'You Look Prettier With Your Mouth Closed'

A guest essay from Stephanie Pérez-Gurri.

“I love it. I hate it. It has made me so smart and so stupid at the same time,” wrote Stephanie Pérez-Gurri, former fashion editor at InStyle and the mind behind the newsletter Bobbie, in her recent essay “Consumption.” She was talking about fashion, but, naturally, her words made me think of my own relationship with beauty.

When Stephanie and I were in a writers group together last year, she recalled a phrase her grandmother used to repeat when she was growing up: Me veo mas bonita con la boca cerrada or, “I look prettier with my mouth closed.” Again, this made me think of my own relationship with beauty — how I have, in the past, used it as a proxy for personality, for identity, for a voice; maybe you can relate? — and I immediately wanted to hear more. I asked Stephanie to write a guest essay for The Unpublishable about it, which you can read below.

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‘You Look Prettier With Your Mouth Closed’

by Stephanie Pérez-Gurri

One of the most embarrassing parts of my childhood was when my mom would take us to Chili’s. She’d opt for the 2-for-1 margaritas just to steal the royal blue margarita glasses and get a good buzz to power her through the weekends with two young daughters. Sometimes the waiters would also bring the royal blue cocktail shaker to the table so that she could top off her glass with what was left inside.

Admittedly, the collection of royal blue margarita glasses with its matching shaker looked stunning against the royal blue backsplash of our kitchen. 

My mom had her plan well-curated: She’d put on her best face of makeup and blow out her hair. Living under the hot Miami sun had given her dewy, olive skin, and she’d sit at the booth with a white smile, a brown lip liner, heavy blush, highlighted hair, and jet black eyebrows with her two girls across from her. No one is immune to the power of appearance, and if anyone were to catch on that this ‘90s dream girl was waltzing into the Chili’s off of US-1 with her two young daughters just to swipe the blue margarita glasses, they certainly wouldn’t call her out on it. She was too pretty.

My favorite part of growing up was watching “I Love Lucy” with my grandmother. We’d watch Lucy on the days Univision played rerun episodes of the novelas we’d already seen.

My grandmother left Cuba in 1960 — my mom was six at the time — to come to the United States. My grandmother was a housewife and raised her children in my grandfather's shadow. Perhaps that was okay for her, because she had just left Cuba, from having to work the camps. Perhaps she felt as though she needed to conform, to shrink, in order to make it in a foreign place where she didn’t know the language. Perhaps this was more than enough, settling her family in the United States surpassing any of her wildest dreams. My grandfather ended up making a good living and my grandmother decided to have a few plastic surgery procedures. There was a sense of reinvention that permeated her early years in this country, but for better or for worse, perhaps the only thing she felt like she could reinvent was her face.

As a girl, I’d spend all my summers with her. My grandparents’ house sat on a 25-acre farm in Homestead and I’d rotate from helping my grandfather tend the chickens in the morning to helping my grandmother in the kitchen in the afternoons. We’d spend nights putting rollers in our hair and watching telenovelas starring beautiful, olive-skinned women with siren eyes — women who somehow always found themselves in a scene where they wore only a bra, or a swimsuit. The actresses never had many lines. Many men would speak to them passionately, to express the love and/or rage they felt towards them, but the women erred more on the quiet side, as if their physical presence alone was sufficient. 

Lucy was different. Not only was Lucy an American who spoke English, but she spoke a lot of English, constantly talking, endlessly conversing, consistently prodding. Lucy had a lot to say, a lot of opinions to express, a lot of needs she needed to air out into the world. My grandmother and I were mutually entranced by the screen, because that’s where the outspoken woman lived. Trapped in a box. There was no way she’d be out in the real world, I thought; there was just no way a woman like that could exist.

How could she possibly have so much to say? 

Being voiceless never bothered me. I started shaving my legs and classmates started being nicer to me. I learned how to curl my hair and apply eyeliner in one simple swoop. My lashes would get so full after three layers of mascara, and I loved that for me because everyone else did. Boys liked me, but if I had to guess, it wasn’t for my personality, because I simply didn’t have one. I was malleable, like clay, and all I wanted was to be built up into something beautiful. Those women with opinions and ideas and humor lived in a box like Lucy. Nothing more. (And anyway, in the first season, Ricky still tells Lucy she can only be in his show if she loses 12 pounds.)

Me veo mas bonita con la boca cerrada is a saying I’d hear constantly from my grandmother: “I look prettier with my mouth closed.”

Me veo mas bonita con la boca cerrada is a saying I’d hear constantly from my grandmother: “I look prettier with my mouth closed.” It’d be mumbled under her breath, whenever she felt challenged but didn’t feel she could speak up for herself. She kept so much inside, as does my mom, as do I — generations of reinvention in appearance only, of yearning to feel beautiful as a means to feel free.

There was one thing I learned at a very young age: Beauty rules. Yet there is a question I ask myself now, now that I’m in full adulthood: At what cost?