The Day after Formal: The Price of Beauty

 
It's strange how you can wake thinking last night was surreal; yet your dreams can feel..so real.
 
So it's the day after Formal. Currently sprawled over the floor are cotton buds, clumped mascara, photobooth strips and glitter gold stars. I woke up at ten and the first thing I thought was: must scroll through facebook! Clearly everyone had a crazy afters because there are about three albums up when there must have been over a hundred different cameras. Or Iphones. Literally! My head's dazed but surprisingly my feet don't hurt even though I wore heels all night! I thought about taking them off except there was a broken glass precuation and it gave me some much needed height. 
 
Formal is definitely fun and amazing- the hype, the dresses, the cameras flashing; it's like our chance to be the celebrities most of us will never be. It easily makes the cut for one of the highlights of high school and probabaly one of the last of them (currently battling it out with my favourite camp where we went wild at Jamberoo with minimal supervision). And what's more ours was right after Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez split, a split that undoubtedly lifted millions of young spirits and hearts worldwide especially of those at Formal, dressing not just to impress ourselves, friends and maybe a date, but a Pop Prince! Realistic, I know, I know, I watch too many flicks. And on that note Formal definitely changes the way we will look at chick flicks forever. Will we still look forward to that amazing prom in Mean Girls, Twilight and every other Amanda Bynes movie? Did my Formal even live up to any of those proms however disastrous they were?
 
Probably not.
 
In four and a half hours it's hard to qualify whether the hundreds of dollars and weeks of thought and dress hunting spent on this one moment was worth it. I mean it's not the Oscars or the Emmys or the Arias or even like a local community club. It's more of a get together with friends and a grade three quarters of which we'll never see again. True make up can be used again, and shoes. As for dresses- most of us went for full length ones that were eventually trampled on by the end of the night either on the dancefloor or just because there are so many people someone will inevitably step on your dress.
 
And when does the price of beauty sink in? When you're up at 4am straggling flower bits and stems and leaves out of your hair and tugging out the billions of bobby pins hidden in a forest of crispy, frizzled hair set with hairspray. Oh, not to mention the one hundred dollars I spent getting my hair cut and styled. And let's face it, Justin or Harry or Zac or Taylor live halfway across the world and will probably never notice me, the average pleb, or make eye contact in a swarming crowd of screaming teens..So I slept on my hairspray filled hair and the braids and curls and woke up thinking my dreams were reality and wondering if the night before had actually existed.
 
And although I now realise looking through silly photobooth photos of heart poses and angel poses and cleopatra poses, that I look weird posing from the side and my make up was slightly ghostly, it was fun. Wondrous fun. Beautiful friends. Gorgeous dresses. Amazing view. A memorable evening with incredible memories. 
 
It might not have lived up to the magical prom but it's a night I'll absomalutely never forget!