There is such a magical country in which everything is beautiful: there is always a cloudless blue sky, flowering meadows, abundant tables, at which kind and noble people who live by honest work feast. There are happy children, courageous men and beautiful women. The country is called "Kakranshiya" - perhaps this is the only thing that is ugly in it, but this happens with countries, some even have abbreviations instead of names.

Everything is wonderful in this wonderful country, but women deserve special attention - they “don’t give a kiss without love”, get married once and for life, and then every year they give birth in the field, milk cows every hour, shear sheep, nurse grandchildren and cultivate gardens. Five-course dinners are prepared three times a day, they wash their hands and rinse in the river, they knit as a rest (see sheep), they tell good stories to children until midnight, and at four in the morning they already collect “village testicles” from under hundreds of chickens. So that the husband, I remind you, courageous and the only one, the head of the family, whom she infinitely respects and obeys in everything, gets fried eggs from ten fresh eggs for breakfast - well, in addition to four other dishes. Also, these women are beautiful.

Each with its own individual beauty, all care for which is a decoction of chamomile and a good disposition. Because true beauty comes from nature. From nature. Not like the current scum, which are pumped up with fillers, Botox and some kind of incomprehensible threads. And who all, well, literally all look the same.

"Kakranshiya" is not a country where only Russian is spoken. Its population speaks English, Spanish, and Portuguese, for example. But the essence is about the same: women are now all the same, useless and spend too much money on cosmetologists (which are absent in principle in Kakrani). They buy themselves new faces - or rather, one face for all.

Sometimes, when I come to the Feira da Ladra flea market in Lisbon, I leaf through old photo albums out of curiosity. Without wondering how someone's family history ended up in a junk shop - it's none of my business, families are different. Just scrolling, looking and trying to find images of these beautiful women. Those who owned the secret of how to remain a young beauty solely with the help of field chamomile, crushed raccoon droppings and good disposition.

These photos - they are amazing at first. A woman in a wedding dress, she looks about forty, that is, plus or minus my age. She is really very pretty, even though her carefully thoughtful look was clearly suggested by the photographer, which is very reminiscent of today's Instagram. I can still hear that voice from the fifties: head a little to the right, lower your eyelashes a little, you have a very beautiful profile, and your nose looks thinner and straighter. And she tilts, lowers, freezes - everything is there, you will be a beauty in the picture, we will retouch quite a bit. Yes, and rightly so, why would someone need a portrait where you hunched over, stuck out your belly and squinted. Well, okay, it's still good - for her age. And then I look at the date and understand that the woman in the picture is sixteen years old. Not forty, not even thirty. Even, Christmas trees, not twenty-five. This is, in essence, a photograph of yesterday's child.

I scroll further: the child turns into a woman and poses in the company of her friends. Everyone has a perm, eyebrows in a thread and bright lipstick - this is clear even in a black and white picture. Dresses to the knees, puffed sleeves, shoes with the same heels - such was the fashion then. I would take these women for sisters, but no, it says: "With friends."

You understand what I'm getting at, right?

What kindividuality is there. Women who had the opportunity to follow fashion always followed it. Always spend money on personal care. We always tried to outwardly correspond to the current, so to speak, trends, which, of course, made them similar to each other to a certain extent.

And those unfortunates that plowed, milked, gave birth in the field - they were not beautiful. Well, excuse me. Perhaps they had an inner light, charm and even sex appeal. But their external attractiveness ended, with the rarest exception, along with youth. Hard physical labor, frequent pregnancies, difficult life and lack of good self-care - and no rabbit droppings, free and meaningless, will save you. This is how the human body works. And so the world works, in which beauty is still equal to youth. Or at least youthfulness.

Yes, a forty-year-old woman is now considered young. And is young - simply because she is still fertile. It doesn’t matter at all whether she has children or not, she can be a loner or childfree, but theoretically and practically her body is able to conceive, endure and give birth to offspring. In many places on our long-suffering planet, life expectancy has increased, and we know to whom and to what we owe it.

Youth began to last longer. My body, for example, looks completely different from the body of my age half a century ago. Well, why, pray tell, should I not do everything to make my face - and everything is much sadder with a face, gravity be damned - also look younger?Why don't I and millions of women use the achievements of science (and cosmetology is part of medicine) to feel beautiful? To enjoy what I see in the mirror?

To people who drown for naturalness and are ashamed of Botox, I want to say: come on, you will treat migraine or intestinal colic with the very hare droppings that, in your opinion, I should smear on my face. Not that wrinkles and ptosis are a disease, not at all. But if I want to reduce them, if there are technological and effective ways to do this, why would I refuse them?

To reach out to the non-existent ideal of "women from Kakraņi"? To a phantom that exists only in the fantasies of the inhabitants of this magical land? For someone to say: “But you have not lost your individuality”? For what - for that?

I will never judge women who follow fashion. Women who have had blepharoplasty, Botox injections or fillers.

Women who spend money and time to please themselves and feel good about themselves. We are not victims of the so-called beauty industry - this is our choice. And this is our life, because, for example, I don’t have time to collect chamomile, it’s easier for me to buy a good mask with an extract of this very chamomile, smear it, wash it off and go live my life.

The cult of naturalness, implanted everywhere, is a big lie and the result of a short memory of mankind. Attempts to fit women into a format dictated by blurry photographs from old albums and false memories of a carefree childhood, when the grass was greener, and the generation of grandmothers was kinder and more beautiful. And it's also fashion. To follow or not to follow is the free choice of any woman. In the end, isn't that what those same ladies with bleached curls and eyebrows-threads fought for? And isn't that what we're fighting for now?

The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the position of the editors.

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