Looking Good: The Struggle To Be Human-Shaped And Presentable.

You know exactly what it means to make an effort with how you look. It means you have decided, right from the start of the day, that you are going to present yourself to the world as a functioning member of the human race not as something that crawled out from under a sofa and wandered outside by mistake. 

Let’s be real though looking neat and tidy is basically fighting a constant war against your natural default setting, which is “comfortable, slightly crumpled, and possibly covered in bits of food you can’t explain.” First off, there are clothes. If you care about your appearance, you can’t just grab whatever is nearest and put it on backwards. You have to make actual decisions. You have to work out what colours go together, what fits properly, and which items don’t have mysterious brown marks that might be gravy, might be coffee, or might be something science hasn’t named yet. This is way harder than it sounds. I once stood in front of my wardrobe for twenty-five minutes holding two shirts that both looked blue, but one was clearly “sky blue” and the other was “navy blue” and I couldn’t for the life of me work out if they matched or clashed so loudly they would make dogs bark. And don’t even get me started on trousers. Trousers are a conspiracy. They claim to come in sizes but those sizes are made up by people who have never seen a real human body. If they fit your waist, they end at your ankles like you’re waiting for a flood. If they’re long enough, they slide down your hips unless you fasten a belt so tight you can only breathe in tiny little sips all day. Looking good is just finding the exact middle point between “falling down” and “being slowly cut in half. 

Then we get to grooming. People who take pride in how they look have whole cupboards full of stuff  gels, sprays, creams, balms, tools that look like they should be used to fix cars or perform surgery. I tried to join that club once. I bought something called “styling paste” that said it would give me “effortless, natural definition.” What it gave me was hair that felt like wet concrete and collected every single speck of dust within a three-mile radius. I walked around all day looking like I’d glued a scrubbing brush to my head and forgotten about it. Shaving is no better  every morning you drag sharp metal across your face hoping you won’t accidentally take off a layer of skin or cut your ear off, and at the end you look exactly the same as you did yesterday, just slightly redder. 

So why do we put ourselves through all this? Why spend time picking outfits and scrubbing and smoothing and adjusting? Because how you look is the first thing people see. When you make the effort, you’re saying without speaking: “I respect you enough not to turn up looking like I slept in a bin.” You’re saying: “I respect myself enough to look like I actually belong here.” And there really is a great feeling when you catch your reflection and think – hey, I don’t look like a complete disaster today! You don’t have to be handsome or fancy or look like you stepped off a billboard. You just need to look like you tried, like you care, like you know how clothes work more or less. Of course you don’t want to go overboard. You don’t need to spend three hours getting ready or carry a mirror everywhere you go. It’s just about finding what works for you, wearing what makes you feel okay, and making sure you look like a real person instead of a pile of laundry that grew legs. 

So yes  I make the effort. I pick clothes that mostly go together. I keep my hair out of my eyes. I check my buttons are done and my zips are up.But  I still occasionally leave the house with my shirt tucked into my underwear!