What if You Stopped Looking in the Mirror for a Year?
Photo: Coppi Barbieri/Trunk Archive
How often do you look in the mirror? More importantly, how do you feel about yourself when you do? Beautiful? Confident? Or do you see only flaws? For sociology professor Kjerstin Gruys, the mirror became a source of stress and low self-esteem at precisely the time she wanted to feel great about herself: right before her wedding. So Gruys made the radical choice to stop looking at mirrors altogether.
Gruys had previously battled an eating disorder and became concerned when she found herself obsessed with looking like the perfect bride. It all started innocently enough while she was searching for The Dress—the magic garment she hoped would make everyone gasp as she walked down the aisle. She found it for a song at a sample sale, but felt less and less sure every time she looked in the mirror. “Trying on my wedding dress was supposed to instill confidence and anticipation for the big day, but the sight of a big belly hiding underneath the fabric was disheartening. I felt like I couldn’t breathe when it was fully zipped,” writes Gruys in her book Mirror Mirror Off The Wall. “I began to resent the dress and myself.” Thinking the solution was a new dress rather than a new perspective, she bought two more dresses. “I’d become the worst version of myself: insecure, indecisive and vain,” she says.
It was the opposite of everything Gruys believed in. She was studying the culture of beauty while working towards her PhD in sociology, learning to understand how it shapes women’s lives. She’d publicly lectured on the dangers of eating disorders, encouraging others to accept and celebrate their diverse bodies. “ I made it my life’s work to help women feel confident, strong and beautiful,” she says. “Yet I was still struggling to accept my own body. I was a body-image expert with a body image problem.”
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Something had to change. Gruys honed in on the source of the problem: her obsession with her appearance. If she could eliminate the mirror, she figured, she would rid herself of a lot of her anxiety. After all, how can you obsess about your looks when you can’t see yourself? “The heart of the project was to put myself in a healthier and happier state of mind,” Gruys says.
Gruys’ book chronicles her year without mirrors in hilarious detail. She expanded her rule to include any reflective surface—she didn’t want to be checking herself out in passing windows. She says she didn’t cheat, not even on her wedding day, but she did continue to wear makeup. “I just cut back on what I was wearing to very sheer products,” Gruys says. “It ended up being an unexpected experiment and finding out that people don’t really care if I am wearing eyeliner or not. The beauty industry tells you that eyeliner will change your life, that this eyeliner will make a man fall in love with you and stay in love with you,” she says. “That’s obviously not true on a logical level, but when you give up the eyeliner you’ve been wearing for 10 years, you realize how powerless that eyeliner is.”
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The experiment brought on a string of positive changes. Gruys began to focus on what was important: not her wedding dress and whether it made her look heavy, but the man she was marrying. She was focusing on getting to work rather than getting ready, “Suddenly a big chunk of mental energy was taken off of my plate and it was fantastic. I really got into the groove with my work.”
The biggest change happened after her wedding day. “ I could just live out this new found relaxation about my looks and enjoy it and it really did confirm for me that wedding culture itself was a huge, huge issue for me,” Gruys says. She was, however, wary of the project ending now that she was in a place where she didn’t rely on mirrors to feel good (or bad) about herself. “I was nervous that all of this newfound confidence would crumble as soon as I went back to those old habits.” But when she finally looked in the mirror, she simply felt like she was seeing an old friend whom she had missed.
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Ultimately it was an experiment that left lasting changes. “I am a lot more relaxed about my appearance,” Gruys says. “I look in the mirror a lot less than I used to, I just have this really powerful evidence that looking in the mirror all the time was not an improvement for my happiness—if anything it was the opposite—and frankly a waste of time considering all of the other things I really enjoy spending time on.”
Would you ever give up mirrors for a year?
