My Japanese mother taught me how to walk, sit, smile, and make a good impression. Some of those lessons became strengths. Others took me much longer to understand.
By Emi · global director of KIWABI
My mother taught me very early that beauty was not just something you were born with.
It was how you stood. How you walked. How you sat in a chair. What you did with your hands. The expression on your face when you were listening to someone. Whether you looked polished, cared for, and aware of the impression you were making… even on strangers on a train.
My mother is Japanese, and before I was born she had a brief stint working as an events model. She was also an avid observer of women. She noticed everything: posture, movement, voice volume, how someone entered a room. And because she was my mother, naturally she decided I should learn all of them, too.
Learning How to Look Elegant
One lesson I remember especially clearly was how to walk.
According to my mother, there were few things less elegant than a woman whose feet turned outward as she walked, giving her a slight side-to-side waddle. The prettier way was to walk along a straight line, with one foot landing more or less in front of the other.
So when I was in elementary school, she would often challenge me to walk along whatever straight line happened to be on the ground, a painted line on the street, the seam between two slabs of cement, trying to place each foot directly along it.
The funny thing is, she wasn’t wrong.
I still walk that way. I don’t think about it anymore; my body simply does it. Over the years, people have commented that they like the way I walk, and very few get to hear the backstory.
She also taught me how to sit in public, how to soften my eyes when listening to someone, and how to keep the corners of my mouth slightly lifted so I looked warm, but not smirky. Somehow, all of it became automatic. I’ve been told I seem friendly before I even speak, that I have the opposite of resting bitch face, that I seem elegant.
Those are qualities I’m happy with, and I am genuinely grateful that my mother taught them to me.
Some of the things my mother taught me about beauty genuinely became strengths.
When Lessons Become Corrections
But the long-term psychological effect of all that early education was perhaps not quite as positive, because the value of a lesson and the way a child receives it are not always the same.
My mother wasn’t trying to make me insecure. I believe she thought she was giving me an advantage. She wanted me to understand how presentation affects the way people perceive you, and how to move through the world making a good impression.
But all of these things were taught as corrections.
It wasn’t always, “Here’s a beautiful way to carry yourself.”
It was more like, “What you’re doing now is unattractive. Do this instead so people won't be turned off by it.”
That distinction matters more than either of us probably understood at the time.
Makeup, Beauty, and the Message I Heard
I have always loved beauty. I eventually built much of my career around it. Makeup, perfume, skincare, hair products. I love the packaging, texture, scent, color, formulation science, and especially the almost magical power a beauty product has to change the way someone feels when she wants to feel a certain way or be in a certain mood.
And smelling like Chanel is much cheaper than carrying a $7,000 Chanel handbag.
As a teenager, makeup became one of my biggest passions.
I grew up partly in California and later went to a poshy private school in Boston and I spent plenty of time figuring out how to make my eyes look bigger and my mouth, fuller. I learned mostly from Japanese magazines that had endless techniques and I tried them all.
One morning, when my mother saw me without makeup and asked something along the lines of, “If you wear that much makeup when you meet men, aren’t they shocked when they see your face without it in the morning?”
To be fair, she probably didn't mean that my natural face was horrifying. I think it was more like, don’t wear so much makeup, you don't look like you.
Unfortunately, that is not remotely what 19-year-old me heard.
What I heard was: You look so different without makeup that people may be disappointed when they discover what you really look like.
And, in one of those awesome examples of parenting advice producing exactly the opposite intended result, I began wearing makeup way more often.
For years I was uncomfortable letting anyone see me without it, including girlfriends. Even now, despite decades of evidence that no one has recoiled in horror or abandoned me at breakfast after seeing my bare face, a part of me still feels exposed and oddly, somewhat guilty, without makeup. As if I had lied by wearing makeup. Here's me. I'm not as pretty in real life.
My boyfriend has said he actually loves seeing me that way because it allows him to enjoy different dimensions of me and he's happy I can be comfortable with him without it. And, he still tells me that I am beautiful either way (he has no idea how HUGE this is to me.) My friends have also told me similar things. I know intellectually that my face is not terribly disappointing without makeup.
And yet, when I stay at his house, I still tend to take it off at the very end of the night and put it on early in the morning. The message from decades ago somehow outlived the evidence.
The message from decades ago somehow outlived the evidence.
What Our Mothers Tell Us About Ourselves
This is not because my mother never thought I was pretty enough but, compliments were few and came indirectly. She might tell me that someone else said I was pretty, or it would come up as an explanation for why something had gone well for me. It was less common for her to simply say, with no larger point attached, “You’re beautiful" or "you look pretty today."
At the same time, I consistently had boyfriends since I was 15, which seemed to genuinely puzzle her. She would sometimes ask, “I wonder what it is that he/they like about you? It's not like you are that beautiful. Maybe because you seem approachable."
Even today, she can occasionally approach my romantic life like an anthropologist investigating an unexplained social phenomenon.
I find it mostly amusing now. But when you’re young, your mother’s observations carry a peculiar authority. You don’t necessarily hear them as one woman’s opinion, shaped by her life, culture, generation, anxieties, and preferences. You hear them as information about yourself.
When you’re young, your mother’s observations don’t always feel like opinions. They feel like information about yourself.
Even her funniest beauty advice contains this mixture of affection, practicality, and mildly alarming logic.
I am almost always barefoot at home and combined with constant high heel wearing when outside the house and bad circulation, my feet can get in bad condition pretty quickly.
One day my mother looked at them and announced that I really needed to start getting regular pedicures because, according to her, when men see feet like that, “they’re going to think you’re not having any sex.”
This was presented as a legitimate beauty concern.
I’m still not sure why evidence of an active sex life needed to be communicated through my heels, but I did start paying slightly better attention to my feet.
Not because I need them broadcasting anything about my private life. Nicer feet are simply nicer.
What I Wanted to Give My Daughter
Now that I am a mother myself, I understand my mother differently.
I have a teenage daughter, and I have been extremely conscious of the way I speak to her about beauty, weight, makeup, clothes, and her body. I know how casually delivered comments can become extraordinarily durable once they take up residence inside a daughter’s mind.
So I don’t critique her appearance or the way she carries herself.
I have told her she is beautiful as a statement of fact, not just when she has dressed up, done her makeup, or styled her hair particularly well. I also balance it with compliments of her intelligence, social skills, and all the other things that make a whole person.
Granted, she actually is quite stunning being half Japanese, half Italian and tall, what impresses me most is her comfort with herself and easy confidence she carries with her.
She can spend one day completely made up, trying whatever makeup, nail, or hair trend is circulating amongst her age group (aka TikTok), and walk into school the next day with just Aquaphor on her lids and lips. There doesn’t seem to be a dramatic change in the way she regards herself.
Her beauty does not appear to rise and fall quite so much with the circumstances.
The Part I’m Still Learning
I would love to say this proves I have executed motherhood perfectly and broken every generational cycle. Obviously, that would be absurd. She watches me, too.
She has grown up with a mother who loves makeup and wears it every day. She sees how I dress, how I prepare myself before I go out, how much I enjoy beauty products. Children absorb what we model far beyond what we explicitly tell them, and I am sure I have communicated things just by being me.
I can’t model some imaginary woman who has achieved complete, serene confidence because I’m not her.
But perhaps I don’t need to.
My mother taught me something valuable: beauty can be cultivated. There is beauty in posture, movement, grooming, expression, elegance, and understanding how you present yourself. I still believe that. I don’t want to throw those lessons away simply because some of them came wrapped in criticism.
What I want to leave behind is the idea that cultivation has to begin from a state of inadequacy.
There is a difference between thinking, I am beautiful, and this is how I want to express myself today, and thinking, I need to do these things in order to become acceptable.
Beauty can be cultivated without beginning from the belief that something about you needs to be fixed.
I’m still learning that difference.
And somewhat unexpectedly, one of the people teaching it to me is my daughter.
I spent years trying to give her a baseline confidence I wasn’t sure I had received myself. Now I watch her leave the house bare-faced after looking completely glamorous the day before, apparently unconcerned that the world might be shocked by the discrepancy, and I admire something I hope I can learn from her.
My mother taught me how to walk beautifully.
Maybe my daughter is teaching me how to walk out the door exactly as I am.
Emi leads KIWABI and she still wears makeup almost every day but doesn't cover her grays as per this post: Why I Still Have Clearly Visible Grays
