My two best friends happen to be the daughters of one of my mom’s closest friends—we all grew up together—which means my friends and I get to talk about our families of origin with a satisfying level of shared understanding. When we swap stories about recent holiday gatherings, we can all picture the dynamics around our respective dining room tables with laughing, and sometimes cringeworthy, clarity.
Recently, while discussing packing for vacation, Katie, Jane, and I realized we are all much higher maintenance than our mothers. My mom can pack for three months overseas in half a carry-on suitcase; the same goes for my friends’ mom, who somehow always manages to have whatever anyone needs with the smallest bag of them all. Meanwhile, I prefer to travel with three heat-assisted hair devices, and Katie packs a whole separate duffel for her toiletries.
With moms like ours, how, we all wondered, did we become so vain?
I don’t have an answer to this, but I do feel unsettled by it. Between admiring my low-maintenance mother and having enough biblical literacy to know vanity isn’t virtuous (for example, Proverbs 31:30: “Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised”), I’ve carried a sense of shame for giving too much attention to my looks. And I’ve been doing it ever since I swapped glasses for contacts in the seventh grade.
My unease has become more pressing, or at least more present, now that I am raising young daughters who are also highly interested in their appearance. They’ve asked for makeup kits for Christmas multiple years in a row, and whenever given autonomy in selecting their outfits for the day, they choose sequined tutus. In front of a full-length mirror in our home, I overheard, with mixed awe and revulsion, my 6-year-old say to her 4-year-old sister, “I just love the way that I look.”
I believe my daughters are lovingly created and beautiful, and I’m glad they are grounded in their goodness. I see in my work as a psychotherapist how much time people waste on self-loathing, and I don’t want that for my children. Better for their minds and hearts to solve real problems than to stress over a sunspot on the bridge of a nose.
Still, I worry about how much time they spend focusing on appearance. I also worry about the energy I expend attending to my hair, skin, and body. Would I rather we not think about appearances at all? Maybe. It feels like a holier path.
I have to believe that spiritual heroines of mine—such as Mother Teresa, Corrie Ten Boom, Julian of Norwich, and Simone Weil—spent a lot less time looking in the mirror than I do. I have no way of knowing, but I imagine this had less to do with an active choice to shun vanity and more to do with the fact that their appearance simply wasn’t their priority. Loving God and loving God’s people was their focus, not their looks. I picture these women as having an innate sense of what God told Samuel as he looked for the person God intended him to anoint: “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature . . . for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Sam. 16:7).
St. Augustine of Hippo’s concept of “rightly ordered love”—which is how he defines virtue—is useful here, I think. He writes:
Living a just and holy life requires one to be capable of an objective and impartial evaluation of things: to love things, that is to say, in the right order, so that you do not love what is not to be loved, or fail to love what is to be loved, or have a greater love for what should be loved less, or an equal love for things that should be loved less or more, or a lesser or greater love for things that should be loved equally.
We live a virtuous life when we love things in the proper order. It’s OK to relish chocolate chip cookies, but we shouldn’t crave them so much we’d shove a child out of the way in order to snatch the last cookie from a plate. It’s fine to have fun trying out a new skincare routine or learning to French braid—but if time and other resources spent enhancing our appearance get in the way of connecting with our families or helping a neighbor in need, we have a problem.
Practically speaking, conveying this message in my parenting involves two steps. First—and this is hard—I have to accept that caring about looks is not a moral failing. My daughters and I love beautiful things. We ooh over a perfectly iced cake, ahh over statement wallpaper, and feel happy when we look down and see bubblegum-pink polished toenails. We take delight in aesthetics, and that’s OK. Delight in beauty, I have to believe, is a gift from the source of all life who called creation good.
When I’m able to loosen my judgment of myself or others, I’ve noticed, I create space for reflection and change. Acceptance, in other words, can enable “rightly ordered love,” which is the next step. While acceptance is a mindset, ordering love is about behavior.
Recently, after watching my 6-year-old style her hair and then talk about how much she liked her look, I repeated to her something I remember my parents saying to me throughout my childhood: “It’s what’s on the inside that counts.” While I don’t think this statement is wrong or even badly conveyed, I see now that the effectiveness of my parents’ words stemmed from the fact they were paired with action. I knew exactly what mattered to my parents because I witnessed daily how they spent their time: driving elderly friends to doctor appointments, reading books, welcoming the grumpy neighbor in for a cup of coffee, growing vegetables in the garden.
And so as an admittedly vain parent the goal for me is this: I strive to align the way I spend my time with what I know to be truly important. Let my children see me spend many more hours laughing with friends, volunteering in the community, and enjoying family meals than shopping for new clothes, blow-drying my hair, or looking in the mirror. Let it be clear through my actions that I care more about my character than my face.
This article also appears in the October 2025 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 90, No. 10, pages 43-44). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Pexels/RDNE
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