Beauty Marks

I have a mole about a half inch below the left corner of my mouth. It's always been there. Over the course of my life, mostly I've either liked it or forgotten it's there. I don't think about it much. When I was a kid I thought having a mole was great. Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, and Cindy Crawford had - and accentuated - them, and they were all gorgeous women. As a teenager, a friend gifted me a make-up product for painting on moles that came in a band-aid style tin with pointy applicators. I darkened my natural mole and used it to mask pimples too. It was great stuff. I don't wear full-face make-up much these days, but when I do I sometimes still darken my mole with eyebrow pencil. This is all to say that - when I have thought of it at all, I have always thought of my mole as an attractive feature.

If you've ever used OkCupid, you'll be familiar with the series of cues they have for you to use when telling potential dates about yourself. One of these is, "The first thing people notice about me is..." I've always said my eyes or my glasses. I have no idea if this is true, and it's certainly not a particularly clever response, but they are the things I get the most comments and compliments on so it at least seems plausible. One day several years ago I was perusing profiles on the site and in the midst of some guy's profile (perhaps it was in the "I spend a lot of time thinking about..." section), he states something to the effect of, "Ladies: stop lying. If you have a big mole on your face, that is the first thing people notice about you, so don't say it's something else." It had literally never occurred to me that my mole might be the first thing people noticed about me. Indeed, it may very well not be, but the thought had never crossed my mind. I mean, no one ever comments on or even mentions it to me.

That is until I started dating another guy from OkCupid in 2012. Some time into our relationship - at least a couple weeks, possibly a couple months - he said he was surprised that I made no attempt to hide my mole in my profile pictures on the site. He claimed to have nothing against my mole, it was just the sort of thing he expected women would try to minimize.

So, anyway, this is the story of how two dudes from OkCupid gave me an entirely new perspective on my mole. (Don't worry, everybody, I still like it.)