" I am a deeply superficial person"

Andy Warhol was obsessed with beauty and glamour. He only surrounded himself with beautiful people. Everything about his lifestyle was glittered and gold.

He was once even quoted as having said: 

"I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood.

They're beautiful.

Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic."

Clearly he was not afraid of admitting that he believed that what was on the outside was far more important that anything on the inside.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Andy Warhols love affair with glamour is that he, himself, was a very unattractive person.

He grew up in a very poor part of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was plagued by illness as a child that left him with terrible pock-like scars on his face. During his childhood and teenage years he was quite an outcast to others his age.

Once he became famous however, he became extremely fixated on fixing his looks.

He would spend hours getting ready before he went out. He applied harsh bleaching creams to his face to make himself appear paler, he covered his skin in layers of cakey makeup, he dyed his eye brows black, and dyed his hair a silver-y white.

Andy Warhol was trying to become everything he admired in the people he surrounded himself by.

In a way, this is extremely sad to me. He was a man who was clearly talented, but so full of self-hatred. He also did nothing to help his situation because he had such high standards of beauty for the company that he kept.

He struggle for self-acceptance and quest for perfection is something that I think the majority of mainstream culture can relate to today. It seems as though these days there are ads all over the place for plastic surgery, magic creams, weight loss miracles, and all sorts of make-up!

Unfortunately, Warhol's face was not the only part of his physical self that he was disgusted with. At the height of his fame an deranged woman snuck into Andy Warhol's Factory and stabbed him several times in the stomach. The woman was later caught and arrested and Warhol nearly died. The ordeal left him even further scarred physically and also emotionally.

He soon became so preoccupied with his dissatisfaction of his appearance that he rarely left his house.

Fame and the quest for glamour and perfection were ultimately what made the last years of Andy Warhol's life filled with misery and solitude.

In relation to the celebrities of today; it seems that many other stars are on the same path of self-destruction in their pursuit of perfection and notariaty.