Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, You Mean I Have to Care About This?

I'm a freelance model. I sell the right to use my likeness. There's more to it, of course, but that's a pretty big part of it. What that means is that I have to actually care about my likeness, and put some amount of effort into maintaining it. Given that an exceptionally natural appearance is one of my selling points, what exactly does that mean?

It means that, for the first time in my life, I have actually polished off an entire bottle of sunblock. In days gone by, I was perfectly happy to let my face, arms, and shoulders brown in the sun. No more! I compulsively slather on waterproof, sweatproof, bombproof sunblock of an obscenely high SPF, in an ever-losing battle to keep all of the skin on my body approximately the same color. When that fails, I lay out in the sun wearing armwarmers. Just armwarmers.

Before I started modeling, I didn't even own conditioner. Shampoo, sure, but not conditioner. I would throw my hair back into a bun and happily forget about it for the following, oh, five days or so. Sometimes I would decide that it was unmanageably long, and have a roommate give me a haircut after a glass of wine (or two, or...). Whether or not my hair was long enough to cover my nipples was certainly not a point of consideration, as it now is. (FYI: My hair is, in fact, currently long enough to cover my breasts completely. Book now if you like shooting implied nudes of this nature!)

Previously, getting overly ambitious about my abilities to hop up a curb on my bike would have resulted in a skinned knee and a bruised ego. Today, getting overly ambitious about my abilities to hop up a curb on my bike results in a skinned knee, a bruised ego, and (re)scheduling shoots based upon said skinned knee. Similarly, any activities that I'm concerned may leave bruises are scheduled into stretches of time between shoots.

None of this is an especially big deal, or difficult to manage. But it does add up a little more every day, and that does, at times, leave me befuddled as to when exactly all of this started mattering to me. It may look like I put no effort into my appearance, but I do. When somebody hires me, they're expecting the most photogenic incarnation of Kari available- one that requires little to no photoshop to make presentable. And so I do my very best to deliver.