Around the World: Paris on beauty

By Lisa Xia

Paris is a city that is preoccupied with many things: la politesse, expensive dog-grooming and fresh-smelling toilet paper, for example. But above even apple-scented Charmin, Paris is a city that harbors a strong obsession with beauty.

The stony facades of centuries-old buildings are continually cleaned so that they glow with their original luster. The trees that line the boulevards are sculpted year-round to resemble large green and brown rectangular prisms; they are stuck awkwardly upon stiff trunks, looking utterly unnatural yet giving off an air of formality that is matched only by the ambience which surrounds the Parisians, who wander underneath with their pedigreed dogs. And, because these Parisians cannot be bothered to rather unbeautifully squat down and clean their puppy feces, the city hires men on motorbikes to vacuum poopies off the street each morning.

I find the nights to be most beautiful of all, however, when the city is dark (because they have decided that not 8 p.m., not 9 p.m., but oh, about 8:20 p.m. is a good time to close down the shops) and the grandiose Arc de Triomphe is lit up by hundreds of spotlights, drawing magnificent shadows that trace the edges of the looming, carved stones. The Tour Eiffel gleams over the Seine, sparkling in thousands of twinkling lights in front of a blackened backdrop of the night sky.

It is almost as if there exists some lucrative and unspoken, yet widely understood rule that requires everything to be beautiful.

But the almost-anal Parisian concern with beauty transcends not only their upkeep of the city, but also their individual behaviors, mannerisms and even their words. While they have proven no immunity to the proliferation of Americanization (there are McDonalds at every other street corner and despite many of them might try to argue otherwise, Parisians do eat there … a lot), the Parisian standards have not yet befallen to the “casualization” of daily life that has become increasingly prevalent in America, where casual Fridays is becoming the norm and the theatre no longer requires its audience to don formal attire.

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The Parisians always appear wonderfully dressed, hustling through the streets, proper in well-tailored suits and tapered skirts with leather shoes that never fail to match. Their backs are always straight and they walk with a pompous certainty, often loudly conversing in French, but rarely stopping to smile.

They describe everything as jolie here, a further extension of the beauty preoccupation. Your shoes are jolie, the sweatshirt is jolie, and even the scents of the toilet paper are jolie. As nice as it is that the French have found such a versatile word to describe all things as nice and beautiful, it still feels rather funny when my Parisian friend, Jeremy, pulls out a $5 dollar “I love Chicago” t-shirt that you can buy in any Chicago street corner, and explains to me in English that it is very beautiful.

Once, over seven euro beers (incidentally, I’ve found the prices in Paris not to be so jolie), I tried to explain to Jeremy the casual nature of dress in the States. In Paris, the only people who wear jeans and sneakers are students, but only if they are coupled with blazers, sweaters and ornate scarves. I divulged that I would often roll out of bed in sweatpants, throw my hair back into a messy “I just woke up ten minutes ago and class started half an hour ago, so do you want to fight about it” ponytail, search for my flip-flops and go about my day. And, I told him, I wasn’t the only one.

Up until this point, we had been slowly sipping our Kronenburg and grenadines – slowly because I couldn’t afford another beer – but when I finished my sentence, I found that Jeremy had put down his glass mid-sip and was staring at me with large round eyes.

“What?!” I said.

He stuttered for a bit, gasping with incredulity.

“Well…” he said finally with an exasperated sigh. “Well, that’s just … It’s not very beautiful.”

I almost laughed at his absurdity, thinking to myself, “Are you *&^%$%# kidding me?”

But in my efforts to assimilate into this strange culture, I didn’t say it aloud.

Jeremy had explained to me once before that French girls do not swear. It’s not very jolie.

Lisa Xia is studying abroad in Paris, France this semester. Her column usually appears every third Wednesday. She can be reached at [email protected].