According to recent studies, a woman will glance at herself in the mirror over 70 times in any given day. Can you imagine living mirror-free for a day? Six months? A whole year?
And what if, on top of that, you were set to be married? For most of us ladies who are lucky in love— wedding bells means obsessing over every blemish and skipping dessert to squeeze into that gorgeous, but one-size-too-small Vera Wang wedding gown (Bridezillas, anyone?).
But this collegiette™ bride-to-be is taking on the personal prenuptial challenge.
Kjerstin Gruys, a PhD candidate and teaching fellow working in the UCLA Department of Sociology, is
swearing off looking in the mirror for an entire year with six of those months leading up to her wedding.
“I picked out my wedding gown before the project started. Looking in the mirror for hours and feeling critical of myself was one of the main motivators [for the project],” Gruys tells YouBeauty. “I want my wedding to be about my partner, Michael, and me, and about our loved ones—not about whether or not I dropped 10 pounds to squeeze into my dress.”
Gruys, who wrote a dissertation that examines clothing size standards in the U.S. fashion industry, expresses an interest in the sociological and psychological effects of body image on women. Her idea to go mirror-free for a year was inspired by a passage out of Sarah Dunant’s “The Birth of Venus,” which describes an order of nuns who swear off all sights of human flesh including themselves. She said she was already feeling the pressure to look perfect in the planning of her wedding, dated for October of this year, and thought that living a year without mirrors might lead to self-acceptance and better body image.
To prep for the year ahead of her, she practiced blindly applying minimal makeup using only her sense of touch and without the benefit of a mirror in front of her.
“Though some of my readers have been critical of my decision to wear makeup during this project, I decided that wearing a bare minimum—tinted moisturizer, blush, mascara, sometimes a neutral cream eyeshadow—was important to me in a professional sense,” Gruys says.
“I’ve had a lot of women tell me that looking into the mirror as a bride is important, and not just in terms of vanity. It scares me that I could miss out on something,” Gruys says. “But I’m also reminding myself that those minutes in front of a mirror are minutes I could be spending with family like my grandparents.”
You can follow Gruys’ daily mirror-free mishaps on her blog, Mirror, Mirror Off The Wall.
So what do you collegiettes™ think? Do you think you could do it? Sound off in the comments below!