretty with her makeup off.” “She has to be pretty.” “She’s sweet and smart and funny and mature and probably much better for me than the other one, but she’s just not pretty enough.” And then there was a smart blog post that finally pushed me over the edge into writing about this, but I’ll link it in the next post on this topic.

Do you really know what you’re asking of someone when you ask them to be pretty? Do we know what we’re asking of ourselves? And does it really matter? I think about pretty less today than I have at probably any other time in my life, but at the beginning and end of the day I still spend a few minutes with the mirror assessing the situation and the damage. There’s no escaping the expectation and weight of prettiness.

This used to be something I thought about a lot, every single day. When I worked in business development — that is, sales — pretty counted. And so every day, I worked out for at least an hour right after I got up. Double sets of crunches on the weekends. Hair and brows done once a month, nails and facial once a week. I also quit cooking in the exploratory way I had and went all-organic, mostly low-fat. Breakfast was reasonably extravagant: a bowl of bear mush with stewed fruit and soy milk in the winter; tomatoes, bread and cheese in the summer; scrambled eggs and turkey sausage other times. Lunch was fruit or turkey chili or turkey spaghetti or hummus and lettuce sandwiches. Dinner was usually a salad with turkey and low-fat dressing or broccoli and rice. Low-fat yogurt for a snack. I drank a gallon of water and swallowed a handful of vitamins a day. No caffeine, occasional tobacco and alcohol. A fair amount of spare time was spent on shopping for clothes. Daily weigh-ins.

But isn’t there such a thing as naturally pretty? If one was generally a cute kid with a well-balanced face, wouldn’t one grow up into the sort of woman for whom all this work is not really necessary? Even if she underwent an awkward adolescence, wouldn’t she stand a decent chance of coming out the other side fairly unblemished, in a state that doesn’t require such rigorous attention? I’d say no — certainly not psychologically, and likely not physically. The cultural signifiers required for an adult woman to present as beautiful are not anywhere near the same as those required of a child. Dolly Parton’s line in Steel Magnolias is so dead on, especially in the South: “Honey, there’s no such thing as natural beauty.” Even in Minnesota, where a more un-made-up, outdoorsy beauty is the norm, one must be well-kept and certainly fit. The pretty, it demands upkeep.

So, here’s what the upshot was for me: at least a couple of hours every single day spent on the basics of being pretty: exercise, a little tweezing here, a little shaving there, a little extra hair conditioning, a little nail repair, putting together an outfit that was neatly pressed and matched, and then doing the hair and makeup). More time on the weekends, when I did at least extra abs and often went shopping and did the heavy maintenance. So, let’s say roughly 18 hours a week, or 72 hours a month, give or take. Another part-time job worth of time invested. And it worked: people told me I was pretty. At the office, on the street, when I was out at night. I dated enough, I closed sales, I got the maximum possible raise every year. Part of that was hard work and a decent personality. But part of it was looks, in the most conventional sense of the term, and on top of that I was a workaholic. And while those two things were not necessarily related, and also not entirely the sum of me in those years, they certainly accounted for the bulk.

(An aside: in spite of all that effort, there are no pictures of me from this period. Probably because I was always going to lose just a bit more weight or get just a bit better looking. My current state was never good enough to preserve; I remember refusing to be in a group shot for my best work-friend’s 40th birthday. Now, part of me regrets that there’s nothing left to document it.)