Sunday’s Were for Primping
A memory on girlhood and the beauty standards we’re taught to take at face value long before we learn to question them.
The Poem
Sunday’s Were for Primping
For bleaching our mustaches.
We felt so grown up, mixing the bleach
into a white paste with the little
plastic paddle.
Beauty was a virtue.
One so important to us that we
didn’t even think to question the
pungent smelling formula that
made our upper lip sting.
We just wanted the beauty—
and to hide those little dark
unwanted pelitos, from our crushes.
Beauty was pain to us and
so were the boys.
The pain worth it for a shot
with the one you liked most.
That’s exactly why Sundays were
for washing our hair, painting our nails
primping—
ensuring we were looking like
ladies come Monday morning.
And not like unkept women
with Pedro Infante ‘staches.
© 2026 Carla Monroy
Part of the 100 Day Poetry Project
The Sunday Ritual
The idea for today’s poem arrived at an inconvenient time, while I was taking a shower. Because that’s how memory works, it shows up when you’re busy doing other things.
I remembered how my cousin and I would hang out on Sunday’s and do things we read about in Glamour magazine, like bleach our mustache. It had a way of making us feel like women. We didn’t stop to question what we were putting on our faces that smelled SO bad and made our faces sting. We would do anything for the beauty of it.
Especially if it meant a chance that our school crush would notice us. And they WOULD notice us more, but not because we no longer doted those little hairs on our faces, but because we felt confident knowing they weren’t visible.
Back then we sort of just accepted beauty norms. In the modern-day beauty norms are much more intense. I catch myself falling victim to them when I noticed it recently that while watching a You Tube video of a husband-and-wife vlogger duo that I really like. Unintentionally, while watching the video, we start making comments. I notice how much harsher we are on the woman over the man. Proving how much harder women have it societally than men. Even I was guilty of having certain judgements over her appearance.
Beauty Was a Virtue
How did we get here. What are the societal queues that solidify our beliefs about gender roles. Why do I judge women more harshly than men? Immediately casting a judgment based solely on the choice of her outfit and how she chooses to wear her hair.
As I thought about that Sunday ritual, I realized the mustache bleach was never really about hair.
It was about belonging. About sisterhood too. It was about learning, at an early age, that beauty carried social currency. That looking a certain way increased your chances of being noticed, accepted, and admired. All things that mattered in high school.
The Rules We Still Carry
The strange part is that many of those lessons remain with us long after adolescence. We carry the baggage into adulthood, often without realizing it. Sometimes we even become the enforcers of the very standards that once shaped us.
I still catch myself doing it. And when I do, I'm reminded that some of the most difficult beliefs to break are the ones that we absorb so early on they feel like they are our own.
What societal norms do you struggle with?
Speaking of identities and being stuck between two spaces, check out my new collection of poems American Mexican get your own signed copy on my website, and also on Amazon.
