Should it really be called vanity if you, in passing, happen to glance at your reflection in a darkened store window? Or if at a red light, your eyes wander to the rear view mirror and you quickly peep at your appearance. Is it really so bad?
Should it be considered vain to duct tape pictures of yourself to the ceiling above your bed so you can drift to sleep with visions of your own beautiful face in your head? I think not. Who wants to think of ugly people before bed? Certainly not me; nor should I be condemned vain for it!
People have been scoping out their own reflections for years and years - since the middle ages. Those who had the means would acquire slightly convex discs of expertly buffed and highly polished metal, bronze, tin or silver, which would reflect light and adequately expose every shadow of malnutrition, every rotted tooth from inadequate dental hygiene and every scar from small pox. Eventually, as an alternative to the extreme polishing endured to make such a reflective surface, mirrors were produced as the result of a unique chemical process in which glass was carefully coated with metallic silver. Impressively, this is not far off from the way they are made today. Modern mirrors are made by covering a thin layer of molten aluminum or silver onto the back of a plate of glass in a vacuum.
From the middle ages to the beginning of the 19th century, mirrors stood for wealth and good taste. They were the corner stone of any chicly decorated room and were indicative of refinement and sophistication. Mirrors made in Venice were considered to be the peak of quality and fine craftsmanship until those mirror making Venetians leaked the secrets of the trade to Paris and London. This caused the mirror craze to spread all throughout Europe; everyone had to have a mirror and the bigger the better!
Mirrors became a fixture in the dressing rooms of most upper class women. Dressing rooms became, in the Woolfian sense, a room of one’s own in which women could behave as they wished and talk as they wished without the weight of a watchful and intrusive masculine gaze. This was the birthplace of the vanity. The cleverly designed piece of furniture which features a generously sized mirror placed conveniently atop a usually ornately crafted dressing table filled with a multitude of storage options: from spacious, vinyl-lined drawers for easy-to-clean cosmetics storage, to pull-out doors offering a variety of hooks and rings for necklaces and other accessories.
Vanities, dressing tables and the rooms which contained them became the foundation from which Victorian women associated moments of liberty and free speech during a time which expressly forbade many of these behaviors from young ladies and women of privilege. Vanities were the tangible touchstone to independence; the focal piece of a realm separated from the social conventions of the real world.
Today, vanities can be found in most American homes. There are vanities made especially for children; vanities for the bathroom; vanities for the bedroom. Vanities for any and all style’s of decor, still keeping up the tradition of high function meeting high fashion. And luckily, your friends at morevanities.com respect this American tradition of gazing at oneself for hours on end; carefully dissecting the odd proportions of your face, or the barely detectable size difference between your nostrils. So the next time someone calls you vain, narcissistic or even arrogant, just remember that your bigheaded friends at morevanities.com support you and all of your vanity needs.
For more information and a great variety of vanities, check out www.MoreVanities.com. Ainslie Hogarth is a marketing associate for Cymax Stores Inc., a premier online furniture distribution company.