Sheila (38)

Nashville, Tennesse

Beauty is Pain(ter)

Sheila’s mom was an Avon lady, so from a young age she was enamored with hair and makeup. Where many young women love the idea of being pretty, Sheila took it to the extreme even at a young age. At only twelve years old she asked her mom for a breast augmentation. When she was a senior in high schoolshe had her first breast augmentation (with her mom signing the parental forms!) From there, the floodgates were opened for tens-of-thousands of dollars of surgeries and procedures to follow. Now, as a single mom and full-time painter/artist, Sheila is continuing on her extreme beauty journey.

Since that first surgery, Sheila has had her breasts enhanced three more times, filler injected into all areas of her face, her nose rebuilt with cartilage from her ear, her jaw reconstructed, and teeth grinded down to be completely redesigned. She’s $50,000 in debt, but nothing will stop her in the quest to defy the inevitability of her greatest fear: aging. In addition to constant enhancements and preventative procedures, she has to find a way to carve out 5 hours per day to maintain her looks in everyday life. Sheila has implemented excessive routines that help achieve this goal - including an hour-long shower after an hour-long workout each morning, regular self-tanning, contouring on her face and body, hand makeup, and using other elaborate skincare products and health supplements. If she skips even one day of this routine, it leaves Sheila feeling defeated and disgusted with her looks; she won’t even be able to leave the house.

Sheila has a very distant and surface relationship with her family (specifically her mother and two sisters) and wants to genuinely connect with them, but she feels that she cannot because they do not understand or support her need for perfection. Admittedly, Sheila is nothing like her family who do not take their beauty regime near to such extremes. She comes from a religious family who believes that Sheila is perfect just the way God created her, and although they see her as beautiful, they would still think she is beautiful without all the unnecessary surgeries. Sheila interprets their perspective as lack of support or understanding. Therefore, they choose to not bring it up, but if they can’t talk about it, what is there to talk about? The disconnect has left Sheila’s relationships with her family surface-level, distant and
disconnected. Sheila yearns for the close-knit, unconditionally understood and accepted relationship that many women share with their mothers and sisters.

Beyond the relationship, her family worries that Sheila is putting her health at risk, and pray that something will finally wake her up. But even after a seizure and ER treatment during a botox-injection-gone-wrong, Sheila doesn’t see any issue with continuing her rituals and finding even more ways to turn back her physiological clock. Her sisters feel they can no longer relate to her, and worry that the impact of her vanity will soon be a detriment to her daughter, Rose, who is already beginning to join her mom in skincare and makeup routines. Sheila’s friends, on the other hand, sometimes use her looks to their own advantage - posting pictures with her and parading her on a night out in hopes of getting more looks from men. As she’s also searching for a man to live up to the high standards that Sheila sets for herself and everyone around her, even her beauty regiment gets in the way of her love life.

Sheila has already begun meeting with her plastic surgeon to learn about new techniques for reducing the visual impacts of aging on her neck and other areas, and will continue to go under the knife out of fear that she’ll lose her perfect image if she takes a break. But between work, single parenting, mending relationships with sisters and friends, and dating, what kind of toll will these procedures continue to take on Sheila and everyone around her?