Passport photos don’t lie.
You can’t wear your glasses even if you wear them all the time. You are backed up against a white wall so that every blemish in your face seems pronounced rather than muted. If you smile, which I tried to do, the photographer says “No smiles.!”
“Can I leave my mouth open?” I asked
Yes. The result was a kind of gasp or snarl configuration of my cheeks and lips.
And my hair?
I stopped going for a haircut during the lockdown five years ago and began cutting my hair myself with barber’s thinning scissors, which I bought online in March 2020 when the world shut down for the first time in history.
One blade of barber’s thinning scissors has a dozen little spikes in it making them thinning shears much like the pinking shears my mother used when she made a dress from a pattern, only these pinking-shears-for-the-hair hide their work, unlike my mother’s dress cut-outs with their tiny zigzag edges.
Barber’s thinning shears pruned the hair near the scalp leaving long strands untouched on the outside hiding their pruning below the surface.
I’ve been thinning my own hair ever since 2020 and shaving the back of my neck with shaving cream and a dollar razor. I’m a frugal Yankee.
That saved me $25 every two weeks plus $5 tip. Times 26 weeks in a year times the 5 years since the lockdown equals 130 bimonthly haircuts at $30 each or $3,900 saved. My forebears would be proud.
Note: the lockdown was so sudden and so threatening to the income of my hair styler, that I sent her a $30 check with apology for going into lockdown myself.
I see that she survived.
Her shop is open again in White River Junction, Vermont where I live just as if Covid and the lockdown never happened. And the result is that I learned that I can cut my own hair.
No passport photos don’t lie. And the U.S. State Department estimates that about half of the population of Americans have a passport.
I’ve been pretty expert at wearing hats and smiling with my big black framed glasses as a way of making selfies lie with my exuberant smile or my rakish hat, but a passport photo is not a selfie.
My eyes look tired without glasses and my hair and beard are pretty white in this passport photo. I was born in 1944 after all.
And my open mouth in the passport photo looks like Jacob Marley’s ghost when he drops the winding cloth around his dead man’s jaw after Scrooge tries to schmooze the terrifying him by saying “You were always a good man of business, Jacob”
“Business Ebeneezer?” the ghost wails with his jaw dropped open. “Mankind was my business.” he laments.
So much for my unsmiling open mouth in my 2026 passport photo.
But I found a quote today that makes my passport photo and my rough edges smooth and noble at least in my eyes.
“Beautiful young people are accidents of nature but beautiful old people are works of art” Eleanor Roosevelt said.
And here’s the catch: beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
This is the greatest leveler in human history. Thus Abraham Lincoln is handsome to some people even though he considered himself homely. And Eleanor Roosevelt herself, who had crooked teeth and a bent posture, was considered beautiful by thousands who admired her courage in resigning from the Daughters of the American Revolution when they refused to allow the black soprano Marian Anderson to sing at Constitution Hall.
The first lady persuaded her husband Franklin Delano Roosevelt to authorize the Lincoln Memorial as the site of Marian Anderson’s concert. And the rest is history including Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream speech” on the same steps of the Lincoln Memorial .
Yes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and even those of us with brutally truthful passport photos have a chance to be beautiful in our own way.
George Orwell believed that “At 50; we get the face we deserve.” But he’s wrong. Year by year the face is painted over by strokes of fate just like the Mona Lisa has previous images painted below its surface.
So enjoy your passport photo as I enjoy mine, one wrinkle at a time.
Paul Keane is a Connecticut native and retired Vermont school teacher.