Garnet Rogers - The Beauty Game lyrics

She stands before the mirror Selects a hat and tries it on for size She can't see the beauty looking back She only sees the lines around her eyes And the corners of her mouth turn down They tighten with self-consciousness and shame She takes off the hat, leaves the store Concedes another battle in the beauty game She's tried and failed to meet her mother's standards Ever since she was a child And the models she would like to be Preach diet, self-loathing and denial And their legs are long and tawny Their eyes and lips and breasts all look the same And they bear the marks of surgeons' knives And the hidden deeper scarring of the beauty game She recalls the lies her mother taught her when she was impressionable and young "Nice girls don't express themselves To get a man play it safe, play it dumb" Now her mother's old and bitter When she visits her she's sorry that she came A fading gentle tyrant One more walking wounded in the beauty game So she didn't get the hat she liked It didn't look as good as the one in the magazine Instead she Œphoned a friend up to commiserate and talk about what might've been "Why can't a man just love me for my humor and my strength and heart and brain?" Worst of all it's she who can't accept herself and live outside the beauty game