You can paint your nails lime green...

Today I got a pedicure for the first time today, and last night I painted my fingernails (yes, lime green). That's getting really, really girly for me. I think I've painted my fingernails five times ever (if you don't count coloring them black with a Sharpie during my punk phase), and I've never painted my toenails.
So while I was sitting in the massage chair with one foot in a hot tub and the other being painted red, I had lots of thoughts about the concept.
At first, I felt bad for being so "girly". The "tough girl" image has always been important to me (stupid, I know). But then I started thinking about how being girly sometimes makes every girl feel pretty (God made us that way; I'm afraid we can't help it), and when girls feel pretty they feel more confident, and sometimes I need that. For example, even though I prefer more casual clothes, if I need a confidence boost a pretty blouse will help in five seconds, whereas losing five or ten pounds will take two months and use up a lot of my limited energy.
And, God made girls the way we are because He liked it like that. There is no shame in femininity. Of course, like everything else, it can be taken too far, and when femeninity is taken too far it becomes vanity. Celebrating God-given femeninity is different than indulging in vanity.
That got me thinking about what can happen when femeninity turns into vanity. It can happen for lots of reasons in a variety of life circumstances, but no matter the reason, the results are never good. Irresponsible ammounts of money spent on clothes, spending hours in front of a mirror, even becoming obsessed and developing an eating disorder (eating disorders are developed as a result of psychological trauma, and the rammifications of that trauma manifest themselves in vanity-like qualities, egged on by society's glorification of vanity).
Why are girls and women prone to vanity? Sometimes it's pride, but I think that in most cases it is our lack of self-worth. It causes us to turn to trendy clothes, expensive jewelry, weight loss etc., because we think that if we're prettier we'll be worth more. Not that clothes and jewelry and healthy weight loss etc. are bad things; not at all. Like I said, they can be an effective confidence boost, and the former two are good tools for celebrating femeninity (weight loss can be a good tool for improving one's health, but not femeninity. One does not have to be any thinner than they are in order to be femenine). But it is sad when those things are used in exess because a girl/woman feels that she is not worth enough without them.
In a song called "White Shoes" by Conor Oberst and The Mystic Valley band, there are lines that go "You can wear your new white shoes in the dirty afternoon; walking through the traffic fumes, a flower in your hair" and "You can paint your nails lime green, rent yourself a lemosine". To me, these lines can be interprited as speaking about the way some of us (girls/women) throw ourselves into fashion and nail polish and make up, but we are still unfulfilled.
Because we, as women, are supposed to find our worth by seeing our beauty through God's eyes. Every one of us were made exactly how we are because God thinks we are beautiful that way. We are tailored to His taste, not to that guy who made fun of our hair or that girl who made a catty remark about our pants size. We should wear pretty clothes and polish our nails and put on some make up in order to celebrate the beauty and femeninity that God has already given us, not to try to make ourselves "worth more" to small-minded humans.

That turned out way more rambling than I'd originally intended, but the points are: a) I'm getting a bit more girly than I used to be, and I'm ok with that, and b) I got my first pedicure today and it was a lot of fun and it felt really good!