Upon donning my fresh plastic “UV 80+++” visor, I had already appeared to have been a changed person. Aside from feeling protected from the sun and its cancerous death rays, being able to wear the famed “Asian mom hat”  meant that I had finally reached the state of womanhood — at least, according to my Asian relatives.

A few weeks ago, my newspaper friends challenged me to wear an “Asian sun visor” to school for a day. Despite extremely judgmental looks from my mom, I was determined to prove that I could pull off a rather large black plastic sun visor.

Surprisingly, despite wearing a plastic visor that shielded my entire face, the only people who really cared were the occasional “passerbyers”  who occasionally gave me double takes.

My day started clumsily, the tragic signature Isabelle style in which I almost forgot my mission to then be reminded by my mom that she loathed the idea of me “covering up my beautiful face.”

Fourth-period newspaper went quietly, assuming that people were used to my antics, everything went smoothly. Lacking excitement, I turned to setting myself missions such as staring at someone for 5 minutes, not saying anything to see if they’d react.

Turns out, though, no one could see if I was  looking at them or not, so my first mission failed miserably.

Mission No. 2 was my time to shine: walking across the hallway from the journalism room to the English wing, which in itself was almost more embarrassing than funny.

Other than the occasional passing freshman who would look at me as if I had offensively worn a sloth onesie to school, few people actually cared to look or judge.

Both missions so far had been failures and rarely caught anyone’s attention, other than some sparing glances. The only compliments I got almost always pointed out that, “you look like an Asian mom at the farmer’s market,” which I took gladly, as I’m pretty sure they meant, “Wow, you look really good you should wear that every day!”

Based on my experiment, I wish I could say that people fell out of their chairs in shock at my fashion-conscious visor, or that I was on my way to becoming the next “style files” subject. What really happened, however, was people looked at me just as if I had worn a beanie.

This realization led to  a mid sixth-period breakdown, because I guess my entire strangeness had just settled with my peers well. Was no one concerned that I was wearing this bizarre hat? Did they think I was this weird that they have accepted me like this?

Finally, after a day of wearing an “Asian sun visor,” I realized that keeping my skin supple, youthful and pale is in fact very accepted and if you want to do this to keep your skin youthful just buy the visor and meet up with me and we can be #squad goals!