15 Truths To How Girls Actually Prep For A Date (That Guys Will Never Know)

To groom, or not to groom? That really is the question. Whether it's for a job interview or for a date there's always a third party that benefits from our aesthetic preparation and there in lies our dilemma.

Grooming is quite literally a bit of a sticky subject for us gals. It's an activity we love to love and love to hate and hate to love and hate to hate and all that jazz. It focuses on the importance of gender norms and imposes on us societal pressures. It costs us crap loads of cash yearly, and causes us physical, and sometimes severe mental, pain.

Yes we are empowered and know better than to buy into, and from, the industries that tax us because of our reproductive organs. Yes we've burnt our bras and grown out our pubic hair and marched in solidarity. Yes, we are aware of the unrealistic expectations set by the over-retouched, young and beautiful models/celebrities shoved down our throats on a daily basis. But we do it anyway because wrapped up in all that sexist patriarchal bullsh*t is some genuine playful desire, or escapism, that we feel to create different physical personas of varying degrees of perfection so that we women may transcend our fleshy bodies and become ethereal beings. Or not. Just you know if we're feeling up to it. Whatever floats your boat.

To really understand the truth about how women prepare to meet a potential mate on a date, we must go back in time and start at the very beginning

15 Once Upon a Time

Once upon a time when we were young we were fed Disney princesses on our silver screens. Disney princesses brushed their hair with forks when they lived in under water kingdoms, and had birds as alarm clocks, and mice for personal stylists, when they were forced to be impoverished in-home help. Disney princesses were clearly the first test subjects for permanent make up tattoos. So this is what boys and girls expect girls to look like. At all times. Even during puberty it is realistic for little girls to be studying aerodynamics with hair that moves as though its either in water or has its own invisible wind machine, with lips as red as blood or MAC's Ruby Woo. Let's not forget Wonder Mom racing around in her mini van to get us to soccer practice/chess club and flitting around the kitchen looking perfect in her pantsuit after a ten-hour workday. Who looks good driving a mini van?

14 Everyone is Jan Brady

Imagine our surprise (read: disappointment) when the only thing we see staring back at us into the mirror in the morning is a freak horror show with a side of some serious morning breath - cue: silent scream. So we had to face the facts. We would never be Cher Horowitz or Marcia Brady. News Flash: there is no Marcia Brady. There is only Jan Brady, or Tai pre-makeover. Jan Brady IS Marcia Brady first thing in the morning. Jan is just Marcia without the frills, the hair spray, and headgear. Now we women are simple obsessive perfectionists, so it doesn't take a quantum physicist to see the dilemma we that face every damn day.

Yes we love our overnight rollers and our natural selves, but we want the world, and men, to see and love a more beautiful terrible version of ourselves. Enter the cosmetic and feminine hygiene industry and watch our bathroom turn from normal place to pee to recurring crime scene. Forget getting anywhere on time and get used to waking up an extra two hours early every day just to properly execute your daily grooming ritual.

13 Transformation Station

Ever wonder why girls seem to turn into straight monsters over night but guys look the same when they wake up as they did when they went to sleep? Remember the 'curse' that turns Fiona, from Shrek, from a human to an ogre? Well that didn't come from a witch. She was just a regular girl suffering from the curse of Night wiping away the effects of grooming products provided by multi-million dollar industries.

Flash forward from girlhood to adulthood, and a whole bunch of 2000s movies staring Anne Hathaway getting a movie makeover, and you've got your current 'look' down to a concise set of steps that you can do, for the most part, in transit. Yes we are magic unicorn creatures of disguise that perform miracle makeovers in rapidly moving cars. When we see people staring at us in awe, terror, or disgust, it only empowers us and reminds us that we are superhuman goddesses. It really is rare that anyone can see us girls under our daily armor of: Maybelline, a sprinkle of Dove, a boost from Gillette, topped with L'Oreal, and maybe little help from Kylie Jenner's Lip Kit if we're feeling fancy.

12 Hard Reality

Our morning beauty regime is child's play compared to what we do to prepare for a date. And just to give some kind of context to that comparison, we wake up wondering whether we have actual birds nesting in our hair or if it's just our extensions dreadlock-ing with the last pathetic scraps of our god given hair. So now we've covered the basics and laughed or cried sufficiently at ourselves and the absurdity of our daily grooming practice we can graduate to grooming for date prep, which as we all know is a much hairier and scarier beast all together.

Prepping for a date is like prepping a Turkey. It takes a lot of patience, a knock out recipe, and a secret ingredient. We - like a turkey - need to be stripped, gutted, washed, massaged, stuffed, rested, and a whole other list of things before we bake evenly for two hours. And then poof we are ready in all our shiny, voluminous, hairless, hourglass shaped glory to be picked up and whisked off to our potentially magical, but usually mediocre, date.

11 A Brief Interlude to Appreciate #HairGoals

Let's just take a second to take a deep breath and fully appreciate the sheer perfection that is the above gif. The famed and fictitious *pulls hair out of bun that is held together by one single pin, which then tumbles down in wavy ripples that are reminiscent of a cascading waterfall* move, executed in sultry excellence by Angelina Jolie.

But Angelina Jolie alone didn't execute this move alone. It took several hair and make up artists to beautify an already insanely gorgeous human, wardrobe supervisors, a whole crew of professionals to get that perfect lighting, another crew handling a seriously expensive camera to get that flattering angle, and a minimum of fifteen takes to achieve this moment of feminine beauty. It's an art. It's a science. Maybe not a standard we should hold ourselves to later when our date goes well and we've brought him back to our place. But still we women aren't underachievers.

And now that we've given the feminist rage bubbling up inside of us a second to simmer, we are somewhat relaxed again. We can continue.

10 Wash Your Sins Away

Now we can really get stuck in to business. Step 1: we hop in the shower to scrub, scrape, and scold away any evidence of the layer of skin covering the body prior to entering the shower. Cue a chorus of products that we all know and worship - exfoliant, shaving cream, body wash, feminine wash (just in case), face mask, hair mask, shampoo, conditioner, etc. - all in varying shades of pink and lavender slathered on to every nook and cranny until our body smells like a forest of flowers. Oh sure it might sound vaguely masochistic but it's also therapeutic to steam (read: burn) our pores squeaky newborn baby clean. It's liberating - euphoric even. We step in to the shower sweaty, brittle, and tired from the weight of the day. Forty-five minutes of scorching water later a woman emerges sparkling, sopping wet, skin all flushed and silky soft; a blank canvas upon which to paint her desired self-portrait for the evening.

9 And Repeat…

It's all about erasure. Now that we've successfully rid ourselves of any blemished skin, we must skim down the curves of our waistline. It doesn't matter what size our waist is to begin with we are always trying to make it smaller. When we can't make our waist smaller we want to create the illusion that it is. So, naturally we all have a pair of those under garments that we squeeze ourselves into in order to smooth, shape, and slim our bodies into a slinky silhouette.

We know too well that if we drink one too many glasses of bubbles or happen on an hors d'oeuvre that doesn't agree with us we will be slammed with a bloat that will ruin the slinky LBD we haven't chosen to wear yet. No. Better that we choose the underpants that restricts our breathing but not our choices. If size zeros have a reason to wear Spanx under their sheer cutout dresses, we probably should too.

8 Nothing to Wear, Everything to Fear

It's maddening. All the clothes in your bountiful, well-nurtured closet and we never have anything to wear. It's every girl's worst nightmare that haunts us daily - or whenever we have an important event to attend. Of course we don't mean we have no clothes. The problem is that we have too many clothes. Too many options and not enough decision time, too many options and not the right waistline.

Oh the anxiety we face every day when we flip through hangers upon hangers of clothes. We've got to dress for ourselves, so that we are comfortable and confident, but we also can't help but try and dress for whomever we are trying to impress. So now we've got a bucket load of variables for this equation and no good solution. We're bombarded with different styles, cuts, matching two pieces, patterns, and accessories galore. Talk about a sensory overload - it's overwhelming. And now we're getting sweaty with panic, and our hair is starting to frizz as we frantically pull on and off different items of clothing that may or may not convey the right ratio of sexy and cute. Not that anyone even really knows what that means.

7 We need Professional Help

Let's just take a second to really appreciate the irony that is women's clothing and the dreaded back closure. Oh sure, the back closure is less popular in casual clothing, but let's just say we are getting all snazzy for our date. Maybe we are going for cocktail attire. Well then we are basically screwed. That classy sheath dress has a zipper from top to bottom on the back of the dress. But that's child's play compared to the maxi that has about a hundred buttons - again - on the back of the dress. Why are there always hook and eye closures at the back of the neck on blouses or those elegant dropped waist dresses? Guess where the button is on those silk high-waisted pants?

Ladies, we clearly need arms with the flexibility of an Olympic gymnast to dress ourselves and even then we are in danger of ruining our very expensive special occasion garments. The fashion industry is basically telling us that we need a ladies maid circa 1910, or a partner to help us dress into our nicer clothes. So when we are getting ready for a date in our apartments, alone, grasping frantically at our clothes because we cannot find an outfit that flatters us, more often than not we hear that dreaded rip. Or snag our skin in a zipper and then bleed on to our silks. And then we pull a button off something. How glamorous.

6 THIS is what Natural looks like

Now that we've chosen an ensemble, and ruined several in the process, we can move onto the fun stuff. HAIR. The trick with hair - which can really be applied to all grooming - is that it needs a lot of work in order for it to look effortless. And looking effortless is the key to success. Nobody likes a try hard. The above gif shows one of the many ways that women can achieve natural waves. What's that? If it's natural why does she have a head of pin curls? Why has her hair that has been sectioned off and rolled into a dozen pins and left in place to coil? That's a pretty decent effort for something that is meant to be natural. Well, what is natural anyway? It's some kind of illusion. And yes maybe us gals have some form of hair dysmorphia that causes us to re-wave our already wavy hair because we believe that our controlled artificial waves are better than the waves we already have. We always want what we don't have. Our hair is no different. So what.

5 Probably, Definitely Flammable

Hairspray is a girl's best friend. When we've put our hair through forty-five minutes of scorching hot water it is squeaky clean and it can't hold a style for sh*t. Naturally we need roughly half a bottle of spray for it to keep those natural waves we have just painstakingly constructed. The goal here is to achieve 'Romantic Hair.' If we set the right tone of romance with our loose, soft, structured, sensual, sexy waves we will of course become irresistible. We will be transformed instantly into a bombshell and everyone/you will love and adore us, and want to have our babies at first sight. Our tousled hair will evoke the idea that we have just woken up. We have arrived with our natural bed head, and it is so effortless it's charming. Thus, we appear as though we are as low maintenance as our hair. So spray away. Add a little height here, fluff it up, brush it out, and loosen a strand there until our barnet looks positively blown out.

For the smokers our there, don't light your cigarette anywhere near our head. We will catch on fire. This is not a joke.

4 Is Something Burning?

The clock is ticking now and we've got to pick up the pace. We've been faffing around for long enough. But, as predicted, some of our glorious sex curls won't hold so we decide to take out the big guns and heat up our one-inch curling iron - the size of the curling iron must be exact - or else… the look is ruined. Of course, due to the copious amount of hair spray already applied to our heads, this could be (read: is definitely) hazardous. Always smart and logical, we do it anyway. The time that our hair spends wrapped around this hot iron is crucial, and directly proportional to how hazardous this act is. So we try not to get distracted. Not by the time, or by our date texting us, or whether we left the stove on. When are holding hot irons close to our heads and get distracted we end up with deep, scarring, red burns on our skin, or worse. We burn our hair off.

3 Please don't be a Murderer

We are running out the door now but wait, we've just remembered that we are women. For all of our godliness women are fearful creatures because, for some ridiculous reason, we have large targets on our backs. Going out into the world and meeting new people can make us feel ever so slightly vulnerable because the world and new people can, and do quite often, decide to trample, hurt, oppress, and abuse us. Considering this, it's a wonder we ever leave our house.

However, being the badass queens that we are, as we confidently prepare to dazzle the world with our wits and wondrous mask of confidence - that we have now spent hours assembling, we hope you like it - we also prepare for an apocalypse. The danger doesn't bring us down it energizes us. We laugh in the face of danger when we leave the house each day. We are survivors. But stay safe betches. There are some crazies out there.

2 If They Only Knew

Now that we're ready to go, let's do a little recap on the processes of the evolution of woman pre date prep to post date prep. Think of all the ways we have tortured our temple in the pursuit of our personal brand of perfect femininity, whatever THAT means. We've plucked, shaved, tweezed, waxed, and shaped ourselves into something that we are not. We are mistresses of massive disguise, which is terrifying when you think about it. Whether you are one of those ladies who looks spruced up but relatively similar before and after the primping process, or one of the mystical chameleons that genuinely seem to be able to change the shape of their bone structure, we have to admit date prep is B A N A N A S. Not that it's all for them, but if our dates saw half of what went into what we did do our bodies before going out with them, they would probably be terrified by, and for, us.

1 A Girl's Best Kept Secret

We arrive at our date looking as close to red carpet ready as we'll ever be. If we don't deserve a free drink after all that then I don't know who does. We can't get enough of this masterpiece we've created so we catch our reflection on anything and everything possible - knives, the mirror behind the bar, the twinkle in your eye as you are seduced by our appearance. We lightly pat our faces with powder, in part because we want the touch up, but also because we can't help but indulge in the mystery that is our face. Although we want to gloat in triumph, we just smile all satisfied with ourselves that we've fooled you, and everyone else, that what you see is what you get. Dita knows the art of romance is all a tease. You can't give it all away at once. So as far as you know Beyonce's word is Bible. And we woke up like this. #MicDrop