I had checked myself into a Motel 6 and couldn�t sleep. By the way my eyes felt, blood-shattered and dry, I guessed it was around two in the morning, maybe later. Over the years, I�ve grown accustomed to my inability to sleep in foreign bedrooms and have created a relatively successful solution. I reached and slid open the nightstand drawer in hopes of grazing over a Bible which are usually supplied in most hotel rooms.

What came next, I�ll never forget.

The drawer was vacant of any kind of Bible or sacred scripture. Instead, I was battered with an image of a half-naked woman surrounded by bright pastel colors and catchy article titles that seemed to flash and dance upon the page.

You couldn�t begin to imagine how I felt.

Right there in front of me laid the future of America, computer enhanced and gleaming.

Flipping to the table of contents, my eyes nearly unhinged from their sockets. Again, a woman half-nude, artificially colored hair, bones shrink-wrapped with artificially tanned skin, silicon enhanced cleavage spilling from the loose, low cuts of her shirt, revealing a computer enhanced flat-iron stomach. According to the text printed to the right of her sandblasted blue jeans, I can �Get Him Hot!� if I turn to page 48. And if I flip to page 65, I can discover �His 4 Sexual Needs.� And according to page 138, I can reveal my true beauty in an article entitled �Morning After Beauty: It Doesn�t Get Any Sexier Than This!�

I could feel the chunks rising from below my stomach.

I laid there in a stir, in the hotel�s lumpy bed, thinking over what I had just witnessed. I came to many revelations. Life-altering and cultural revelations.

Revelations that last a lifetime.

Now, it�s no great secret that definitions of words are defined by culture. And seeing how cultures vary from country to country, definitions of words tend to do the same. I believe in America, what Neil Postman describes as a �Technopoly�, we are lowering our cultural definitions, more specifically, our concepts of Beauty, due to the consistent concerns with hygiene, the growing rate cosmetic surgery, fashion magazines, internet mail-orders, consumer venues, and cultural standards. And these are all apart of what I like to call the �Cosmetic Conspiracy.�

In Technopoly, Postman states ��cultures must have narratives and will find them where they will, even if they lead to catastrophe.� What he means is that every revolution needs guidelines and those guidelines are usually, or were in the past, found in sacred scriptures. These kinds of narratives offer the moral codes and standards a culture can live by, something that Postman believes is necessary in any given culture. I believe in the modern American culture, the age of the Cosmetic Conspiracy, we have found ourselves a new, colorful, styling scripture. And it�s not the Bible. It�s not the Koran. It�s not even the Tao Te Ching.

Its name: Cosmopolitan.

Its mission: To overthrow the power contained in sacred narratives.

I have no doubt in my mind that the magazine I encountered on that lonely evening in my hotel room has overpowered the culture.

But don�t take my word for it.

Ask your peers.

I can almost guarantee that the average young American will know more about the content contained in those types of magazines than any passage from any given sacred scripture. They will be able to tell you more slogans, more seasonal colors, more celebrity names. Jesus has been replaced with how-to articles. Muhammad has been shot by the fashion police. Lao Tzu? Dead, gone, forgotten.

Rather than �Let there be light�, its Let there be shine.

Let there be color.

Let there be perfection.

And in America, home of the Cosmetic Conspiracy, we meet these precise demands with lip-gloss, eye-shadow, cosmetic surgery, and twig models. These days, scriptures don�t contain any kind of intellectual stimulation. No moral codes. No rational dialogue. No higher being. Well, that�s unless, of course, you believe Tara Banks is a Goddess. Unless you believe Ben Affleck is an intellectual leader.

What�s worse is that there is more than one scripture. As Muslims have the Koran, Christians the Bible, the Cosmetic Conspiracy has supplied us with a variety pack of holy texts. For adults, the classic Cosmopolitan. For teens, we have YM.

Refer to: Glamour

Refer to: Teen Cosmo

Refer to: Seventeen

Now days, we start them early. We get them from the crib.

Random flip of the page: It�s an advertisement. Again, it�s a bright pastel color scheme, a close up of a skin-to-bone woman, make-up deeply coated in a multitude of colors, shining wet lips, manipulated hair, artificial layering. To right of her face is printed: �New.� Below that: �Pure Color Eye Shadow.� Even lower: �Redefining Beauty.�

I�ll repeat: REDEFINING BEAUTY.

Can it get anymore spelled out than that? With the ever-growing cosmetic and hygienic technology, which is the foundation of the Cosmetic Conspiracy, that is exactly what these products are doing: Redefining Beauty. These companies aren�t hiding anything. They are fully aware.

This is a conspiracy. They have intent.

It�s been printed, published, and applied on lashes around the country.

But, it hasn�t always been this bad. The Cosmetic Conspiracy didn�t evolve without our help. I believe it started with the introduction of simple hygienic products (i.e. toothpaste, deodorant, nail clippers, tweezers) paralleled with the advancements of surgeries (i.e. dental surgery, cosmetic surgery). Basically, the initial intent was health. With these products you can reduce suffering, such as cavities, overweight health problems, and other things that hold the potential of bad health, infections, pain, or risk of death. But along with the reduction of suffering came other factors that people aren�t so aware of.

The bar of perfection has been raised.

Anymore, in a culture so based on external appearance, you�re not allowed to have bad teeth. Never mind the families that can�t afford the high monthly heath coverage bills. There�s no excuse, the technology is available. Find a way. Find a way or else you are essentially banned from the community. And this is just one example. The same goes for those with large guts, balding scalps, bad hair, pimples, crossed eyes�the list goes on.

Besides the basic health overthrow that the Cosmetic Conspiracy was able to provoke, there was also the expansion of the definition of hygiene in general. It has divided itself into subcultures: one being external hygiene, an ever-growing trend which includes clothing, cosmetic surgeries, make-up, and even basic material possessions. I am also a strong believer that this subculture has expanded so large that it has essentially overthrown the original health culture in which hygiene originated.

Instead of a growing concern in health, we are concerned with looks: seasonal looks, generational looks, stylish looks.

Look around.

The evidence is everywhere.

Rarely do we advertise weight loss programs in relation to �health.� We provide slide-shows; a before-and-after picture of some human before their weight loss and after. The �before� picture shows a slouched over man or woman, shirtless or in a bikini top, pale, grim face, unhappy, shown in low-quality resolution. The new and improved human is smiling and tan, hair combed and exceptionally thin, shown in a high-quality resolution. Oftentimes, these new and improved humans are shown with a beautiful new partner, man or woman, gawking over their �new look.�

This isn�t about health, it�s about acceptance.

It�s a culture risk.

Ask those people that are anorexic and bulimic, they�ll tell you.

It�s not for health. These woman, sometimes men, are starving themselves for their culture. For their level of acceptance. They are simply devoting themselves towards the new Ten Commandments: Look thin. Look shiny. Look sexy. Look smart. Look healthy. Look perfect. Look fun. Smell fruity. Feel smooth. Act intelligent.

Look around.

The evidence is everywhere.

Certain churches or places of worship discriminate against certain religions; this is a well known fact. And the cosmetic religion is no exception. In many modern day restaurants we have dress codes. In order to eat at these particular restaurants, you must wear what the Cosmetic Conspiracy deems adequate. In other words, if you do not meet our standards, you are rejected.

Essentially blacklisted.

You will starve.

We�ve all become Cinderella. We seem beautiful for a time, looking for some fast, superficial acknowledgement before our masks peel from their shells and our real identity is exposed when the clock strikes. When our foundation starts to crack. When the shower rinses the curl from our hair. When the lipstick smears and leaves stains on our pea coats.

In Technopoly, Postman gives numerous examples of how different forms of technology alter and inevitably change the culture. He states that without the mechanical clock, capitalism would never be possible. He claims that the introduction of medical instruments, such as the stethoscope, has turned the doctor/patient relationship into a machine/virus relationship. In Postman�s words, �Medicine is about disease, not the patient. And what the patient knows is untrustworthy; what the machine knows is reliable.�

I call upon these examples because it demonstrates how a certain technology alters the culture and shows who wins and who loses. In the case of medicine, the patient loses their voice and machines gain respect, thus degrading the humanity of the patient and the overall worth of a human voice. In other words, the patient is the loser, the machine is the winner.

In even less words, you lose.

With this in mind, I will demonstrate the winners (if any) and losers (if not all) in the Cosmetic Conspiracy. It�s clear who the losers are in the culture. Those who can�t afford or don�t comply with America�s standard of �beauty.�

Bad teeth? You lose.

Bad hair? You lose.

Clothes out of season? You lose.

You lose big.

Don�t smell like flowers and fruits? You lose.

Overweight? You lose.

I ask, who�s actually winning? If you call subjecting yourself to hours in front of a mirror, buying product after product after product a win, I guess there is an entire community of winners. Winners by default. But in my mind, these people are the real losers.

And I know from experience. I was a loser. I was once under the tight constraints of the Cosmetic Conspiracy just a few years ago. I remember sitting on my bathroom toilet with my head feeling like it was on fire, smoke drifting from my scalp, the bathroom windows fogging. They call it cosmetic bleach, meant to strip you of your natural hair color, transforming it into a new, more beautiful blonde color. Well, it does a lot more than that. What they don�t advertise is that the product also strips you of your natural identity. You can literally see it bleach right out of you in shades of orange and yellow.

And it burns.

It burns a whole bunch.

Beauty should never burn. Or hurt. Or cause cancer. For the most part, it was my decision, but I can�t help but mentioning that this wouldn�t have happened if I didn�t live in a culture so concerned with external beauty.

It was my mother who bought the dye.

It was my sister who applied it.

But it was my culture that convinced me.

Random flip of the page: Another advertisement. This time, it�s a nude celebrity, �J-Lo�, behind a foggy glass-shower door. Her make-up remains ideal, hair perfectly flapping and waving in an artificial wind created by an off-camera fan. All this show, these gimmicks, it�s all to sell perfume.

How is it possible that we remember such names as Brad Pitt, Madonna, Sharon Stone, and �J-Lo�, rather than the names Plato, Socrates, Tolstoy, Bradbury, Morrison, and even Palahniuk?

One word: Marketing.

You can�t throw Tolstoy, with his long, scraggly beard, balding scalp, and livers spots on the front page of a magazine. There is no instant magnificence, no external attraction. No simple beauty. That�s because Tolstoy�s beauty is contained in his mind, where it should be. But no, in an age where everything is as easy as �a-push-of-a-button� or as quick as �overnight delivery�, we have built up an impatient mindset to things that don�t come in a simple �click-of-the-mouse.� In other words, if you can�t see it at a glance, if it doesn�t grab your attention externally, it�s a waste of the Cosmetic Conspiracy�s time. We don�t concentrate on internal beauty anymore. And why should we when we can apply beauty on the tips of our eyelids or the soft flesh of our lips in just minutes? It�s quick, affordable, familiar. And it sells. All things which the Conspiracy drools over.

Now, we�ve all heard the phrase �beauty is in the eye of the beholder.� This is a true statement. But the question that more people should be asking themselves is who supplies me with the definition of beauty? If you were raised in a culture where beauty is found in eyeliner, silicon injections, eye shadow, muscles, hair color, clothing, and material possessions, how can you expect to acknowledge any other kind of beauty? Yeah, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but cultural influence is not.

Look around.

The evidence is everywhere.

To ignore it isn�t always as easy at it seems. Now days, we are compelled to gawk skinny, muscular women and men, but let me remind you of the days when larger men and women were considered more attractive and beautiful. The skinny people of the culture were looked down on because it showed poverty and lack of power. When exactly did the culture shift sides? Which definition is correct? I say, neither. It�s all depends on the cultural influence. Today, these influences are transmitted nationally through television and movie screens, modern day scriptures, and shopping malls.

Now having said all that, I would like to note that I do not have a problem, initially, with cosmetic products. That is, I don�t have a problem with them when used in moderation.

But it�s too late.

We�ve been invaded Hitler style.

They�ve taken over our scriptures, our lifestyle, our goals, our minds, our youth, and our liberty. But more importantly, they�ve raped the meaning of beauty. Instead of chasing wisdom and knowledge, education and experience, we chase bigger boobs and whiter teeth. We sprint for trendy tank tops and matching shoes. Shiny hair. Erotic scents. Skinny thighs. Eating disorders.

If it were up to me, I would treat these things like cigarettes.

Or firearms.

Set restrictions.

They are just as deadly.

You must be eighteen or older, with proof-of-age, to purchase eyeliner, foundation, eye-shadow, and perfume. Twenty-one or older for cosmetic surgery.

And there needs to be a tax, just like cigarettes. Use the proceeds towards the publication of books and education. Print warning labels on the sides of each product.

It�s time to take back the real meaning of beauty. Internal beauty. The kind of beauty that doesn�t deteriorate when the roots of your hair start to show. The kind that doesn�t smear when you cry. The kind that lasts until you grow senile.

Everyone, turn off your shower.

Throw away your deodorant.

Eyeliner, foundation, toothpaste: Go to hell.

Look for public burnings in your town soon. I�ll be there with a bullhorn, calling the culture to arms. I�ll be trading eye-shadow for Tolstoy�s Anna Karenina. Exchanging Abercrombie shirts for Dostoesky�s Crime and Punishment. And I�ll toss them all into a sopping gasoline-soaked pile, light a match, and in beautiful shades of orange and yellow I�ll let it burn.

Yes Lord, I�ll let it burn.