Today I went for an afternoon long walk in a fabulous weather. After four days of constant drizzle in Toronto, we were able to enjoy a blue, clear sky and a little bit of sunlight.

Everyone is out, the streets are crowded, the patios are full and loud, happiness is back.I walked up and down on Yonge St. and then took Bloor St. all the way West until I decided to turn around.

While walking and chatting with my mother I noticed a sign outside a salon that read: “Eyelash technician”. Below the sign there were a couple of pictures with the usual “before and after” and I had to stop and change my conversation for a whole new topic.

Am I waking up and smelling the modern life? I never heard of a treatment to make your eyelashes fuller and longer. As a woman I like to look attractive, interesting, unique and pretty but am I wrong to think that this is way too much? One thing is to fix yourself nicely, buy a new dress or shoes sometime and a completely different thing is to fabricate a new you.

I started a conversation with my mother about how people in the developed world tend to shop non-stop. Shopping is entertainment. Shopping is releasing energy, forgetting your problems, fixing your world, rewarding yourself. There is no bad time to enter the mall and discover new things that you did not even know you desperately needed. Women and men shop. Every season they need new “everything” and the compulsive “shoppinismo” starts.

I personally can be like that with craft. If I had enough money to waste in jewellery I would have purchased four pairs of earrings and five different necklaces at the ROM gift shop today. I absolutely love craft, recognize my weakness and try to fight it but how can you be like that with all the articles out in the market?

We are all free to spend our money and time doing whatever we choose to do but spending hours and hours a day to achieve a doll face with the perfect make up and hair is one of the most superficial and annoying things I find in women nowadays. And then the eyelashes. I am glad I often do not follow this news. Placing the personal look in such an important place in life is just ridiculous. You could always look better, you could never end buying beauty products, new bags and clothes, actually the brands want you to never stop buying and trying out new things to their convenience. All this work will end up being the future for us women, a future where we get older and we cannot keep the teenager look anymore. A future where we have to quit trying this pointless race to look the best.

I hope I can face the future and the beauty in a different way and enjoy it on a more productive level, the spiritual level.

Perhaps it is that coming from a country where owning ten pairs of sandals is a total luxury I learned how to think “poor”. But in reality lots of Cubans who have moved to Europe or the States behave exactly the same, they obsessively shop, they add silicone to their lips and down, they become rubber or plastic material, like we say in Havana. I guess it depends on the person and their priorities, but take me out of that list. No eyelash technician for me, please.