Throughout the middle chapters of the novel, Remedios the Beauty is wholly unaware of the effect that she has on men. Because she is uninterested in her appearance, Remedios’s modest beauty is treated as ironic by the novel. This sense of situational irony is apparent in Remedios’s characteristic response to her family’s attempts to pressure her to maintain propriety: 

They bothered her so much to cut the rain of hair that already reached to her thighs and to make rolls with combs and braids with red ribbons that she simply shaved her head and used the hair to make wigs for the saints. The startling thing about her simplifying instinct was that the more she did away with fashion in a search for comfort and the more she passed over conventions as she obeyed spontaneity, the more disturbing her incredible beauty became and the more provocative she became to men.

When her family pressured Remedios to cut her long and wild hair, she simply “shaved her head” in order to “make wigs” for the dolls and figurines of saints around the house. The narrator notes the “startling” fact that her disinterest in her appearance makes her, ironically, all the more attractive to men. “The more she did away with fashion,” the narrator notes, “the more provocative she became to men.” The men in Macondo, then, regard her disinterest in maintaining her appearance as a provocation or challenge to them.