Last week, I wrote about how taking eyelashes to extreme lengths and thicknesses seems to be an obsession for women these days. Mascara brands promise lashes so long and voluminous that it makes my eyelids heavy just blinking about it.

That led me to think about what makes a woman feel beautiful and why a particular physical feature can become so important to the way a woman feels about herself.

A recent episode of "What Not to Wear" also tied into these issues. On the show, a very attractive 50-something gal from Texas was made-over to bring her wardrobe out of the 1980's and teach her how to start dressing in a more age-appropriate way. A part of the makeover process was also updating her hair from the Texas beauty queen, big blonde "do" to something softer and more modern.

At the end of the show, this already good-looking woman looked absolutely fantastic, yet she didn't feel pretty because they had cut off her over-processed, long, blonde hair and given her a fresh, new hairstyle. In her mind, she couldn't be pretty and attractive to men unless she had the big hair. Since she no longer had that, her hair was the "flaw" in her appearance that she focused on and she totally missed seeing how great she looked.

Like this woman, I think many of us dissect ourselves until we're not the sum of our parts, we're just bits and pieces. Then we spend an inordinate amount of time putting ourselves down for not meeting the ideal picture we have in our heads of what this feature should look like in order for it to be labeled as "pretty."

There are many women - and this includes me - who have one feature of their appearance that they are unhappy with. "I really hate my-fill in the blank." We believe that as long as that stays the same, we can never feel truly beautiful. In fact, many women just plain give up even trying to look better because perfection is unattainable, so they believe that even small attempts at looking better are futile.

But as this episode of "What Not to Wear" demonstrated - and we've seen it numerous other times on the show - we (and I'm talking to myself here too) need to wipe away the image of perfection we have in our heads, accept who we are, and work with it. The show has shown me over and over again that every woman, no matter her size or shape, can look better with clothes that fit well, a good haircut and artfully-applied makeup. The good features of each woman are accentuated and her less than perfect features minimized. And when we see each of them as a complete picture at the end of the show, they look beautiful.

So back to where I started with why we are obsessed with lashes-when you compare yourself to a "Victoria's Secret" model - and it's pretty hard not to do when a TV commercial comes on and the camera is about three inches away from her taut, 19-year-old abs - it's very easy to feel inadequate in pretty much every way.

But makeup companies want us to believe - and I don't fault them for this - that if we use enough Intense XXL Extreme mascara, you can compare your lashes to those on a model and even if you're five-foot-two, you won't come up short.

You may hate everything else about your body, but your lashes will be perfect.