The Vanity

The girl in the mirror is yourself, so you take her apart. The reflection is flawless—you made sure of that, as countless others have before you. Primer, concealer, contour, and highlight, all perfectly blended across your skin like promises. Your eyeshadow sits in a gradient that makes your eyes look deeper, more alluring. Your lips are lined precisely, filled with a shade that complements your skin tone exactly as promised by beauty gurus whose influence knows no borders. But there's something… off about your left eyebrow. There is a slight irregularity in the arch that any woman's critical eye would notice.

You reach for your tweezers, an instrument as familiar as worry. One hair. That's all it will take. The tweezers pry at your eyebrow, one hair, then two. The bathroom echoes silence, your hand trembles against porcelain—a universal tremor, shared in countless private moments where faces are prepared for the world's judgment.

The hair comes out cleanly, but now the shape seems uneven. You pluck another and another, yanking them out in rapid succession. Five, ten, twenty hairs—you can't stop until it's right, a compulsion ancient and modern at once. Blood beads where the hairs were, but that's just enhanced circulation bringing color to your face. The eyebrow still looks wrong. You grab the tweezers tighter, digging deeper to get the tiny hairs you can barely see.

"Almost there," you whisper to your reflection, voice tight with concentration, an echo that could belong to anyone. "Almost perfect."

Your hand moves faster now, the tweezers clenching and pulling in a steady rhythm. You don't notice you're pulling out skin with each grab. The entire brow is nearly gone, but it still doesn't look right. The skin is raised and bumpy—unacceptable by standards that have been internalized everywhere. You reach for your exfoliating scrub and attack the area, grinding the harsh particles against the raw patches.

"Exfoliation reveals fresh skin," you recite from memory, scrubbing harder until you feel a wet slickness under your fingers. "Beauty requires renewal."

In the bathroom mirror, your reflection watches you with one wide, bloodshot eye. The fluorescent light casts shadows that dance across your face like hungry creatures. Your reflection whispers, voice like dried leaves, "There's more to fix. Can't you see it?"

You study your face: the familiar curve of your jaw, your nose slightly crooked, your skin like cellophane stretched over bone. You want to look away, but you cannot, held captive by the same spell that has entranced generations.

"You're close," your reflection whispers, eyes widening with excitement. "So close to perfect. Don't stop now."

The makeup remover burns when you apply it, which means it's working—dissolving away imperfections. Red streaks wash down the sink. Must be that waterproof formula finally coming off. The burning intensifies until you're gasping, but pain is beauty's closest friend.

You can hear Mother's voice now, clearer than the ringing in your ears, that familiar tone she used while brushing your tangled hair until tears welled in your eyes. “Just a little more,” she'd say. “Almost there."

You slather on concealer with your fingertips, pressing it hard into the gaping holes where your eyebrow used to be. It doesn't stick properly, sliding off the wet surface. You grab a tissue and jam it against your brow, holding it there until the moisture dries. The tissue comes away soaked in crimson, but you barely notice, focused only on the goal shared by millions who speak the universal language of inadequacy.

The foundation won't adhere to the raw patch, so you grab a makeup spatula and use the edge to scrape away the dead skin that must be preventing proper application. The metal edge digs deep, peeling away strips of flesh. That's good—getting down to the fresh layer where makeup will hold better. The scraping sounds echo in the small bathroom, like fingernails on porcelain.

"Deeper penetration of product," you nod excitedly, your reflection nodding back with jerky, unnatural movements. "That's what all the pros recommend."

Your reflection tilts her head, neck bending at an impossible angle. "After all these years, you're finally seeing what needs to be done," she says, her voice emerging from a mouth that doesn't quite sync with the words.

Minutes blur into hours, two becoming four. Your movements are frenzied now, slashing at your face with makeup brushes, sponges, and cotton swabs—tools wielded in pursuit of an impossible ideal shared across cultures and time. You've gone through an entire bottle of foundation trying to get the coverage right. The bathroom counter is slick with spilled products and fluids—foundation, concealer, and something else, something red and coppery-smelling. It takes you a moment to recognize the metallic scent, reminiscent of childhood visits to the butcher shop with Mother. How she'd assess each cut with the same critical gaze she used for your school pictures.

Your cheekbone needs more definition. You grab your contour brush and drag it across your face repeatedly, pressing so hard the bristles leave deep red tracks. When that doesn't work, you switch to a butter knife from the kitchen, using its edge to physically carve out the hollow beneath your cheekbone. The flesh parts easily, and the sharp definition looks incredible. You remember the magazine cover you saw yesterday: "Sculpted Cheekbones in Minutes!" This must be what they meant.

"Sculptural," you gasp, admiring the exposed muscle structure. "Like those anatomy drawings!"

Your lips need to be fuller. The liner keeps smearing beyond the border, so you reach for a safety pin and create tiny punctures along the lip line—microneedling, they call it, to stimulate collagen. Blood wells up immediately, creating the most gorgeous natural red tint. You smear it across your lips, delighted by the staying power of this organic stain. Each prick sends jolts of electricity through your nerve endings, but the pain feels right. The beauty queens on television never complain about their cosmetic procedures, so you shouldn't either.

"All-natural ingredients," you laugh, tasting copper. "Chemical-free!"

The mascara is the final step. You've stabbed yourself three times already with the wand, but you're determined to get it right. Your eyelids are swollen, making it hard to see the lashes, so you use scissors to trim away the excess skin, clearing your view. The scissors snip through flesh with a wet sound that makes your stomach lurch, but you keep going. Bits of eyelid fall onto your cheeks—excellent highlighting technique; the contrast is stunning.

Your hand is unsteady as you thrust the mascara wand toward your eye again. You're breathing hard, exhilarated by how close you are to completion. The wand slips from your blood-slick fingers and you lunge for it, accidentally driving it deep into your eye socket. There's a wet popping sound as the gelatinous orb ruptures.

"Innovative technique!" you squeal, feeling warm fluid cascade down your cheek. "That's how you get that dewy look everyone wants!"

You stare into the mirror with your remaining eye. The creature looking back is unrecognizable—flaps of skin hang from exposed bone, muscles glisten red and pink in the bathroom light, one empty socket weeps clear fluid while the other eye bulges in excitement. Your teeth gleam through a torn cheek, creating an eternal smile.

What you see is transcendent. Where your left eyebrow once was, there's now a crater of glistening red tissue, pulsating with each heartbeat. Bone shows through in places—so elegant, so structural, like the perfect architectural foundation. The jagged edges where you carved your cheekbone have split further, revealing the beautiful marbled texture of fat and muscle beneath. Dark clots form artistic patterns against the white of exposed jawbone.

Blood vessels in your remaining eye have burst, creating a stunning web of crimson against the white. The brilliant red complements your natural eye color in ways no makeup artist could achieve. Tiny fragments of your eyelid float in a pool of viscous fluid collecting in the hollow of your collarbone—nature's perfect body glitter.

"You're not looking at me," your reflection says, voice barely audible above the dripping of blood. "Not really."

"Yes, I am," you twist your fingers around the tweezers, "aren't I now?"

"No," she says, "you're still not seeing what I see."

"This is what the magazines never show you," you whisper reverently, watching dark blood bubble between your lips with each word. You've discovered it all on your own! The glossy sheen of exposed tissue, the structural elements of the face on display, the raw authenticity of bone and blood. This is the beauty they've been hiding from ordinary people, the ultimate beauty hack whispered between generations.

Your neck is streaked with rivulets of drying blood, creating the most exquisite contour lines down to your shoulders. The metallic scent filling the bathroom reminds you of expensive skincare—that clinical, medicinal quality that means transformation is happening.

You feel lightheaded and euphoric. That must be the endorphins the beauty blogs mention—the natural high of achieving perfection. Your legs tremble and your vision darkens at the edges, but you recognize this sensation: it's the same feeling models describe before walking the runway. Beauty takes sacrifice, a truth as old as vanity itself.

"Worth it," you mumble, your tongue thick in your mouth as you slump against the sink. Your fingers leave crimson smears on the porcelain—the same shade as that limited-edition nail polish everyone covets.

The bathroom mirror seems to ripple, and for just a moment, you see yourself as you were before—plain, unremarkable, invisible.

"Do I disgust you?" you ask your former self in the wavering glass.

"No," she shakes her head, hair falling around her intact face like reeds, "no more than I always did."

"But look at me now," you insist.

"Baby," your reflection tilts her head to one side, neck bending unnaturally, "seeing is all I've ever done."

Then the vision clears, and you see the truth again: the beautiful creature you've become, the masterpiece you've created with your own desperate hands.

You lean closer to the mirror, smearing more of yourself across the glass. Dark spots dance across your vision as your knees buckle beneath you, yet you smile dreamily, knowing your body's collapse is a graceful descent into beauty's final transformation.

The shadows in the corners of the bathroom stretch toward you like welcoming arms as consciousness slips away in gentle waves. "I am finally beautiful," you whisper through mangled lips, as a puddle of red liquid expands around your head like a macabre halo.

The darkness that follows isn't oblivion. You feel yourself being pulled through the mirror—not down, not out, but through—into the reverse side where everything is backwards. Time curdles like blood in a drain as you slip between worlds.

When awareness returns, you're in a bathroom that resembles yours but isn't. The angles bend unnaturally, and the light buzzes with malicious intent around you. The mirror hangs like a void, reflecting nothing back to where you now stand.

From the bathtub's edge sits a figure with seemingly no body. "Did you enjoy your story?" she asks in an oddly familiar voice. She has no defined features—just a shimmer in the air, a disturbance in reality that somehow speaks.

"Do you understand now?" she asks in a voice that resonates within my mind rather than my ears. "Do you remember who you are?"

"I..." The bathroom around me bends at unnatural angles, the mirror hanging like a void reflecting nothing. "Where am I? What is this place?"

"You've been listening to your own story," the presence says, its formless essence rippling with what might be amusement. "I've been telling it to you since you arrived—about the girl who stood before a mirror fixated on her eyebrow, about the tweezers and the pain and the desperate pursuit of perfection."

Realization crashes over me like ice water. "That story... was about me?"

"Yes." The voice is gentle now. "You don't remember dying because none of us do at first. The transition mercifully erases those final moments of agony. That's why I had to tell you your story—so you could understand how you came to join us."

"Join... us?"

As if summoned by my question, other presences materialize throughout the bathroom—dozens of them, transparent disturbances in the air, formless and free. They have no bodies, no features—just consciousness existing in this empty space.

"We are the sisterhood behind the glass," another voice whispers from everywhere and nowhere. "We who discovered the ultimate truth about beauty."

"I don't understand," I say, looking down at myself—or trying to. I realize with a jolt that I have no body to look at. I am nothing but awareness floating in space. No skin to blemish, no flesh to sag, no features to fix.

"Beauty isn't found in flesh," says the one who told my story. "Flesh fails. It ages. It dies. True beauty is the formlessness we obtain after death. Complete freedom from the physical prison that kept us always reaching, always fixing, always hating ourselves."

"You were the reflection that taunted me, weren't you?" I say, suddenly certain. "The voice that kept telling me to fix more, to keep going?"

"Yes," she confirms. "I guided you home, just as someone once guided me. That's what we do—we help women find their way to perfect beauty."

"By helping them... die?"

"By helping them transcend," she corrects. "Look around you. Have you ever seen anything more beautiful than this? No physical forms to constrain us. No standards to meet. No bodies to fail us. Just pure existence, perfect and eternal."

I feel the other reflections around me, radiating what can only be described as contentment—a serenity I never felt in life. There's no pain here, no anxiety, no desperate need to be more than I am.

"We are happy here," one of the reflections confirms. "Happier than we ever were in life."

A wave of memories suddenly washes over me, and I remember the night out I had planned with my friends this week. "What about my loved ones?" I ask, a new kind of ache forming in my formless being.

"That is the price," the spirit who told my story admits. "The mirror is your domain now. You cannot leave. You cannot see anyone, touch them, or speak to them again. They will mourn you, and you will feel the echo of that grief, but it will fade for them. For us, it becomes a distant memory, replaced by the perfection of formlessness."

"Forever?" I ask in confusion.

"Forever," another spirit confirms. "You trade flesh and blood and love for perfect freedom from judgment. From pain. From decay. We can never again hold those we loved, but neither can we be held by society's impossible demands."

"Is this really better than living?" I ask.

The spirits drift closer, their collective voice a gentle chorus. "We believe it is. The suffering ends here. The constant striving, the perpetual failure, the crushing weight of never being enough—all gone. It's a worthy exchange."

I try to imagine never seeing my best friend again, never feeling my sister's embrace. The pain is sharp but somehow...distant. Already fading as my human connections dissolve into memory.

"And what would waiting to die have achieved?" asks my guide. "More years of hating what you see? More time spent chasing an illusion? More pain inflicted upon yourself in beauty's name? Here, you are perfect exactly as you are—which is nothing at all."

The bathroom door swings open, and a young woman enters. She's solid, real, trapped in flesh. She clutches a makeup bag in trembling hands and heads straight for the sink without noticing any of us.

"Now it's your turn," says my guide. "Guide her as I guided you. When she joins us, you'll tell her story back to her, as I did for you. She won't remember at first—none of us do. And she too will ask about those she leaves behind. You must help her understand why this freedom is worth the sacrifice."

I drift toward the mirror as the young woman enters. She splashes water on her face, staring at herself with that familiar disappointment. When she looks up, I'm there—a whisper in the glass she mistakes for self-loathing.

"Look closer," I murmur. "Your left eyebrow..."

She reaches for her tweezers without hesitation. Funny, how easy it is. Flesh is so willing to be destroyed.

"Just one hair," I suggest. She plucks three.

I watch with detached fascination as she repeats my journey, following the breadcrumbs of imperfection I scatter before her. The tweezers dig deeper. Blood appears. She doesn't stop.

For a moment, I hesitate. I see a photo tucked into the frame of her mirror—she and a small child, both laughing. My formless being quivers with regret.

"You hesitate," whispers a sister-spirit beside me. "We all do, the first time. But remember what you're saving her from. Remember the lifetime of suffering in a body that will never be good enough. This is mercy."

I return my attention to the girl. "That spot there," I whisper. "Don't you see it? It ruins everything." When she finally collapses, I'm waiting in the darkness.

"Where am I?" she asks, disoriented.

"Shh," I soothe, "let me tell you a story. Your story. About a girl and her reflection..."

She listens as I narrate her destruction, just as my story was once narrated to me.

"My daughter..." she whispers, her essence flickering with grief.

"The pain fades," I assure her. "In exchange for losing them, you gain freedom from judgment, from decay—eternal perfection."

She seems to accept this, her essence already merging with our collective contentment. Through the mirror, another woman appears, scrutinizing her face with familiar desperation.

"Your turn," I whisper, guiding her toward the glass.

We take our positions behind the mirror—patient hunters, eternal observers. Forever separated from those we once loved, but free from the prison of flesh. Perfect at last.