News Flash: Beauty Consumers Aren't Suckers

The headlines regarding this recent study about claims made in cosmetics ads indicate things like "Most 'scientific' beauty product claims are bogus." As per usual, the headline isn't accurate at all; the study measured whether product claims were seen as accurate, which is an entirely different matter. Luckily, the question of whether customers think products are bogus is arguably more interesting than whether or not they actually are, so let's go from there—

In short, the study found that women think most beauty ads are bullshit. And appropriately so: They found ads that directly claimed superiority over other products to be flat-out false, and ads based on science to be vague or omissive. Interestingly, the ad type that was perceived as being most acceptable was endorsements—which makes sense, as most of us implicitly understand that at the very least, the person making the endorsement is agreeing of her own free will to make it (even if it's a talking-head fee, not the product's efficacy, that prompts the agreement). And cannily executed, an endorsement, particularly a celebrity endorsement, can be effective if the consumer sees a reflection of herself in the spokesperson.

So we're not suckers for iffy advertising; that's great. But if we actively do not believe the advertising, why are we buying the products? Reputation? Curiosity? Joyful participation in consumerism? Hope? The study I'd really like to see is one in which women who actually buy these products (I include myself here) judge the ads. I'm just as skeptical as the women in this study, but my bathroom shelf has plenty of products that make science-ish claims on it. I do my research, sure, and if I don't think I see any change I don't buy a product again. But the trick of the beauty industry lies in that little blip: If I don't think I see any change. Most things that come in a jar are going to have effects so subtle that their effectiveness is largely in terms of perception, not anything measurable. I think the retinoid cream I use helps keep my skin smooth, but do I know?

The science of beauty ads isn't meant to educate consumers on polymers and retinoids. The science only needs to be assuring enough to fill in that gap between thinking and knowing a product is "working," whatever any consumer's definition of "working" might be. Cosmetics' science claims don't hold up independently, and they don't need to. They just need to hold up enough to nudge us right over the border of where hope and possibility meet.

I've talked with plenty of women about why they wear beauty products, specifically makeup and how it plays into women's day-to-day routines, but not so much about why they buy them. Tell me: What goes through your mind when you're deciding whether to purchase a product? Are you evaluating the product's claims, parsing the words on the label? Are you going by what trusted sources have said? Do you go into a purchase with cynicism, or hope, or both?

MAC Office Hours: "Weisure," Beauty Labor, and Order

She's a glamorous go-getter with nothing temp about her! Full-time, overtime—her makeup, like her day, goes on and on. What she loves: the no-fade staying power of these M∙A∙C Pro Longwear formulas—including new M∙A∙C Pro Longwear Blush. 

I don’t mean to pick on MAC—really, I don’t. In fact, if the brand didn’t intrigue me so much I’d ignore it (when have I ever written about, say, Maybelline?). It used Miss Piggy for a model, for chrissakes, and even though I hopped right onto that with looking at the version of “authenticity” MAC peddles, the fact remains that I have to admire how well MAC’s marketing team zeroes in on what skeptics comme moi might sniff out in a brand.

So at first, when I saw this astute Makeup Museum post critiquing MAC’s latest line, titled Office Hours, I glanced at the styling of the ads for the collection and actually had a knee-jerk defense of the brand. Yes, the ads depict a working woman whose office looks like cotton candy, and who appears to do nothing more demanding than file her nails; yes, they’re styled in a retro fashion, hearkening back to the days when the best a woman could hope for was being head of the secretary pool. I saw the spot-on points the Makeup Museum’s Curator was making—but truth be told, I sorta liked the look of the ads. Pretty much the only fashion trend I’ve endorsed since grunge fell out of favor is the Mad Men-inspired 1960s revival (I’m writing this while sporting a checkered pinafore and a bouffant). The show and the styles it brought back have been critiqued as a manifestation of our national longing to return to a “simpler time”—simpler being code for racist, sexist, and psychically stifled—and perhaps in some aspects it is. But as creatures of 2012, we also have the luxury of being able to see the era in perfect hindsight; in loud shift dresses and winged eyeliner we may see not conformity but a generation of women on the precipice of feminism, rebellion bubbling inside them, just waiting for the right moment to burst forth.

Point is: At first I saw the MAC collection as being a reference to where women actually are today, not an idealization of the past. I didn’t even mind the Barbie-fied version of work the ads fed us; I don’t particularly want a “real” work-based makeup collection featuring a shade called Printer Preset Blues, you know? Certainly I wouldn’t want it from MAC, which even more so than other beauty brands is not in the business of reflecting our realities; they’re in the business of creating our fantasies. So, sure, let the vision created with this collection be not an office populated with Flavia coffee machines but a Mad Men-style glam kitsch office where martini hour starts at 3 and Esquivel is piped through the intercom.

That doesn’t answer the fundamental question raised over at Makeup Museum, though, or the question lurking beneath my own assessment of the campaign: Why office work? Why, of all the possible themes for MAC to choose from, choose a place associated with drudgery, in-the-box thinking, and tedium? (Apologies to all who enjoy their office jobs; my freelancer bias is showing, I suppose.)

The campaign is a sort of reverse nod to a trend sociologists have noted in the past several years—a conflation of work and leisure (or “weisure,” if you must) most readily visible in the expectation that because new technologies allow us to be available 24/7, we’ll actually be available 24/7. Theoretically, the upside is a more flexible work culture (I can work poolside on my smartphone!); the downside is an expansion of what can fairly be considered “office hours” (must I work poolside on my smartphone?). Running parallel to the phenomenon of working hours coming to resemble leisure is the phenomenon of leisure time beginning to resemble work. I mean, when else in the history of humankind have 34 million people signed up to spend their leisure time tending imaginary farms? Or eagerly signed up for the privilege of basically creating our own timesheets of time-and-place accountability?

The idea behind things like Farmville and Foursquare is that our leisure time will seem somehow more pleasurable if we view it through the lens of work; they provide us with rules, feedback on our own activities, and clearly defined parameters. There is comfort in regulation. And so it is with MAC’s Office Collection: Beyond the kooky pink kitsch of the ads, there’s definite—and appealing—order. Lip glosses take their place in the office drawer alongside paper clips and staple removers; blush compacts line up next to perfectly sharpened pencils. MAC’s immensely popular Lipglass is shown open but immaculate next to a broken pencil (the writing kind, not the eyelining kind), the idea being that Lipglass is more reliable than good old-fashioned work tools.

It might sound like I’m strictly cynical about MAC’s conflation of work and play, and I am, but no more so than I’m cynical about any campaign. In fact, there’s something refreshing here about MAC openly acknowledging that beauty isn’t always play. Sometimes it’s work, even if you approach it with a MAC-like sensibility of makeup being about “expression” and play, and the idea of linking their products to heavily styled drudgery serves as an inherent acknowledgement of women’s individually performed beauty labor. (It also makes me wonder what our other manifestations of “weisure” might be telling us about how we choose to spend our supposedly free time. If this collection is a nod the labor of beauty, what does Farmville’s existence signify—a longing to get “back to the land” without leaving the comfort of our sofas? Do the constant check-ins of Foursquare signal our active acceptance of surveillance, to the point where we’ll broadcast our own locations to the world at large?)

The collection itself reflects the message of regulation behind the campaign (which, I suppose, is the entire point): The shades are neutral, tasteful, traditional. No matter how over-the-top the styling of the campaign may be, right below the “fun” retro styling beats an orderly, conservative heart. These shades are office-ready. The model’s pompadour, the monochrome palette, the exaggerated 1960s look: MAC gives us a glamorized version of office work here, which we need in order to want to participate. The company is partially relying upon its reputation as an innovator in the field in order to give us a wink and a nod—you know we’re not really saying you should want to be an office drone, right?

Yet without the products themselves having any subversive qualities (pink blush! taupe eyeshadow! oh my!) it becomes clear what the campaign is: the packaging of a rather boring color collection that still lets us get our kooky side on. That is, it’s doing exactly what marketing is supposed to do—highlighting hopes and fantasies we may have hushed over time, but ultimately just feeding us versions of ourselves.

The Alienation of Mary Kay

Karl is wearing TimeWise® Firming Eye Cream, .5 oz., $30, marykay.com or your nearest Mary Kay lady

Near the top of the dry erase board where I keep a running list of fragmented ideas—nose job thing, Miss Piggy, story about yogurt (all in due time, my friends, all in due time!)—there’s long been an item that makes me laugh every time I see it, because of its sheer grandiosity. Is beauty inherently capitalist??? it reads, question marks included. I have no idea where my line of thinking was at the time I scrawled it; certainly now the question doesn’t make much sense, unless one is willing to look at beauty as inherently being a good, which I’m not. The best I can come up with is that I meant is the beauty industry inherently capitalist, which, duh, yes, as are all industries, right?

Reading “The Pink Pyramid” by Virginia Sole-Smith in this month’s Harper’s, however, it seems my overblown, half-baked question has a stark answer. Specifically, I’m wondering if one arm of the beauty industry—Mary Kay and its masquerade of empowerment through direct sales—might not actually be a classic case study of why our economic system works the way it does, exemplifying certain aspects of capitalism, specifically the ways our own labor alienates us from our fuller selves. (The piece isn’t fully available online, but Sole-Smith has written about it at her blog and in these ungated pieces, and the piece is definitely worth picking up a copy of the magazine.) I’d always found Mary Kay old-fashioned and fussy, sure, but I rather liked the idea of women being able to work on their own schedule—the original flextime!—building upon a business founded by a woman, catering to women, being unabashedly feminine and celebrating the small joys of beauty.

The picture Sole-Smith skillfully paints with her investigative reporting dismantles any protofeminist notions: Mary Kay makes its money not so much from the sales parties conducted by its team members (a.k.a. Mary Kay ladies), but rather in roping in more and more people to become team members. For in order to successfully sell Mary Kay, it’s best to have lots of inventory—inventory purchased wholesale by team members from their “sales directors” (i.e. the next rung up on the pyramid), who receive a cut of the inventory sales before any client has actually purchased a thing. (And hey, if need be, Mary Kay saleswomen can just charge their inventory to their Chase Mary Kay Rewards Visa card.) With frequently shifting inventory and the tendency for potential sales party attendees to back out at the last minute (does anybody really enjoy going to those parties?), team members are stuck with thousands of dollars worth of inventory they can’t sell. The higher up the pyramid, the sweeter your deal. But hey—you don’t have to buy inventory in order to be a Mary Kay lady; you can just have your clients place orders and they’ll get their products in a few weeks—so it’s not technically a pyramid scheme. So technically, it’s not illegal.

In other words, it’s genius. Not only are Mary Kay participants basically jumping into a pyramid scheme, which preys upon hope, but the way Mary Kay evades being an actual pyramid scheme is the very thing that made me view the company as charming, even vaguely empowering: sisterhood. If you’ve ever been to a Mary Kay party or its ilk (I haven’t, but an ex-boyfriend’s mother once invited me to a “Passion Party,” and people-pleasing me actually went), you know what I’m talking about: an “it’s just us girls” tone that hits midway between no-nonsense big-sisterly advice and ostensibly pro-woman nudges to buy more products. (“You really are helping a friend and yourself,” says a sales director in the article’s opening scene. “That’s how Mary Kay works.”) If beauty talk serves as a portal for the kinds of conversations we’re actually hungry to have with other women, Mary Kay charges by the word.

That’s insidious enough, particularly because it puts a dollar value on the sort of tentative connections I see women try to make with one another all the time—proof that the catfight imagery that dominates depictions of female friendship is a divide-and-conquer technique that masks the vulnerability that’s so often laid bare in those relationships. But I’m just as intrigued by the way this dependence upon our wish to connect translates into dollars.

I lay zero claim to be a Marx scholar, or even to have seriously read Marx, so excuse me if this is beyond rudimentary. But as I understand it, a principal theme of Marxism is alienation from various aspects of labor—alienation from the product of one’s labor, the act of production, and human potential. This alienation is an inevitable outcome of a stratified class society—a social pyramid, you might say—in which people are only privy to their particular cog in the wheel that makes society go ’round. Lurking throughout the process of alienation is mystification, or the ways the market conceals the hierarchies and class relations that set the stage for alienation.

Mary Kay could hardly be more literal in its manifestation of alienation and marketplace mystification. Team members (the bottom of the pyramid) depend upon sales directors, (the next rung up) to supply their products and help build their clientele; a saleswoman’s interaction with Mary Kay proper seems nil (alienation from production). The company tracks wholesale numbers only—that is, what saleswomen purchase to sell, not what customers actually buy—so while a saleswoman has the illusion of complete control over her own labor, in fact she’s playing a crucial role in marketplace mystification, which serves to keep workers alienated from the true results of their own labor. It’s a strategic refusal on Mary Kay’s part, since it allows for the myth of team members’ potential to become the stuff of legend. The pink Cadillacs are only part of it; the brochure Sole-Smith was given in her first meeting with her sales director cited $17,040 as a reasonable outcome for holding just one skin-care class per week. (In her three years of research, of course, Sole-Smith didn’t find women who made anywhere near that amount.) The workers themselves seem to hesitantly accept the mystification to the point of superstition; legend has it that to have a successful Mary Kay career, you need to have your picture taken while standing in Mary Kay Ash’s heart-shaped bathtub. “I think most people were a little torn about doing this, because the line was so long, and it was all so campy,” said a sales director whose precarious Mary Kay-related finances played a role in her eventual divorce. “But at the same time, there’s this huge tradition that you can only be successful if you take the picture in the tub. So nobody was willing to forgo that step.” That is, the workers were afraid to pay attention to their own instincts that were whispering This is ridiculous, because the promise of earnings loomed so large. The alienation was complete.

When I interviewed Sole-Smith for The Beheld last year, she talked about what she calls “beauty gaps.” The gap between a customer paying $50 for a salon service and the worker receiving a fraction of that to perform outsourced “dirty work” (and, indeed, the overall gap between what women spend on beauty and what women earn when they become beauty workers); the gap between what a buyer is promised with a beauty product and what she actually receives; the gap our culture has created between being the smart girl and the pretty one.

This piece examines another beauty gap: the gap between the true actualization of human potential and the reality of the lives of the story’s subjects. Mary Kay talks a good talk about encouraging its workers to fulfill their greatest potential (“How can I help u achieve your dreams?!” the local sales director texts Sole-Smith at one point). But in truth, what Mary Kay workers hope will be flexibility turns out to be precarity—the very thing that prevents many of us from “fulfilling our dreams” or “reaching for the stars” or any of the bootstraps-happy talk we’re led to believe is the key to success. (Which, as Sole-Smith points out in a companion piece to "The Pink Pyramid," is particularly troublesome when our national conversation about women is still centered around the question of “having it all.”) Most of the women who do wind up making money from selling Mary Kay earn minimum wage. And some who lose money on their first attempt keep coming back, certain it’s not the system that’s at fault but rather their own lack of expertise that’s holding them back.

But hey, even if it’s a pyramid scheme, well, these women are going in with their eyes open, right? This is more about bad business, not about the beauty industry per se, right? Well, not really, and not only because Mary Kay talks a good (and misleading) talk. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Mary Kay is built upon the same idea as the Tupperware party plan—popular in the 1950s, the height of the “feminine mystique” era that put a hard sell on the idea that women should be wholly fulfilled by homemaking and child-reading alone. Today, in a world where the valorization of housewifery has been displaced by a combination of the beauty myth and superwoman, is it any surprise it’s a beauty company that has taken hold? And is it any surprise that in a world where it’s hard enough for regular consumers to manage their own combustible insecurities of appearance and money, some workers within the industry might fall prey to that same toxic combination?

The Enduring Popularity of Tans

Around this time each year—usually a hair later, but, hey, climate change!—I enter the same debate with myself: to self-tan or not to self-tan? After years of studiously avoiding the sun, fervently evoking old-timey movie stars with porcelain complexions as my reason for doing so, I spent time in the tropics a few years ago and returned with a deep allover tan that made people around me say, “Wow, you’re tan.” I freakin’ loved it and promptly spent a small fortune on Jergens Natural Glow. It lasted through the summer, but then the following summer I was faced with a conundrum: I’d adored having a natural tan and didn’t mind keeping it up artificially, but healthwise I couldn’t afford to do it again—I tick nearly every box on the list of skin cancer risk factors. (I’d initially done my best to avoid the sun in Vietnam but when that proved impossible, I threw off the towel and sunbathed for all it was worth.) Did I actually want to start from scratch, building up a “tan”—a tan made up of what amounts to skin dye, I might add—for no particular reason? Did I really want to invest the money and time in a fake tan, for a capitulation to vanity?

So here we are, leg-baring season quickly approaching, and I’m in the same spot again. And as I go back and forth with myself about whether I want to appear tanned this year, I'm asking myself a question that, surprisingly, I haven’t wondered before: Why do we want to look tan in the first place?

Part of the answer, as with many things fashionable, is Coco Chanel. Prior to the designer’s rise to prominence, clothes covered so much of women’s form that a body tan was impossible, and a tan on the face and hands signified what it still does in developing nations: that the tanned person is an outdoor laborer, most likely of low social status. Lily-white skin remained a sign of a lady even after industrialization, but legend has it that when Chanel was accidentally sunburned during a trip to the Riviera and developed a tan shortly thereafter, her new hue took fire as a symbol of all she herself embodied: modernism, luxury, and independence. The episode “coincided” with a shift in the medical approach to sunlight, as the medical field went from regarding the sun as dangerous to seeing it as a cure-all within a span of 30 years. In 1905’s The Effects of Tropical Light on White Men, Dr. Chas Edward Woodruff wrote that “The American girl is a bundle of nerves. She is a victim of too much light,” but by WWI “heliotherapy” was readily used to treat wounds, rickets, tuberculosis. Whatever the case, according to Vogue, “The 1929 girl must be tanned,” and so she was.

But here’s the thing that’s sort of flummoxing: That was 83 years ago. We haven’t let up since. There have been plenty of developments that have kept tanning popular—the bikini in 1946, the foil blanket in the 1950s, a plethora of tanning aides from “gypsy sun tan oil” in the 1930s to the perfunctory Coppertone baby—and there have been fluctuations in the fashionability of suntans. But since their arrival, tans have never truly gone out of fashion. Even through the enormous rise of awareness of the dangers of UV rays, tanning is, if not a cultural imperative, something we don’t necessarily question. We might swat wrists of friends who bake in tanning beds, but we don’t really blink an eye at self-tanning creams even if we don’t use them ourselves (and up to 46% of us do). Plus, judging by the number of people who complimented my tan after my return from Vietnam, it still holds a good amount of cultural cachet. Since 1929 we’ve given up spit curls, drop waists, and breast binding, but we cling to the tan.

We cling to it in part because its significance hasn’t changed all that much, sure; it’s affluence, luxury, and even though we all know better, health. The idea now isn’t so much that we’re acting as if we’ve spent two weeks at Saint-Tropez but rather that we’re not desk-bound. It’s also the perfect accessory: A tan hits the sweet spot between conspicuous and inconspicuous consumption. It visibly shares that you’ve done something we still connect with leisure and affluence, but without the bourgeois connotations of furs, Jaguars, and jewels. Once tan, you cannot help but be tan; it’s literally a part of who you are. It’s the ultimate expression of “Oh, this old thing?” The dearth of tans among hipsters supports this: In a community definitively marked by inconspicuous consumption, the standards for visibility change, stigmatizing any visible consumption, i.e. tans, more than they would be elsewhere. The activities prized by the hipster community—not that such a thing exists, mind you!—with the possible exceptions of fixed-gear bicycling and rabid picnicking, are largely indoor: art, music, Tumblr. The less tan you are, the more easily you can create the appearance of partaking in these activities. Certainly I don’t think hipsters are avoiding the sun to act as if they’re not secretly weekend warriors. But taking the step those weekend warriors might—applying self-tanner or bronzer to advertise one’s proclivities to the outdoors—would send the wrong sort of social message at Chloe Sevigny’s tea party.

Beyond the idea of material luxury, a tan represents that we have the luxury to be connected to both nature and culture simultaneously. Tourism boards use tanning in their materials: “The bourgeois on their Mediterranean beaches can entertain the illusion of learning to love their bodies again as they did in childhood,” writes K.K. Sharma in his overview of the history of tourism. A tan is a message, and the message is that its bearer is a child of nature who has returned to one’s filing-cabinet life bearing proof of the nature connection. The idea of tans returning us to a state of nature makes tanning less stigmatized where more tangible icons of luxury might be sneered at. 

But even with all these reasons for tans sticking around for more than 80 years, it’s still counterintuitive. I’m having trouble thinking of anything that we know full well is bad for us but that we do anyway, for vanity—rather, that we encourage the mimicking of. We might go on diets, wear high heels, quaff martinis, puff smoke rings, or any number of other things that have been glamorized that aren’t so hot for your health—but we’re actually doing those things, not pretending to do them. With self-tanner, it’s like we’re all standing around puffing on electronic cigarettes even if we’ve never touched real tobacco. We all know tans don’t actually represent health and that there’s no such thing as a “healthy tan,” but we don’t really believe it. Rather, plenty of us believe it but covet the tan anyway, and turn to products to help us regain what has been taken from us with our banishment from the sun.

And, as with so many things about the intensely personal choices we make, it just might come down to this: There is an enormous financial amount at stake in keeping us sunny-side up. Sunblock is a good-sized segment of the skin-care industry (it’s projected to hit $5.2 billion globally by 2015), but so are its cousins: sunless tanning products, spray-on tans, and cosmetic bronzers totaling $516 million annually, not to mention the indoor tanning industry and low-dose sunblocks marketed as "tanning creams." I’d initially thought that the cosmetic approaches to tanning were developed as a “healthy” alternative to natural tans and tanning beds, but actually, various lotions and dyes have been around as long as tanning has been fashionable, for the very reason that a suntan is sought after in the first place: Most of us don’t have unlimited time to lounge around Biarritz (or, today, to lay complacently in tanning beds—which ain’t cheap, even if you’re willing to take the health risks). Mantan, a sunless tanning lotion popular in the 1950s, promised dual action with its “moisturizing” action that “lasts for days without touch-ups!”; even in an era when women were being supposedly liberated from housework with the modern kitchen, time was at a premium.

And we can’t look at tanning products without at least glancing at their counterparts: lighteners. Skin lightening creams are wildly popular in Asia; the idea isn’t to look white but rather to look sophisticated and wealthy—an elevation from the peasant class that works outside.The politics and implications of skin lightening call for deeper examination than I can give them here; for now I’ll just point out the obvious: Both self-tanners and skin lightening creams are class in a bottle. Asian women using skin lighteners don’t want to look white any more than I want to look Hispanic when I put on self-tanner; we want to look lighter or darker, sure, but both of those are a route to looking what our cultures deem better. Skin lightening creams are making in-roads in the North American market, with claims about “radiance,” “brightening,” and “illuminating—but the truth is, those adjectives are similarly applied in Asia as well (as I found out when I bought a “radiance” face wash in Vietnam that didn’t strip away my tan but made me look chalky immediately after washing). These are the same formulas, mind you, but being packaged to apply to the inner desires of each culture: paleness in Asia, radiance in America, youth and “rejuvenation” in both. As this excellently reported piece on the rise of skin lightening creams in North America shows, "a brightener is whatever we want it to be."

In The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf writes about how the beauty industry attempts to package the radiance each individual brings to the world. “The Rites of Beauty offer to sell women back an imitation of the light that is ours already, the central grace we are forbidden to say that we see,” she writes. If radiance can be bought and sold, in a consumer society that sends the message that the “real” radiance is what comes in the package, while the homemade stuff gets moldy. Add to that the reality that the homemade tan—that is, a tan acquired from actually being in the sun—is damaging to your health (and eventually to your vanity through a leathery appearance), and suddenly the stuff in the bottle becomes even more appealing than run-of-the-mill makeup that just promises to make you look “better.” Eyeliner makes you look more awake, but self-tanner (or lightener, depending on the culture) promises to give you back that light that was originally yours, and it does so in a way that lets you play by the rules. Good girls stay out of the sun, but good girls also look like they get plenty of the stuff regardless. The tan in the bottle—that “Radiant,” “Natural Glow,” that “Sublime Bronze,” that holy protection of the “Bronzing Veil”—gives us an out, allows us to have our radiance without the harm the real deal would inflict. The beauty of it for us is that we’ve figured out how to get that “healthy tan” after all. And the beauty of it for the industry is that we’re paying $8.49 for each opportunity to do so.

Nutricosmetics, Part II: Morality, Capitalism, and Selling Us Ourselves

"Apples' soluble fiber helps your body eliminate nasty toxins that could show up on your skin.
It's nature's beauty bar!" —Cranach the Elder, subtextually

When I first learned about Renaissance beauty ideals in high school—or rather, the idea that physical beauty was then widely understood as an indicator of moral superiority—my first thought was that we still sort of think that way. We’re just not as blatant about it as Castiglione was in 1528 in his Book of the Courtier: “Beauty springs from God, and is like a circle of which goodness is the center. And hence, as there can be no circle without a center, there can be no beauty without goodness...outward beauty is a true sign of inward goodness.”

Today I think we still do make that equation, but the myriad variants on female beauty—the femme fatale, the beautiful damaged soul, heroin chic, the gorgeous bitch whose looks could kill—complicates it a good deal. We’ve introduced more archetypes, more ways to be prototypically feminine and beautiful, than just our walking angels. Morality still comes into play in our discussions of beauty—for example, we still use terms like “good skin” and “bad skin” that reflect our conflation of morality and beauty—but we’ve largely shifted away from openly and directly equating morality and beauty. Instead, we readily talk about another sort of “inner beauty” that manifests itself physically. Radiance, confidence, allure, je ne sais quoi, “a special quality,” or simply “it”—we freely talk about “inner beauty” as something that can’t be faked, as something that has to come from within. And in that sense, I’m wondering if nutricosmetics are being touted as a route to a sort of “inner beauty,” serving as a modern-day extension of Renaissance ideals of beauty and inner goodness. Nutricosmetics promise more than good skin; they promise inner beauty. Not the sort of inner beauty we’re referring to when we talk about radiance or confidence, of course—but I’m pretty sure nutricosmetics companies are banking on consumers making the connection between their product and confidence-as-inner-beauty. And given the ways that we moralize what women put into their bodies, nutricosmetics marketers are probably wise to take that bet. Nutricosmetics attempt to commodify an intangible spiritual quality, using words like glow, energy, balance, and replenishing, by linking it to something similarly intangible (health) via something highly tangible (a pill, a tea, a tonic, a beverage).

I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to say that we equate health and morality (certainly the “war on obesity” and the intense vitriol it brings speaks to that), and that in particular what women choose to put into their bodies becomes a moral issue. (The success of many a trite diet-food campaign—hell, the success of an HSBC ad campaign from several years ago—depends upon it.) Putting the right things into your body is near the top of the pyramid of morality for western women. We link health and morality, and we certainly link health and beauty (I challenge you to find a beauty guide of any length that doesn’t address nutrition and exercise; certainly if I were to write one I’d include health). So nutricosmetics, in linking health and beauty, become a representation of the ways we still link beauty and morality. The pills and potions become the linking object that allows beauty, health, and morality to combine in ways that become difficult to consciously untangle—which is exactly what makes it ripe for capitalist culture, where such elisions and difficulties become the basis for effective marketing.

Capitalism works in part because it takes our private, intrinsic qualities and makes them extrinsic. With nutricosmetics, capitalism takes our abstract ideas about goodness and beauty—specifically “inner beauty”—and transforms them into products we can buy. Nutricosmetics marketing works specifically because it takes our most abstract and intrinsic of qualities—radiance, vitality, glow, “a certain quality,” whatever you wish to call it—puts it into a capsule, and sells it right back to us. Is there a more tangible manifestation of “inner beauty” than a pill that promises good skin?

We talk about how the makeup industry does this, and certainly there’s a moral component to face paint and topical skin care, but throwing health and ingestible products into the mix complicates matters. Where cosmetics enhance and correct, nutricosmetics purport to transform us, literally from the inside out. Cosmetics try to cover our flaws; nutricosmetics try to make us flawless. And specifically in American markets, they do so while allowing us to skirt our old-fashioned Puritan ideals. With nutricosmetics, we don’t even need to do the work of sticking to a “good” diet or eat “right.” All we need to do is buy.
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For part I of The Collected Thoughts and Writings of Autumn Whitefield-Madrano on Nutricosmetics, click here.

Nutricosmetics, Part I

Tastes like berries! May or may not do jack shit for your skin, but efficacy is hardly the point.

I was 15 the first time I tried what’s now known as nutricosmetics. I read in some magazine that it was prenatal vitamins, not being great with child, that gave pregnant women their famous “glow,” and that the glow was easily obtained by taking prenatal supplements. I bought a bottle, and despite taking the pills faithfully, my hair didn’t suddenly start growing in glossy and lustrous, my nails didn’t sprout more quickly, and while I probably was aglow, what 15-year-old girl in reasonably good health isn’t? Just about the only change I noticed was the classic B-vitamin effect (i.e. neon pee).

I could tell the vitamins hadn’t really done much, so I didn’t buy them again--until college, and then again in my early 20s. It’s the same reason I sometimes buy boxes of “Skin Detox” from Yogi Tea, and used to apply a vitamin C cream under my eyes until I finally admitted it really wasn’t doing anything: I wanted them to work. And hey, if the whole idea is that it’s hope in a jar anyway, then maybe my wanting them to work would be enough. It’s like my beauty editor pal said: “It’s like the confirmation bias in psychology… If you just shelled out $300 for a cream, your brain is in this mode of, This is going to work. You have that optimism that can actually make you radiant.” I can get all huffy about some anti-aging snake oils, but vitamins and teas? Yeah, I’ll play.

For once, I was ahead of the curve. Once relegated to “the dusty aisles of health food stores” (the kind that smelled like carob nut clusters, not the kind that smelled like, say, lemongrass-freesia candles and California Baby Wash), nutricosmetics, or nutriceuticals, are expected to grow 6% a year to reach $8.5 billion by 2015, the New York Times reports. Nutricosmetics are foods, drinks, or supplements meant to enhance beauty, usually the skin. (Some consider skin creams containing nutrients purported to aid beauty, like vitamin C cream, to be a nutricosmetic; others loosely apply it to novelty cosmetics meant to be eaten with no ill effects, like a godawful brown sugar-honey lip scrub I got at a beauty sale. I’m using it here to mean ingestibles meant to enhance beauty.) You can find Borba “Skin Balance Waters” in delis; dermatologist Dr. Perricone peddles his “Skin Clear” supplements at Sephora; Balance’s Nimble bar, designed “specifically for women” (because our skin is different?), was at the checkout the last time I went to Duane Reade.

I’m curious about nutricosmetics, and suspicious of them too. In the coming days I’ll be talking more about my larger hesitations about them, but for now I’d just like to look at how we created a market for them, and why it happened now instead of during the 1970s vitamin boom. Nutricosmetics have been around in other countries for a while now; the Times article touches upon their role in China, where supplemention has long been a part of regular health care. (And the first time I saw a drink purported to aid with beauty, it was in the Czech Republic. The drink was sugary, which seemed to defeat the purpose, but perhaps it was easier for me to dismiss its claims because I couldn’t make out much of the labeling on the bottle. Funnily enough, “Beauty Water” was in English.) I think there’s a market for them now because of the ways we segment information, particularly health information, and particularly health information for women.

Pretty much any women’s magazine will repeatedly and explicitly state that simply eating right and exercising is good for you and that the particulars of it are up to you, and they’re absolutely correct. But that larger message gets lost in the drive for microinformation that fills every inch of space in ladymags: runners at the bottom of the page about what this vitamin can do, starbusts of information on health pages about the benefits of everything from beet juice to gingko biloba. Microinformation has gotten more plentiful due to the web (duh) but also publishing advances that make it easier to make information more graphic--easier to digest, but also with less room for exploring complexities.

Here’s how microinformation gets onto the page: Let’s say a journal publishes a piece about the effect of lutein on skin elasticity. An editor would find the study and pitch it to her boss to be included in an upcoming issue as one of the short information busts (like those one-sentence “didja know?!” brightly colored circles you see all over ladymags). They decide to run it, and the magazine’s research team verifies the information for factual accuracy, usually just reading the study but possibly talking to the people who conducted the study. It’s factually correct, and the information burst runs as, say, “Lutein increases skin elasticity! Be sure to eat your turnip greens.” It’s correct--lutein does increase skin elasticity, and turnip greens contain a lot of lutein--so the magazine has done its job.

It’s not really that simple, though. Consumer magazines are meticulous about fact-checking, and most fact-checkers I know are good at their work and care about making sure they don’t let bad facts slip through. So it’s not that anyone’s negligent; it’s more that fact-checking too often serves the purpose of making sure things aren’t wrong, not making sure they’re right. A study might say that lutein is good for skin elasticity but also note that most adults get plenty of lutein with relatively little effort through their diet, or note that the study was done on people who were lutein-deficient and that the effects don’t increase once you’ve met the relatively low recommended daily allowance. Or maybe it increased skin elasticity by 2%, or maybe the study involved 12 people, all of whom were white women over 50. Or maybe the study was just a bad study, in a way that wouldn’t be clear to a diligent but overworked fact-checker with an English degree, not a medical one. Or, more likely, the fact-checker points out all of the above, but there’s only room for 15 words in 18-point font with the wraparound on the graphic element, and art can’t give us more room on the page, and you’re running at deadline and the information isn’t wrong, it’s just not as holistically accurate as it could be, so let’s just take one for lutein, okay? What’s the harm?

And there isn’t any major harm, of course. But our hoarding of nutrition microinformation takes away from the larger point, which is that if you have a balanced diet you won’t have to be chowing down turnip greens because you’ll organically be getting your RDA of lutein, and you won’t have to worry about what nutrients will make your skin elastic because you’re getting what your body needs just by being sensible. More to the point here, it creates a market for things like the Nimble bar, because oh hey it’s got lutein and didn’t I read somewhere that would make my skin more elastic?

The more we segment information, the more we segment ourselves and our buying choices. Now, I don’t think nutricosmetics are abhorrent (probably the worst thing about the Nimble bar is that it tastes like chalk). But when I stop and think about how we’ve dug our own hole here through our constant intake of microinformation, I get uneasy. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that nutricosmetics have only really caught fire in the States in the past couple of years, despite Americans’ love affair with pills, which is nearly matched by our love affair with easily digested health information. Couple our love of health information with the quest for beauty, and you’ve got a market waiting to happen. There is no new way to become more beautiful; it’s all variations of the stuff that’s been around forever, e.g. painting your face, getting a little exercise, styling your hair, and trying to make the most of what you have. Creating niches of service-oriented information can be helpful, but it also leads the march toward creating niche markets. Lutein, iron, and beta carotene aren’t new; they’re just being packaged as new and branded with a hyperinformed consumer in mind. Without niche information as provided in mainstream women’s media, the Nimble bar wouldn’t exist.

“Slow living” might be a fad, but we’re still American, forever looking for shortcuts to something that takes real time, real effort, or real skill. Nutricosmetics don’t give us anything we don’t get in a well-balanced diet, and that’s one reason to question the sudden market for them--but it’s not the most important one. Tomorrow I’ll be looking at some of the larger ideas behind nutricosmetics, as well as nutrition-based beauty regimes that might fall into the “slow living” category. In the meantime, tell me: Have you bought nutricosmetics? Do you take any supplements with your looks in mind? I’ve already copped to my “Skin Detox” tea, and I’ll also admit that a major motivation for taking my omega-3 oil and eating lots of salmon is because I notice a difference in my skin when I’m diligent about it. What about you?

Beauty Blogosphere 12.9.11

What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between.

Yes, that is Alyson Hannigan. We've all gotta make a living.

From Head...
Sometimes the press release headline speaks for itself: Head & Shoulders Empowers Women to Be a Good Girlfriend. Actually, no, it doesn't speak for itself; let's turn to the press release tag line from dandruff shampoo Head & Shoulders for that: "Good Girlfriend Guide Helps Put an End to Head-Scratching Behavior." GET IT?!

...To Toe...
Tis the season: Did you know there is an entire website devoted to elf shoes? There is. But on it you can click through to instructions on how to fold a dollar bill into an elf shoe. You never know what you'll find if you stick around on the elf shoe site!

...And Everything In Between:
Sweat it: Swallow a pill, sweat out perfume. People, I do not judge. But: ew!

I get so emotional: The Korean National Human Rights Commission's study on "emotional workers" indicates that nearly 33% of cosmetics salespeople suffer from depression, compared with a national average of 24% among professionals. I'm thrilled to see this taken seriously by a nation that recognizes the toll of emotional labor, and it's interesting that cosmetics salespeople were singled out to the point where the union of L'Oreal Korea is planning to request sales workers have guaranteed "paid emotional leave."

"I just think of myself as a girl who works and who likes to go out": You know, last week when my friends at The New Inquiry were mocked by Gawker for their appearance in the New York Times Style section, I was all indignant (even if editor-in-chief Rachel Rosenfelt wasn't), like, Why make fun of people for just doing their thing? And then I read this piece about New York socialites breaking their way into the beauty business. So.

The beauty of Ginger White: Officially could not care less about political sex scandals, but am glad I read Irin Carmon's piece on Herman Cain mistress Ginger White that touches upon the peculiarity of her profession of gym owner/fitness instructor. "She claimed she wanted to start a fitness business because men wouldn’t look at her and she could make other women feel beautiful at the same time. She seemed unsure if she wanted to cast herself as a victim or a gamer of a system in which female beauty is a blessing and a curse. She was probably both."

Wilde thing: One thing I care about even less than political sex scandals is celebrity fluff pieces. That said, I found it interesting that Olivia Wilde fears looking like "a tranny" with her makeup application. It says more about our ideas of transsexuals and gender roles than it does about Ms. Wilde—that as much as transsexuals may try to look feminine, there's a new bar that we have in place to prevent anyone but a select few from getting there. (Note: I've edited this blurb; thank you to the anonymous reader who pointed out that my original language, which implied transsexuals "masquerade," wasn't understanding of transsexualism. I don't always get things right, but I do try.) I also agree with her point about us gravitating toward looks that suit our faces well. There's a reason this full-cheeked, dark-eyed lass likes the 1920s look so much!

The Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci, 15th century, tempera and Bath & Body Works Cucumber Bliss on gesso

Passover: Makeup and skin creams are ruining The Last Supper. Judas, it seems, is off the hook.

American beauty: Really wish this HuffPo piece thought to question Estee Lauder's declaration that European women are "more pragmatic" about aging and thus need different skin care items than Americans do. I suppose this theory could be part of the je ne sais quoi of les françaises, but is it really true that American women are just naturally more freaked-out about our crow's feet and that Estee Lauder is just following our lead?

Honor crime: Potential laws in Saudi Arabia would fine and "publicly shame" street harassers. But wait, I thought women were harassed because of our short skirts, yet Saudi women wear hijab! Something must be amiss.

"Get More, Pay Less": The British Advertising Standards Agency has banned a flippant ad for breast augmentation, claiming that it trivializes cosmetic surgery. I don't normally get too up in arms about any one particular ad or image, but when I saw this my mind was sort of blown. Who thought this was okay?

Real value: This report on a Girl Scouts study about the effect of reality TV on girls does its damndest to not be bleak, but it still is: 38% of girls who watched reality TV were reported that a girl's value lies in her looks, compared with 28% of girls who didn't watch reality TV.

Wearing your heart in your pits: Some personality traits can be somewhat reliably detected through body odor, according to a study in which participants slept in T-shirts that were then evaluated by other participants for extroversion, neuroticism, and dominance. The sniffers predicted each shirt-wearer's personality about as reliably as those who, in another study, evaluated people based on videos of their behaviors. (How will this intersect with the swallowable perfume?!)

Pantone makeup line!: !!!

How young is too young for a bikini wax?: I'd say, oh, eleven. (Thanks to reader Madeline for the tip!)

The Perfect Irish Man: Somehow it's a little easier for me to see the "male beauty myth" more clearly when it's being applied to Irish men, a more homogenous population than we have in the States. Cosmetic procedures have sharply increased among Irishmen, belying their image as rugged fisherman, and a new documentary, The Perfect Irish Man, is set out to explore that.

Fly me: The flight attendant aesthetic is well and alive, as shown by the beauty tips in Runway, Virgin Atlantic's employee guide.

Who's that girl?: Zooey Deschanel as not the new iteration of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but as a "Logo Girl," thoughtfully laid out at The New Inquiry by Sarah Handelman. "Showing a version of Jess that is anything other than awkwardly cute is out of the question. Yet, being anything other-than-cute is exactly what she needs in order to lift off the page."

Wish the illustration had kept the saw on the ground.

Pinup girls: Fascinating side-by-side comparisons of the photos used for cheesecake pinup illustrations, and the illustrations themselves. There's the obvious stuff (even with all that shapewear and already-lovely figures, the actual models aren't as hourglassy as the illos), but what really strikes me is that there's this eagerness in the actual photos that's entirely missing from the final images. The illustrations always look happy, of course, but they don't have much verve.

Supercomputermodel: For the three people on the Internet who haven't heard it yet, H&M is superimposing models' heads onto the same body. What I can't figure out is why anyone is surprised by this. Every image you ever see in an advertisement is basically computer-generated! This is absolutely no different.

Coded: Decoding Dress on the potentially restrictive nature of informal dress codes. I'm absolutely with her: Informal dress codes can provoke a good deal of anxiety, reminding me of how I used to secretly wish my high school had uniforms so I just wouldn't have to ever think about what to wear. Honestly? Still feel that way sometimes.

All the sad ladies: Emily Ansara Baines on sadness, women, and being seen. "We're expected to perform anyway, so why not make a career out of it? We perform by laughing off comments that might be meant kindly but are often chauvinistic. We perform by being good students and trying to make our teachers and parents proud. We perform by doing our best to look a certain way. We are continually performing." She suggests that this performance is a way to manage the sadness that comes with the recognition that it's damn near impossible to be a woman and just be instead of being looked at, which is interesting because I've always thought that the sadness stemmed from the performance. I'm not one who is known for examining my own sadness, though. Perhaps I should start.

Who do we want to look beautiful for?: Kate Fridkis on realizing that the desire to look good wasn't as correlated to male attention as she'd thought: "An interesting thing happened when I got married. I started feeling like I had to be pretty or I might let [my husband] down." This pained me to read, because I recognized it all too well. As upsetting as it is, it was a relief to read another self-identified feminist in an egalitarian relationship express the sentiment.

Belly up: I normally shy away from galleries of "real women's bodies," because frankly I more often walk away from them feeling worse than I did when I went in. But if anything could convince me otherwise, it's reading Caitlin's piece about the xoJane Real Girl Belly Project. My belly is by far my most despised body part, and though I can't say the gallery cured me of that, because real women's bellies are usually hidden (as opposed to our faces, or even the circumference of our hips) it really was illuminative.

Looking forward: I've been musing a lot recently about the phrase "aging gracefully," and wondering what exactly that means. And then Une Femme d'un Certain Age comes up with this: "Are we dressing, wearing our hair, making choices based on who we are and how we live our lives today, and moving into the future?" This was part of what made me hold onto certain beauty products far past their expiration date (chemically and emotionally), and I like the idea of styling myself while moving into the future. The discussion at No More Dirty Looks was helpful too (side note: I love it when I see commenters at The Beheld commenting on other sites! You're all so insightful).

Context is queen: Thoughtful post from Kjerstin Gruys on learning that she's technically "overweight" even though she's in excellent health, and both she and her physician are totally fine with her weight specifically. It's particularly interesting in light of her eating disorder history, as she questions the usefulness of metrics: "Then she asked me, 'How much weight did you lose in your most successful weight-loss attempt?'... There was no space to specify that 'it was due to anorexia and she could have died.' ... This is troubling: the wording of this question frames any weight loss as good, which we know isn't true." Seeing how she's resisting the temptation to use her BMI "diagnosis" as an excuse to dip into old behaviors is inspirational.

Beauty Blogosphere 12.2.11

What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between.

Indian Woman With Red Bindi, Ginette Fine Art (no word as to whether model was great with child)

From Head...
O Calcutta!: The Indian Institute of Technology is proposing distribution of nutrient-rich cosmetics to pregnant women in hopes of reducing infant mortality rates. And here I thought bindis just looked cool!

...To Toe...
Well-heeled: Because the "lipstick index" still isn't good enough, now we're wearing the economy on our feet. "Examining the trends alongside economic patterns led researchers to theorize that a shakier economic situation correlates with the popularity of similarly shaky high heels." The reporter sort of calls BS, though, thus giving me a girl crush on her. (Which doesn't take away from my girl crush on you, m'dear.)

...And Everything In Between:
They are the 1%: Step-by-step read on how the Lauder family has sheltered hundreds of millions of dollars over the years through skilled use of tax breaks. We're hearing so much about the 1% but it remains a vague idea to the 99% of us; this piece illustrates exactly how the 1% stays the 1%, and shows how it has nothing to do with our favorite bootstraps stories—like, say, a plucky daughter of Hungarian immigrants who cajoled her chemist uncle into helping her make a face cream to sell to her friends and eventually becoming one of the world's most influential cosmetics magnates. Sounds a lot more romantic than short sells on the stock market in order to maintain a neutral position under IRS rules and savings $95 million in capital gains taxes, eh?

I get so emotional: More insight into the emotions-cosmetics link, from a cosmetics marketing report being pimped out to companies. Manalive, I always like to think I'm one step ahead of companies, but that's foolish: "Beauty Attachment shows that for certain consumers, beauty is extremely important and they’d rather skip breakfast than skip their morning routine; while for others, it’s simply a utility that meets a need, like a front door key.... Simply put, some women see the aisles at Sephora and their head spins with anticipation; while others see these same aisles and become incredibly anxious." Girl, they have got your number.

Hungry lies: Lionsgate, the studio putting out Hunger Games, is being sued by a cosmetics company for breach of contract surrounding an exclusive Hunger Games nail polish line.

Not so kawaii: I didn't realize until reading this piece about Shiseido vice president Kimie Iwata that Japanese professionals were even more imbalanced than Americans: Women account for less than 1% of top-level Japanese business executives.

Everyone I Have Ever Bathed With: Unfortunately late on this, but Tracey Emin soap!

Playing dirty: Beauty/body product chain Lush is taking action against a UK politician whose environmental policies have been deemed lacking. In the States it's relatively rare to see a company so specifically target one politician, much less a "softball" company like a cosmetics purveyor. I've got to hand it to Lush—this doesn't really seem like a publicity stunt to me (or is that the point?).

Political wrinkle: Australian prime minister Julia Gillard under fire for accepting anti-wrinkle creams as gifts, even as she refused other designer wares. (Really, the buried lede here is that the prime minister has a partner, and has never been married. As an American, to me this seems like some future-world sci-fi Ursula Leguin utopia. A woman is leading the country and we all know she has sex without the legal bond of marriage?!)

Reached a compromise: Historic depictions of ugly muscular babies. Vermeyen, Holy Family

Can't decide which is more awesome: Collection of historic depiction of muscular women, or collection of Ugly babies in Renaissance art. ("I love you both, just in different ways!") (Thanks to Lindsay for the tip) 

Photoshopped: With a new tool that allows us to tell how much a photo has been digitally altered, is it possible that we'll someday have "retouch ratings" like we do movie ratings? "Rated three points for rib removal and jawline trimming."

Framed: Bitch magazine has two particularly interesting "In the Frame" entries this week: A photo of noted photographer Nan Goldin one month after being battered, in which her makeup contradicts the idea of the hidden, cowering victim, and then the art of Ingrid Berthon-Moine, showing women wearing their menstrual blood as lipstick. (And here I thought I was a hippie for trying out beets as lipstick, as per No More Dirty Looks.)

The importance of being intact: Oscar Wilde's restored tomb makes its debut in Paris, covered by a glass partition to protect it from "being eaten away by lipstick," as is tradition.
 
Paging Don Draper: South African fragrance line Alibi is designed for cheating spouses to wear to literally put suspicious partners off their scent trail. "I Was Working Late" smells of cigarettes, coffee, ink, and wool suits; "We Were Out Sailing" features sea salt and cotton rope. I am not making this up. (But they might be; I can't find anything about the company elsewhere. Hmm.)

Sweet smell of success: The odiferous history of "perfume" versus "cologne" in regards to becoming a comment on a man's sexual orientation, and what the headily scented Liberace had to say about it.

Neat and clean: Half of the men in Britain don't think it's necessary to be clean-shaven to look well-groomed. (I heartily agree, as a fan of a bit of scruff on a feller.)
 

Inventor Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler

 
This week in dead movie stars: Why Marilyn Monroe is still a beauty icon, and did you know that Hedwig Eva Marie Kiesler—aka Hedy Lamarr—invented a telecommunications process that's still used today in much of our wireless communication?

Newly inquired: If you enjoy my more academic-ish posts on here, you should definitely check out The New Inquiry. I'm proud to be associated with them, and prouder still of their profile in this week's New York Times! (Quibble: I wouldn't call any of these minds those of "literary cubs"; all parties involved are far too insightful and thought-provoking for that.)

Attention Sassy lovers: Former Sassy editor Jane Larkworthy, now beauty director at W, is featured on Into the Gloss this week. "I do think [beauty products] should be done in an accessible way, though—I don’t ever want beauty to be intimidating."

Hair mayonnaise: Hysterical beauty bit from comic Sue Funke, courtesy Virginia.

Fight for the right: This piece at Rookie about cultural stereotyping is worth reading in its own right, but of particular interest to me is the collection of vintage photos of "black and brown and yellow girl gangs in American history" on the second page, all from Of Another Fashion. The photos of beaming, well-dressed Japanese women heading off to internment camps during one of the most shameful episodes of U.S. history raises questions about expectations of femininity, and of fashion's true role in our lives: "Even during internment, these girls were determined to look cute. And though that may sound like the height of triviality, it’s not. As the late, great civil-rights activist Dorothy Height once said, 'Too many people in my generation fought for the right for us to be dressed up and not put down.'"
 
Honored: I love Sally's concept of "honoring your beauty," and I'll throw in that once I learned that the way to accept a compliment was to look the person in the eye, smile, and say, "Thank you," I felt like I'd learned something small but important. It also made it easier to give a compliment too; I stopped worrying that every compliment I gave was loaded somehow. There's no hidden motive. I really just like your hair.

Push it good: This post from Fit and Feminist on the myth of the noncompetitive female made me (and her, as evidenced by her Mean Girls reference) wonder why we embrace totally contradictory views of women and competition. C'mon, patriarchy: Are we all cooperative sweethearts who aren't so great at team sports because we just want to hold hands and make daisy chains, or are we vindictive bitches who love to tear one another apart? Just tell us already, my best bitches and I are getting tired of this sewing circle-Fight Club jazz.

MAC, Transformation, and The Authenticity Hoax

Like any child of the late '70s might be, I was tickled by MAC’s recent choice of Miss Piggy as spokesmodel for the brand. It was the final step in winning over skeptical little moi, I thought: With a history of choosing unlikely models and collaborators—Johnny Weir, Cindy Sherman, hell, Cyndi Lauper—I’d been gradually warming to MAC despite initially being turned off by its flash. By the time they rolled around to featuring the porcine glamour of Miss Piggy, I was on board. “Its brand managers have a keen appreciation of the fantasy aspect of makeup,” I wrote when the news came out a couple of weeks ago, “and I like that MAC isn’t asking me to buy its product to make me a better version of myself.”

I particularly liked the MAC campaign in opposition to the “better version of myself” ads I was referring to. From Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign in 2004 to Bare Escentuals’ “Pretty is what you are, beauty is what you do with it” commercials, I’ve critiqued these ads as being only a step removed from “Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline.”

By associating natural or inner beauty with their products, companies get to have it both ways, selling us potions as well as self-esteem. I saw MAC as presenting a more authentic alternative, one that acknowledged the metamorphic possibilities of makeup and that didn’t try to pretend it was selling us inner beauty. By selling us not our natural (but prettified) selves but our made-over, over-the-top fantasy selves, MAC emphasizes the very fact that it’s selling us transformation. All makeup sells transformation; MAC was just being more honest about it. Therefore I’m being more honest about it when I pay my $14 for its lip pencil, right?

What I didn’t see is that that’s exactly what MAC wanted me to do. I fell for what journalist Andrew Potter dubbed The Authenticity Hoax with his 2010 book of the same name. The idea is that since authenticity is the ultimate sell (who wants to buy something fake?), it makes an easily fetishized buzzword that can transform pretty much anything into profit—and that when we chase authenticity we’re seeking not truth but identity and status. And if that status is something that brings us a sense of being terrifically individual, even iconoclastic? All the better. By selling us transformation into our wildest, most creative, most individualized selves, MAC slips in through the back door to sell us authenticity.

I had been thinking that the role of authenticity in cosmetics marketing was unique because cosmetics are inherently inauthentic: Their entire purpose is to alter us into prettier or more glamorous versions of ourselves. In truth, though, both the “natural beauty” campaigns and the MAC approach are selling beauty authenticity, just different versions of it. Bare Escentuals (and Maybelline, and Revlon, and every other makeup brand that has relied upon the girl-next-door aesthetic) tries to sell us us an authentic version of our best selves; MAC tries to sell us a more authentic version of makeup. In fact, the MAC ethos wouldn’t work unless we were already souring on the peddling of “natural beauty”; as Potter reminds us in The Authenticity Hoax, “the notion of cool only ever made sense as a foil to something else.” We like MAC not only for its products but for its cool.

It’s not that I don’t like what MAC is doing, or that I don’t appreciate the inspired sensibility and tone of irreverence that led it to feature Miss Piggy as their latest model. I like that it openly acknowledges the crucial role gay men have played in the beauty industry. Hell, I like its products. But at its heart, we must remember that MAC is part of a major company, and that major companies are known for their abilities to find what resonates with their consumers, including uppity feminists who think they’re too savvy to buy into ads targeted directly toward them (ahem). MAC pushes the line of supposed subversion because it’s in the company’s interest to do so (and when they realize they’ve gone too far with their subversion, as with last year’s line inspired by Juarez, Mexico, aka “the capital of murdered women,” they scale back—as well they should). It’s not actually goodwill for MAC to acknowledge that drag queens use makeup, and it’s not actually more authentic for MAC to posit itself as the truest route to transformation—or for me to buy their lip liner because I feel like their ethos somehow fits with mine.

There’s nothing wrong with selling products or making money, of course—full disclosure, at various points in my life I have both earned and spent the stuff. But I for one need to check my tendency to not cast scrutiny upon a brand just because I prefer its flavor of false authenticity to that of another. We need to remember that MAC’s fortune is in its appearance of irreverence, not makeup. I disliked the Bare Escentuals campaign because I immediately recognized the ways it was preying upon our yearning to see a broader definition of beauty, and I felt manipulated. I didn’t feel manipulated by the MAC campaign because I deemed it “authentic.” Both companies make things that go on your face to make it look better, but each campaign would have you believe that they’re doing far more—that they’re giving us a long-awaited answer to legitimate complaints about the beauty industry. Bare Escentuals gives us acknowledgment of the other factors that make us beautiful—our activities, our diversity, our personalities. MAC tells us makeup is for fantasy and play, taking pretty much the opposite tactic as Bare Escentuals, but leading to the same place: sales.

MAC’s reputation as an edgy, alternative brand neatly obscures the fact that it is owned by a beauty behemoth. Estee Lauder Companies sold $8.8 billion in 2011 and is one of the biggest prestige personal care companies in the world. MAC began with an alternative vibe—two men named Frank, one an entrepreneur and the other a makeup artist, collaborating on a line designed to pop on-camera and to match a wider variety of skin tones than was available on the market in 1984. Today, though, MAC is not edgy. MAC is as corporate as it gets. Estee Lauder’s individual branding strategy—that is, marketing MAC distinctly separately from, say, Bobbi Brown, which is marketed separately from Clinique, Origins, and Aveda, while all of them belong to the same company—shows that Estee Lauder understands the value of positing MAC as living on the edge even though it’s anything but.

With any beauty product—with any product, period—what we get when we plunk down our money isn’t merely a mixture of petroleum and Red #7. We get whatever set of qualities the company imparts to us simply by bearing its own label. If I wear Chanel lipstick I get a nice shade and the satisfaction of knowing I am treating myself to a luxury good; if I wear Wet ‘n’ Wild I get a similar hue plus the 99-cent smugness of almost believing I’ve gotten essentially the same product for a song. It’s what is known in marketing circles as brand equity, or the value a brand has opposed to the actual product the brand represents. Every time we wink at MAC for being cheeky, irreverent, and driven by fantasy, we increase its brand equity. By buying into our fantasies about ourselves by believing the feedback loop a company sells us, we may increase a brand’s value without spending a dime.

And to be perfectly clear: I just may continue to do exactly that on occasion. Despite the mini-Marxist in me, I blog about beauty and am enthralled with many of its trappings, and sometimes that means being enthralled with colored bits of petroleum I smear on my face. But while I’m smearing, playing, smudging—while I’m transforming—I want to be as clear as I can about understanding what I’m doing.

Beauty Blogosphere 10.21.11

What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between.

From Head...
Neck and neck: Flattery "rules" don't usually work for me, but this post on mathematically calculating flattering necklines explains a lot (namely, why I feel best in wide, deep necklines despite not generally showing a lot of skin). (via Already Pretty)

Smile!: Speaking of numbers as guidelines, the layperson can detect dental deviations of less than 3 millimeters, reports the Journal of the American Dental Association. But breathe easy! Says the dentist who alerted me to this, "A lot of people do more than they need to. Perfect Chiclet teeth look a little weird." I always thought that, but he's the one with the degree, so!

...To Toe...

Bootie Pies: "Pedicure-friendly" boots with removable toes. Between these and my new automated twirling spaghetti fork, my life is about to get a whole lot easier.


...And Everything In Between: 
Quiet riot: Are YOU on the lam for your participation in Vancouver during the Stanley Cup riot? Do YOU need a massage? We've got the spa for you! Just go to Vancouver's Eccotique Spa, detail your criminal activities and fingerprint yourself onto their $50 gift card, then turn yourself into the police and return to the spa with proof of arrest for your treatment of choice.

Occupy CoverGirl: Fortune magazine uses Procter & Gamble's fully legal ways of evading taxes (to the tune of billions of dollars) to illustrate the need for corporate reform.

Salon tragedy: Portrait of Salon Meritage, the California hair salon where eight people were killed when the ex-husband of one of the stylists took open gunfire on the floor. Salons are known for hosting a particularly high intimacy among workers, and to a degree between staff and clients, making the violence seem all the more shocking. It's also a hard-line reminder this month, Domestic Violence Awareness Month, that not all partner violence takes place behind closed doors. (Speaking of Domestic Violence Awareness Month, Tori at Anytime Yoga is hosting a blog carnival October 29. It's an important topic, so if you're a blogger with something to say, please participate—I will be.)

Willa won: Procter & Gamble settled its suit against startup hair- and skin-care line Willa. P&G had contended that "Willa" was a trademark infringement of their hair line "Wella," thus thoroughly annoying anyone paying attention to trademark law or good old-fashioned common sense. (Their recent Cosmo award for being a woman-friendly company doesn't seem to extend to its litigation targets.)

J&J's big move: The "sleeping giant" of Johnson & Johnson is peering into the higher-end market with its recent acquisition of Korres, a switch from its drugstore stalwarts of Neutrogena, Aveeno, Clean & Clear, and, of course, Johnson's. Considering that the company only got serious about mass facial care in 1991, it's not nutty to think that J&J could expand its offerings in luxury and masstige markets soon.

Uniclever: Unilever is quick to snap up Russian brand Koncern Koliva, noting that Russian beauty product spending is up 10% compared with Unilever's overall growth of 4%-6%.

One can never have too many reminders of our erstwhile presidents in their college years.

Rah rah: Via Sociological Images, a slideshow of how cheerleader uniforms have changed over time. I mean, obvs the bared midriff is because of global warming, but the uniforms have changed in other ways too.

"They did this to me": Hair's symbolism, particularly within some religions, makes it an unsurprising—but still shocking—target of attack from a splinter Amish group headed by the unfortunately named Sam Mullet. He's been attacking families in more conventional Amish communities by cutting patches out of men's beards and women's hair.

Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street: Gross. Gross? Gross! GROSS.

Taxed: England considers a "boob tax" on cosmetic surgery procedures, which brings in about £2.3 million annually. Fair method of supporting social programs, or an unfair way of punishing women for getting procedures that may help them level the playing field? (The U.S. rejected the similar "Bo-tax" in 2009.)

The Brazilian way: The Women's Secretariat of Brazil (a Cabinet position, appointed by President Dilma Rousseff) issued a statement against a recent lingerie ad featuring Gisele that suggested using one's erotic capital to manipulate one's husband was a jolly route to take. The complaint is somewhat plebian, but it's taking place at high levels of government, something we simply haven't seen in the U.S. Is this what happens when a country elects a female president? Women's issues get taken seriously? You don't say. (Of course, The Economist reports that women in the UK parliament are also making their thoughts heard about false advertising for beauty products, notably a bust cream claiming to increase a woman’s bra size from 32A/B to "a much fuller and firmer 32C," so it's not just the big cheese that matters.)

Betty Rubble's makeup kit unearthed.

Makeup artist, the world's oldest profession?: Anthropologists find a 100,000-year-old tool kit and workshop for making ochre paint, used as an early body adornment.

Side by side: Personal science blogger Seth Roberts on the newly coined "Willat Effect," in which we experience two or more similar items compared side-by-side as more or less desirable than we would if sampled on their own. I suspect this is the reason for popularity of "before" and "after" shots of beauty treatments. In other words: Neutrogena Rapid Wrinkle Repair (somewhat depressingly, the #2 search term that lands people at this blog) basically doesn't work at all, and only appears to when compared with the other side of my face.

What forms our body image?: Turns out it's not your body; it's your beliefs about other people's thoughts on your body, reports Virginia Sole-Smith. That includes bodies in general, so enough with the body-bashing talk, okay? Forget your own body image—you could be hurting your friends' too.

H0tTie: 13% of IT professionals gave away their passwords when asked to by a...drawing of a pretty lady? The findings are bizarre but worth reading.

Body and Soul: Interview at Threadbared with Alondra Nelson on the images that came out of the Black Panthers in the 1970s, including their Free Clothing Program that induced "sartorial joy."

Stuck on you: Magnetic nail polish! I'm such a sucker for cool nail art.

Tweezed: XOJane asks if tweezing in public is okay, pinpointing something I hadn't been able to articulate about public grooming: It's interesting to see someone be self-conscious enough to "fix" something about their appearance (stomach hairs, in this case, at the gym) but not self-conscious enough to do it in private.

Beauty contest: If you're near New York, you may want to check out the Beauty Contest exhibit at the Austrian Cultural Forum. Austrian and international artists examine "contemporary global society’s obsession and fascination with physical appearance." I went to a performance art arm of the exhibit, and the following panel discussion, including French choreographer François Chaignaud and author of The Man in the Grey Flannel Skirt, Jon-Jon Goulian, was invigorating.

"This is basically uncharted territory": Style blogger Stacyverb guest posts at Already Pretty on style and disability. "For anyone with a disability who’s interested in experimenting with style, there aren’t exactly any rules or road maps to follow. It’s not like we see models and celebrities in wheelchairs rolling down the runway during fashion week or on the red carpet on Oscar night. This is basically uncharted territory, which means it can be disorienting—but also liberating!"

No-makeup week: Rachel Rabbit White revisits her no-makeup week, an experiment she tried on for size last year. Like much of her work, what's exciting here is the acceptance of ambiguity: "It’s not about taking a week off  because make-up is somehow bad or because not wearing it is better. It’s that by taking a week off, I should be able to understand my relationship to cosmetics more clearly."

I'm a Pepper, you're a Pepper: Caitlin at Fit and Feminist on how even if the Diet Dr. Pepper "It's not for women" ad is satire (I don't think it is), it still gets to have it both ways in wrangling the diet industry into man-size portions. (I also love her post about cheerleading as a sport, and her contribution to Love Your Body Day about the difference between respect and love. Seriously, if you're not already reading Fit and Feminist, you should be.)

Good old-fashioned erotic capital: Rachel Hills, writing on Erotic Capital, raises among her many excellent points one of my biggest annoyances with Catherine Hakim: "Hakim and her colleagues would have us think they’re intellectual renegades... But while the terminology may be new, the principles underlying 'erotic capital' and 'sexual economics' are decidedly old-fashioned."

Sunrise, sunset: Be sure to check out the Feminist Fashion Bloggers roundup of posts on youth and age. Franca writes, "God forbid [professional women] just go for the suit and shirt 'uniform' and actually look old... Professional clothes need to be constantly balanced out by elements that represent youth and health and fun, like accessories and hair and makeup"; Jean writes on bucking trends usually defined by age; and Fish Monkey and Tea and Feathers, like me, write on the happiness of no longer being young.

Beauty Blogosphere 9.23.11

What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between.

Bedtime makeup is for those afraid to be a total glamourpuss like Miss Golightly.

From Head...
Sleeping beauty: Is this a Thing? Has this been around for a while? Makeup for when you're sleeping? I mean, I admit this would be sort of awesome for early sleepover phases of a relationship (ooh la la!) but, I dunno, those early phases are sort of a handy test, too, you know? Like, if I can't let him see me without makeup, why am I letting him see me without clothes?

Big gulp: The world's first antiwrinkle pill! I'm going to swallow it on half my body for a month and then post pictures.

...To Toe...

Playing footsie: South Africa communications minister files an expense report including $1,300 in pedicures and manicures.

...And Everything In Between:

DIY divas: The new group of YouTube makeup gurus are teens showing other teens how to make their own cosmetics. This is totally brilliant—who didn't love all those DIY recipes in Seventeen? It seems like these girls are sharing information in a particularly inventive way and calling attention to the overpricing of makeup, which, now that they can order ingredients like mica and magnesium stearite directly from sites like DIY Cosmetics, they know the actual value of.

Mutant beauty: New beauty line FCX-DNA is incredible if for no reason other than its level of scienctific BS. They'll test your DNA to "detect mutations in certain genes which affect skin aging" and then recommend appropriate products, which have been "developed [using] a process to extract the essence from organically grown fruits and vegetables without harming its texture or genetics." Other awesome words in the press release include: nutrient metabolism, dermagenomics, micronized. CAN'T WAIT!

Nails painted like antidepressants: No comment!

Avon calling: A Q&A for investors interested in Avon after the corruption charges filed earlier this year.

Mary Kay China sales to overtake U.S. sales by next year: Mary Kay is investing $25 million in a distribution center in China, which makes total sense given that because of its sales method the company doesn't need to rely on shopping spaces like malls.

Beyond Marie Curie: The copy here reads suspiciously cheerleader-like, but the point is well-taken: More than 50% of L'Oréal's cosmetic scientists are women, and the company encourages cross-disciplinary women in science too with five $100,000 grants each year to women scientists.

Good news for consumers down under: Cosmetics laws in Australia are becoming streamlined to be more consumer-friendly.

Dead Sea: Flagship Ahava store shuttering in London due to anti-Israel protests.

Halal cosmetics: How to market halal cosmetics? Well, given that 23% of the world population is Muslim, there's a head start already—but this piece points out that halal cosmetics certification also qualifies a product as strictly vegan. Cross-marketing opportunities!

Fly me: With all the press surrounding Pan Am (which I don't plan on watching but am terribly curious to find out if any of the lessons from Arlie Russell Hochschild's study on flight attendants and emotional labor, The Managed Heart, are portrayed), this British Airways ad is particularly interesting. As Deep Glamour notes, it's impossible to pretend that flying as a passenger—or even as a flight attendant—is glamorous, given how un-glamorous flights are now. But by relying on the masculine glamour of old-time aviators, the message still gets across.

The state of supermodels: Great piece at Grantland (a new discovery for me, which is why I missed this piece when it was published in August) on the intersection of the self as brand, the valorization of vanity, and why that means we've likely met the last great American supermodel, Ms. Cindy Crawford.

Beauty from within: Balance is coming out with a nutrition bar that has beauty benefits. The 120-calorie Nimble bar will feature antioxidants, beta carotene, lutein, and tiny elves that massage your face from the inside.

Hand me the man-shampoo, Billy!

No girls allowed!: Proctor & Gamble is working with CVS to create a "Guy Aisle" so men don't have to "weed through the pink razors, floral body wash, and hundreds of shampoo formulations" when buying their grooming products, because unlike us dizzy girls who just love to titter over all the AMAZING FLORAL BODY WASHES in the drugstore, "Men are buyers, not shoppers," said Michael Norton, director, external relations, male grooming at Gillette. No news yet as to whether the boys-only aisle will be located in a secret tree club house at which one has to know the super-secret password ("boobies").

Beauty scandal!: A former Miss Utah was sued by a beauty product company that claimed she stole and then resold their goods; she's countersuing, saying that she was given the goods by the company under the auspices of a charitable donation, and then decided to sell the products and donate the proceeds to the same charity. It's small-time and confusing, and the moral of the story is, don't be Miss Utah.

"A very public table": Interesting article at Psychology Today about the inherent risk—and inherent solutions—of eating disorders among orthodox Jewish women.

"I LOVE MY BOOBIES": Leah at Hourglassy takes a moment of Jessica Simpson appreciation, and I'll sign onto that. (I don't care for her music, but enjoyed "The Price of Beauty," and I think she does a nice job of talking about body image stuff with an inquisitive, open manner and not seeming pat.) "So a celebrity who publicly says she loves her body, especially one who regularly receives public criticism, is a major win in my book."

Inked: A tattooed academic—whose work focuses on the normalization of tattoos and its effect on what was once a distinct subculture—on what might signal a shift in the way tattooed women are viewed. And, surprise surprise: The more accepted tattoos are, the closer its wearers are expected to be to the beauty norm: "Yes, tattoo magazines feature a lot of tattooed women, but which tattooed women?" (via Feminaust)

Model me, model you: MAC's new UK campaign makes over non-models who just love makeup, and for once I've got jack to say about such campaigns! The pictures look great.

Inner love: There's a lot of body acceptance in the blogs I read, which, obviously, is fantastic. But there's an irony there: One of the mantras of loving your body is focusing on the inside--which can be hard to do when you're experiencing doubts about your worth in other areas. Sally at Already Pretty borrows here from body love principles and applies them (and some others) to dealing with a sense of inadequacy in the realm of achievement. (I particularly liked this because the transition from school to job was hard for me, since I was so used to getting regular and positive feedback and suddenly was just expected to, you know, do my job.)
Edited to add: On the off-chance you read me and haven't yet discovered Already Pretty, today's your day to hop over and check it out, as I'm guest posting there today. Topic: Beauty and visibility: "Every choice we make about beauty is a choice about being seen. And the more time we spend focusing on the minutiae of beauty, the less time we spend focused on one possible outcome of beauty work—heightened cultural visibility."

What can a year bring?: Elissa at Dress With Courage asks: What sacrifices have you made for beauty? I've got a rather dark take on the study about how 16% of British women would trade a year of their life for the perfect body—I'm sort of like, if it means it would put an end to all my body struggles, then sure, sign me up! What's a year? But Elissa has an answer ready for cynics like me: "[A year can bring] the possibility of greatness that we all look forward to, the idea that things will probably get better, that we can grow and change into the people we dream of being."

Mirror U: Kjerstin Gruys of Mirror Mirror Off the Wall weighs in on the mirror-free high school in the U.K.: "Some people have suggested that this ban prevents creative expression. I call bullshit."

Chasing beauty: Lisa Hickey's stellar piece about being addicted to beauty is a must-read, even as it's painful: "When I’m beautiful and I’m with you, I’m wondering if the guy across the room thinks I’m beautiful. I think beauty is going to connect us; but I’m not connecting with you, I’m connecting with a beautiful image of myself that I think you might like."

Go fetch: Why do we use the word fetching both as a compliment and a command?

Attack of the 50-foot blogger: Caitlin at Fit and Feminist on the power and politics of women's height: "Height, like physical strength, is one of those things we don’t really care much for in women because we say it upsets the 'natural order of things,' which is that men are the Protectors and women the Protected."

Beauty Blogosphere 9.2.11

What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between.

Between Sinéad and Jaunty Dame, it's bald-lady week 'round here! 

From Head...
So you shaved your head, eh?: To you, today, I make this vow: If a glossy ladymag ever runs a beauty tips piece as awesome as Jaunty Dame's 10 Tips for Coping With an Accidentally Shaven Head, I will copy edit it pro bono.

Hair vs. health: The surgeon general warned attendees of the Bronner Brothers International Hair Show (which is wonderfully chronicled in the Chris Rock documentary Good Hair) to choose exercise over hair, noting that she hears women say that working out will make them sweat too much to properly maintain their hair. And then a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research criticized her for engaging in "smaller issues" like this, because certainly the surgeon fucking general wouldn't know what issues are actually affecting Americans, right? Has nothing to do with him being a white man who doesn't understand issues that might affect black women, I'm sure.


...To Toe...
Pedicure woes: Cassie Murdoch interviewed pedicurists to find out what annoys them, and tells us how not to be That Customer.


...And Everything In Between: 
Makeup 101: New series at the Guardian about the history of various cosmetics companies. First up: Revlon.

Asian men and makeup: Which country ranks #1 in sales of men's cosmetics? Korea. Unsurprising, given Korea's history as being a leader in the Asian beauty market, but still raised my eyebrows. Korea, from what I understand, is reasonably egalitarian in gender roles, with the timeline of feminism roughly echoing that of North America. Are Korean men's cosmetics sales reflective of men's desire to redefine masculinity, or just a part of the market game?

Social expectation and beauty markets: Intriguing industry look at the differences between the Japanese and Chinese beauty markets, which neatly reflects how expectations of women play out in the market. For example, cosmetics are seen as an obligation for Japanese women, making color cosmetics a higher percentage of the beauty market than it is in China, where beauty products are heavily used but still eyed with suspicion, with an emphasis on "natural beauty" being prized.

NOT!

"Be the change you wish to see in the world": Op-ed piece in the Times about how bumper-sticker wisdom becomes falsely attributed to iconic figures. (This Gandhi was a mangled version of something he said in which he making a point about the importance of community action, not individual action.) What's interesting is the frequency with which these misattributions show up in a particular kind of "you can do anything!" kind of quote that shows up in some western self-help-style works. The piece is a roundabout way of critiquing some of the weaker aspects of the self-help industry, which at its sloppiest takes a Randian approach that initially seems empowering but in the end is really just unhelpful.

Lovely lobby: Interesting that the sponsors of the Small Business Tax Equalization and Compliance Act of 2011 are both women (Senator Olympia Snow, R-ME, and Senator Mary Landrieu, D-LA). Could it have anything to do with the Professional Beauty Association's lobbying efforts?

I'll have what she's having: "The food was remarkably good and inventive, but the impression that I was most left with was now effortless the whole remarkable dining experience had been made to seem," says Deep Glamour on having a good-looking waitstaff.

The Pill: I sometimes use self-tanning cream, aka skin dye, so I'm not one to talk. But taking a pill to change your skin color is creepy, right? We can agree on this?

It must be true, it's in Time!: The Beauty Myth makes it onto Time's 100 best nonfiction books published since the magazine's creation. 

Is that Tallahassee or Bismarck?: Interview with the author of Erotic Capital, who argues that women don't capitalize enough on their "erotic capital"—grace, sex appeal, social presentation, and, of course, beauty—in the workplace. Made with less intelligence this argument would totally fall flat but her interview is thought-provoking. And for a solid counterpoint, check out Hugo Schwyzer's response at The Good Men Project, nicely tying it into his continuing work on the myth of male weakness. 

Another interesting new book on appearance: Beauty Pays by Daniel Hamermesh, which details how conventionally attractive people make more money. Judging by this reader Q&A session it could be an entertaining read; he seems neither righteous nor apologetic for the intricacies of beauty and labor.

From Athlete by Howard Schatz and Beverly Ornstein

But what about mathletic bodies?: Ragen at Dances With Fat on "athletic" body types, which IMHO is probably the biggest disappointment in the body-typing category, because on one hand it puts a positive spin on a body type that might not be seen as "feminine enough," and on the other hand sort of means nothing. (Magazines have told me I'm "athletic" because I'm thick-waisted, which was true when I couldn't run two minutes nonstop, and is also true now that I'm a regular gymgoer. Baffled!)

Miss Universe: A weird peek behind the scenes of Chinese beauty pageants, which seem bogus even by beauty pageant standards. Hidden within is a link to this truly incredible website, Missosology, which appears to be wholly dedicated to analyzing and tracking beauty pageant contestants worldwide. Its banner includes a countdown clock to Miss Universe 2011.

Teaching with sole: A different take on the impracticality of heels (which I have a long-documented love/hate relationship with) that goes beyond simple comfort. (The update is even better: Tori's sneakers-with-skirt trend is catching on.)

Dress With Courage on body image, celebrities, and the media: The general topic is well-trod ground, but Elissa goes beyond questions of bodily dissatisfaction to examine a more philosophical issue: "We are increasingly disconnected with what our bodies actually look like."

We'll be her mirror: Kjerstin Gruys's year-long mirror project has been getting some amazing press recently (Yahoo and HuffPo!), so a congratulations to her--and a great opportunity to look at what it means to package one's appearance-related message through for-profit media, as Sociological Images does here.

Macrofashion: Decoding Dress asks us about our fashion economy, in which we "pay" for entry to a social group via adhering to that group's norms. "Is there...a limited supply of social inclusion?" she asks. "Or do we limit supply artificially, by declaring certain modes of dress to be “inappropriate,” so as to enrich ourselves, to increase our own powereven though our doing so denies a good (and potentially causes harm) to others?"

Work it: I hadn't really thought about it until Sally asked, but I'm with her: My body image at the gym is actually pretty solid. Definitely more solid than it is when I'm roaming free on the streets, and here she breaks down her (and, as it turns out, my) reasons for that.

LGBTQ...A: Rachel Rabbit White asks some great questions about where asexuality should fall on the sex-positivity curve. "[I] argue that sex positivity needs a more psychological approach that is personally crafted—that may ask: what is okay for me? How interested in sex am I really?"

Goddess pose: Virginia looks at Yogawoman, a documentary about yoga's journey from being a male-dominated practice to the American incarnation, which is pretty much all about the ladies, it seems. I'm with her in wishing that the film spent more time looking at some of the not-so-great things about the faddishness of yoga: "Women have reinvented yoga in many important and beneficial ways. But they've also spawned a multi-billion dollar industry devoted to selling you pants that give you a yoga butt."

Nightmare Brunette on the performance of desirability: "'You’re almost intimidatingly good-looking,' one man told me after we shared our first kiss. 'No,' I said, laughing. But I thought about it later and maybe. The trappings matter so much: right hair cut, color, style; right make-up (the lighter the better; it’s less strange in the morning) the right shoes, the right dress, the eye contact. I look in the mirror and I see me, working, which is separate than myself. Their desire makes me a different person. I think it’s not so hard to shape myself that way." (This week Charlotte also gives the best defense of Pretty Woman I've ever read, not that I've read a lot of them, but still!)

Beauty Blogosphere 8.19.11

What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between.

From Head...
Au naturel: No More Dirty Looks is doing another hair challenge, and it's a good one. Send in a picture of yourself with your natural hair—no blow-drying, no product beyond shampoo and conditioner (no leave-ins!)—to the green beauty site, and you'll not only help show what the real story is behind "natural hair," you'll also be entered to win a hair-care gifting from NuboNau. Challenge ends Sunday, 8/21, so get a-snappin'!

Year without mirrors, days without makeup: Kjerstin Gruys of Mirror Mirror Off the Wall is upping the game with embarking on makeup-free Mondays. Check out her first post on the weekly event.


...To Toe...
Sarah Palin's polka-dotted tootsies: News or not news? You decide.


...And Everything In Between:
Beautiful Girls: The pilot episode of Beautiful Girls, a show about employees at a cosmetics company, was picked up by Fox. This has the potential to be interesting, as it's the work of Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain, who collaborated with Joss Whedon on Dollhouse, which was a thoroughly engrossing look at appearance, identity, the idea of "perfection," and being looked at.

Birchbox biz: Interview with one of the founders of Birchbox, a subscription-based box of curated, personalized beauty product samples sent to you monthly; focuses on the business end of things but still interesting to those of us who aren't so inclined.

Tip of the...nevermind: The department of health in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal will start offering circumcision to 10% of the male babies born there, in a reversal of custom (currently circumcisions are only performed for medical or religious reasons). Why? Foreskins are commercially valuable, used in anti-aging treatments (in addition to more legitimate medical uses). As Reason notes: "2.3 million foreskins are at stake." (Okay, that phrasing is ridiculous, but I'm firmly against circumcision and it's upsetting to think that profit could be driving this.)

Natural cosmetics in the Middle East: Sales are expected to grow 20% this year, but that's only up from 0.01% of the cosmetics market (compared with 3% in North America and Europe). The theory is that the growth in awareness of natural foods trickled down to cosmetics, but since there's no similar drive in the Middle East, the market has to create itself.

Mean stinks: Secret deodorant, in an effort to up its profile à la Old Spice and Axe, launched an anti-bullying campaign with the "Mean Stinks" tagline. "Secret stands against things that stink, whether it's body odor or mean behavior like girl-to-girl bullying," says a Procter & Gamble spokesperson. It (hopefully!) goes without saying that I'm anti-bullying, and I'm glad to see smart minds like Rachel Simmons of Odd Girl Out pairing with star power like cast members of Glee. But...I dunno. The kids who were always teased the worst in my junior high/high school were ones whose home lives were clearly in such disarray that their personal hygiene wasn't a priority for either them or their caretakers. The Secret campaign is anti-bullying, girl-positive, and is not at all encouraging people to use deodorant to prevent their own bullying. Except...by virtue of it being a deodorant, that is also sort of an unspoken message. Am I reading too much into this? Yay for anti-bullying, though!?

Heidi Schatz on being "cute": "By golly, I will try on lingerie until I no longer laugh when I see myself in the mirror." (via Already Pretty)

Guerrilla complimenting: From Decoding Dress—"Why, of all the women she passed on her way to wherever she was going, did she choose to offer such an apparently non-violent but utterly confrontational compliment to me?" I'm generally in favor of complimenting other women, and I don't necessarily intend to stop. A friend of mine once astutely observed, "A well-placed and heartfelt compliment between women can sometimes feel subversive," and it's a point I stand by. Still, Decoding Dress's meditation on the self-indulgence and self-gratification of complimenting adds a new shade to the conversation here.

Woman in the mirror: Advertisers are placing their goods on mirrors, which seems like the missing link between "the commodity of the self" and personal branding that Marginal Utility laments.

How girls look good: Amusing piece at Vice on the various products we use to be pretty in "juuuust this other way." (And besides being amusing, it's one of the few places I've seen the socioeconomic dance of salons being discussed. Beauty Schooled, the conversation is happening!)

Questions for perfect-looking women: I wrestle with the term "perfect," but I know exactly what Stephanie Georgopulos is getting at here. "Does perfection bore you? Do you look at people like me and wish your hair would frizz a little, that your bra would peek out? Do you ever want to let your nail polish chip? Or is this, the coiffed hair, the ironed shirts; is this your version of happiness?"

Poetry break: "The Beauty Myth," by blogger Shine.

Why don't you wear hi'jab?: Nahida at The Fatal Feminist is sort of tired of the ever-present question among Muslim feminists, but addresses it eloquently nonetheless. "There will most likely come a day when I will wear hi'jab. ... Maybe just that day, I needed an extra dosage of modesty, because I could feel myself becoming vain. ... Hi'jab means something to me—in relation to my spiritual self, to modesty, and to God.... It is only for me to evaluate. I will be the only one who knows what this means."

Flying while fat: Regan Chastain at Dances With Fat offers much more reasonable options than, say, shame and humiliation for larger air passengers. (The usual "well THAT oughta solve it!" answer is to have fat flyers purchase two airline seats, but as Regan points out, that isn't as easy as it sounds.)

Blogosphere body love: There's always a lot of great stuff going on in the self-acceptance sphere of the Internet, but this week seemed particularly awesome. Tori at Anytime Yoga puts it as plain and simple as you can, with "I don't want to change my body"; Courtney at Those Graces lets go of pretty; and Virginia at Beauty Schooled reminds us that "cleavage wrinkles" are not a thing.

"Life's a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death!"

News flash, you don't shrivel past 55: Speaking of "a thing," I'm questioning the pulse over at Allure, which declares that "Granny Beauty" is "officially a thing." I know they're trying to acknowledge the superlative style age can bring, but making style awareness of senior citizens a "thing" seems a tad degrading to me. Auntie Mame, my fashion-plate 85-year-old grandmother, and any of the subjects on Advanced Style would probably be surprised to learn that the wisdom they've acquired over the years—plus the financial means, confidence, and fuck-it attitude that comes with age and that helps one become a style icon—is a "thing." Yay for recognizing the fashion sense of people of a certain age; boo for indicating that it's a trend as easily discarded as jeggings.

The health/beauty conundrum: Virginia gets to the heart of one of my major concerns: Is "health" sometimes a convenient cover-up for beauty concerns? "I’ve noticed that those who reject that plastic beauty ideal in favor of 'natural beauty' are often nevertheless still saying that health and beauty are one and the same. They just get their 'healthy glow' from vegetables and yoga instead of tanning booths. Of course I see why that’s better—but I’m still worried about making health and beauty synonymous."

Assume positive intent: Sally asks what would happen if we assumed that those clunky comments we sometimes hear about our appearance came with positive intent. It's an interesting question, because appearance is both a way we connect with others in an immediate sense ("Cute shoes!" "Thanks, and I love your dress!"–that can be an entré, and a manner of appreciation), and a well of attachments we can use to undermine others and ourselves (as in Sally's example, when an acquaintance told her she'd look so much prettier if she'd "just put on some makeup and a skirt once in a while"). Where do we draw the line between setting others straight on appropriacy of their comments and assuming positive intent? I don't think I've found an answer yet. You?

Beauty Blogosphere 8.12.11

What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between.

From Head...
Tooth and nail: I'll be blatantly honest and say that I really, really don't understand Japan. Does that make me xeno...not phobic, I'm not scared of Japan. Xenobephuddled? Xenokonfused? In any case: People are getting all matchy-matchy with their nail polish and their teeth over there.

Rise and shine: It's one thing to read beauty routines magazines suggest we follow; it's quite another to read what women actually do in the morning. No More Dirty Looks is starting a new series that looks at women's routines, which I always find oddly hypnotic to read about.


...To Toe...
Lady financiers: Lo and behold, a pedicure story makes the Financial Times.


...And Everything In Between:
A legal wrinkle: In an industry about-face on false advertising, cosmetics company B&P is suing Kris Jenner (the mother of the Kardashian clan) for getting a face lift, after they'd hired her to be their rep for Beautiful Eyes in a Bag. To me this is actually a logical extension of the airbrushed-ad ban in Britain: WOW you mean I won't look like Kris Jenner, who has been a wealthy woman for a good long time now, just by using your product? Color me shocked. 

Bad week for beauty and Israel!: First Nivea seems to have left Israel off its main buying site (which the company says is because the Israeli page was under construction), and then Hudson New York questions why Lush won't open stores in Israel. The company reportedly has said, "We want everyone in the country where we are trading to be on an equal footing as far as basic human rights go." You know, like Saudi Arabia.

Nature's masseurs: Speaking of Israeli, a spa in the holy land is offering snake massage, in which a variety of large, heavy snakes (great for deep-tissue work!) and smaller, wrigglier types (for the fine "fluttering" effect) are dumped upon your back while you...relax. Fish pedicures are so 2010.

(via)

Ms. Toxic Beauty: Filipino activists hold a "toxic beauty parade" to call attention to the dangers of skin whiteners.

Feminista: Fascinating historical look at the links between fashion and feminism over at Final Fashion. (Thanks to Terri at Rags Against the Machine for the link!)

Peas in a pod: Fun piece about two friends with different attitudes toward cosmetics swapping beauty regimes for a day. 

Go, Glo!: Fantastic interview at, um, Interview with one of my personal heroes, Gloria Steinem: "I have to say that I was not considered beautiful before I was a feminist. I was a pretty girl before, but suddenly, after I was publicly identified as a feminist, I was beautiful. So, many people were really commenting on what they thought feminists looked like." (Also, she wants to live with the elephants, but I'm not telling you more because you really should read the whole thing.)

Pretty smart: Sally at Already Pretty takes on the case of smart vs. pretty in a way I haven't seen before—examining how we got to that point in the first place. I'm pretty much always game for any rant about how it's treated as an either/or question, but to see a reasoned consideration of the question is even more engaging.

Love it}: Jill at Feministe calls for a friendly punctuation mark that is decidedly not an exclamation point, given that they're disproportionately used by women to soften our meaning. I suggest that we colonize }. Also, I know this has nothing to do with beauty, but it's so rare that the punctuation geek in me gets to come out} (Original study here. Enjoy})

Hemlines and defiance: Decoding Dress's three-part series on hemlines is a must-read: She covers privilege, defiance, age, and triumph. I've only recently begun to worry that I'm getting too old to show as much leg as I used to, and this series came my way just in time.

Carry on: London salon chain co-opts, then gives the most hilarious apology ever for co-opting, the "Keep calm and carry on" slogan during the riots. "in all honesty, before today we hadn't done any historical research on the popular slogan that has been popping up on coffee shop posters. we simply thought it was a really cute phrase & worked well in describing that our rosewater calming gel helps calm the skin & that it is travel-friendly so you can even carry it on a plane." (Lower-case theirs.)

Talk about a bombshell: Chances are that the breast-implant bombs, which the TSA recently issued a warning about, will not actually ever happen. WHEW.

Black beauty: The Atlanta Post examines the current state of beauty companies targeting black women. Lots of issues raised here: The growing focus on serving the needs of multiethnic women, the ever-present and major gaps between many customers' needs and the products on the market, and how the industry can better serve its customers even when once-black-owned lines are being snapped up by cosmetics giants.

Beauty Blogosphere 8.5.11

What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between.

"I feel I'm anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren't self-portraits."
—Cindy Sherman (Right, because sometimes they're ads.)

From Head... 
MAC's newest spokesperson: Oh, MAC! You ever-loving high-concept owned by one of the world's biggest cosmetics companies (Estee Lauder) but appearing to be so indie and edgy! You've done it again, with a Cindy Sherman ad campaign. 


...To Toe...  
Barack Obama will personally paint your toenails: Or so says Fox News contributor Sandy Rios, because that's clearly the next logical step after mandating health insurers to cover birth control. "Is the White House out of their mind? ...We’re $14 trillion in debt and now we’re going to cover birth control, breast pumps, counseling for abuse? Are we going to do pedicures and manicures as well?" 


...And Everything In Between:
The beauty biz: 2011 beauty trends from the business end—masstige, time-savers, online retail, green beauty, and heavily engineered products. (Like magnetic hair.) 

Hilton head: How hotels wind up with the shampoo/conditioner/soap brands that they do. (Also: Hilton once had its own brand of wine??) 

Shiseido staying afloat: Even after the March disasters that disrupted domestic production, Japan-based Shiseido nearly broke even in Q1, with a $3.6 million net loss. The prescient company had recently expanded its overseas markets and acquisitions, including Bare Escentuals, which performed well and was able to absorb some of the losses from the catastrophes in Japan. 

Chinese prestige: Business-end review of the Chinese relationship to high-end beauty brands, namely Estee Lauder. The analysts even say that they don't anticipate Chinese women or men to withdraw from the market despite the brand's recent 10% price hike. 

Beauty school: Manhattan College to launch an American first—a master's program in cosmetics engineering.

Reading Letterman's own fat jokes back to him, after whipping the list from her cleavage. Magic!

Letterman's big fat zero: I've never been a big Kirstie Alley fan, but her classy callout of David Letterman and his jokes about her weight is a winner.

Wine as sunscreen?: I can't tell if we're supposed to drink wine or apply it to our skin, but I know which one I'll do. Side note: I once befriended an elderly Sicilian gentleman who insisted that he'd been using beer as sunscreen all his life, and indeed poured a 12-ouncer all over my back when I realized I'd forgotten my sunscreen for a day at the beach, and indeed I did not burn. So! 

"I do not have an eating disorder": Fantastic comics-style graphic series about developing and beginning recovery from anorexia. 
 

The vagina monologue.

Summer's Eve and its anthropomorphic vajerge: Stephen Colbert takes a long-awaited stand on vaginal puppeteering and marketing to the ladies. It's particularly irksome to the women of color some of the ads were targeting, which Wise Latinas breaks down, complete with a group photo of the trainees entering the branding sector of the agency that created the ads. (Guess how many of them appeared to have firsthand experience being brown?)

Just can't get enough: Speaking of vaginas, Tits and Sass goes to a Vagina Pageant. Meet Miss Beautiful Vagina 2011!

Fucking-a: Y'all know I love a good word post, which is why I'm into Hugo Schwyzer's challenge to his students: Start using fuck to mean sex, or fuck as an expletive of anger, but not both. "If 'fucking' is the most common slang term for intercourse, and 'fuck you' or 'fuck off' the most common terms to express contempt or rage, what’s the end result? A culture that has difficulty distinguishing sex from violence." I'm a fan of fuck as expression of emphasis or anger, and so I'll take option B, and the rest of the time I will stick with befriend the beast with two backs.

Run, Tori, run!: Tori at Anytime Yoga just wanted a pair of running shoes for her underpronation—but salespeople kept pushing her toward the "adorable" shoes. I really hate to say it, but this has happened to me too, and I've overwhelmingly found that running shoe salesmen are less likely to do this than saleswomen. Maybe there's a difference in training? Maybe female sales staff feel like bonding with female customers over "cute shoes" can give them an edge that their male colleagues wouldn't necessarily have? I don't know. I just know that men tend to point me to the ugly shoes that feel good more often than women. C'mon, ladies, step up!

Mind/body: Cameo at Verging on Serious had to give up aggressively working out because of a rare muscular disease...that she might not have had all along. The official diagnosis is still in the air, but "I might have 'loathed myself' into a metabolic myopathy as a result of (years spent) disordered eating and over-exercising." A compelling read that speaks to the intersection of mind and body.
 
Instant perspective: Rebekah at Jaunty Dame gives a lesson—however unfortunate—on indifference, gender, and vulnerability. With her just-shaved head, she was mistaken for a man twice in one day, then attacked the next.

Body image billboards "lack newsworthiness": Beauty Redefined's billboard campaign in northern Utah that promotes bodily self-acceptance is the first of its kind that I know of—but their work was deemed unnewsworthy after a news organization had sent out a reporter to interview members of the team behind the billboards. And, you know, I get it—"rah rah" news stories aren't my cup of tea either. But the way Beauty Redefined breaks down the messages the rejection actually sent shows what's really going on here. (A news story that ran the week the billboard story was supposed to: yoga for dogs.) 

"Manufactured discontent": Sally at Already Pretty on that underarm-beautifying deodorant that Dove "love your body until we tell you not to" products invented, because there's not quite enough products out there for us to be buying yet. "I use concealer on my zits and dark circles....I shave my legs and paint my toenails and someday I’m fairly sure I’ll dye my gray hairs. And I’m generally pretty grateful for the products and procedures that I utilize to gently alter my appearance. But I try to keep an eye out for manufactured discontent, stealthy marketing that targets my body confidence."

Workout Spanx: You know, one of the very few downsides of reading all the fantastic blogs on my Google Reader is that sometimes, because of all the spot-on feminist critique my favorite writers do, I learn about the existence of things I wish you hadn't known of. I was able to introduce mandals to a handful of readers here (apologies all around), and now Virginia lets me in on...workout Spanx, which will look great paired with my glamorous armpits.

Welcome to the Dollhouse: Men, Cosmetics, and the Beauty Myth

Back when pretty much the only men wearing makeup were either rock lords or Boy George, I privately came up with the guideline that if any particular piece of grooming was something women generally performed while men generally didn’t, I could safely consider it “beauty work.” Nail polish and leg-shaving? Beauty work. Nail-trimming and hair-combing? Grooming. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a useful guide in helping me determine what parts of my morning routine I might want to examine with a particularly feminist—and mascaraed—eye.

That rule has begun to crumble. Americans spent $4.8 billion on men’s grooming products in 2009, doubling the figure from 1997, according to market research firm Euromonitor. Skin care—not including shaving materials—is one of the faster-growing segments of the market, growing 500% over the same period. It’s unclear how much of the market is color products (you know, makeup), but the appearance of little-known but stable men’s cosmetics companies like 4V00, KenMen, The Men Pen, and Menaji suggests that the presence is niche but growing. Since examining the beauty myth and questioning beauty work has been such an essential part of feminism, these numbers raise the question: What is the increase in men’s grooming products saying about how our culture views men?

The flashier subset of these products—color cosmetics—has received some feminist attention. Both Naomi Wolf of The Beauty Myth fame and Feministe’s own Jill Filipovic were quoted in this Style List piece on the high-fashion trend of men exploring feminine appearance, complete with an arresting photo of a bewigged, stilettoed Marc Jacobs on the cover of Industrie. Both Wolf and Filipovic astutely indicate that the shift may signal a loosening of gender roles: “I love it, it is all good,” said Wolf. “It's all about play...and play is almost always good for gender politics.” Filipovic adds, “I think gender-bending in fashion is great, and I hope it's more than a flash-in-the-pan trend.”

Yet however much I’d like to sign on with these two writers and thinkers whose work I’ve admired for years, I’m resistant. I’m wary of men’s beauty products being heralded as a means of gender subversion for two major reasons: 1) I don’t think that men’s cosmetics use in the aggregate is actually any sort of statement on or attempt at gender play; rather, it’s a repackaging and reinforcement of conventional masculinity, and 2) warmly welcoming (well, re-welcoming, as we’ll see) men into the arena where they’ll be judged for their appearance efforts is a victory for nobody—except the companies doing the product shill. 

Let’s look at the first concern: It’s not like the men mentioned in this article are your run-of-the-mill dudes; they’re specific people with a specific cultural capital. (Which is what I think Wolf and Filipovic were responding to, incidentally, not some larger movement.) Men might be buying more lotion than they did a decade ago, but outside of the occasional attempt at zit-covering through tinted Clearasil, I’ve seen very few men wearing color cosmetics who were not a part of a subculture with a history of gender play. Outside that realm, the men who are wearing bona fide makeup, for the most part, seem to be the type described in this New York Times article: the dude’s dude who just wants to do something about those undereye circles, not someone who’s eager to swipe a girlfriend’s lipstick case unless it’s haze week on fraternity row.

“Men use cosmetic products in order to cover up or correct imperfections, not to enhance beauty,” said Marek Hewryk, founder of men’s cosmetics line 4V00. Sound familiar, ladies? The idea of correcting yourself instead of enhancing? Male cosmetic behavior seems more like the pursuit of “relief from self-dissatisfaction” that drives makeup use among women rather than a space that encourages a gender-role shakeup. Outside of that handful of men who are publicly experimenting with gender play—which I do think is good for all of us—the uptick in men’s cosmetics doesn’t signify any more of a cultural shift than David Bowie’s lightning bolts did on the cover of Aladdin Sane.

Subcultures can worm their way into the mainstream, of course, but the direction I see men’s products taking is less along the lines of subversive gender play and more along the lines of products that promise a hypermasculinity (think Axe or the unfortunately named FaceLube), or a sort of updated version of the “metrosexual” epitomized by Hugh Laurie’s endorsement of L’Oréal.

The ads themselves have yet to be released, but the popular video showing the prep for the ad’s photo shoot reveals what L’Oréal is aiming for by choosing the rangy Englishman as its new spokesperson (joining Gerard Butler, who certainly falls under the hypermasculine category). He appears both stymied and lackadaisically controlling while he answers questions from an offscreen interviewer as a young woman gives him a manicure. “That’s an interesting question to pose—’because you’re worth it,’” he says about the company’s tagline. “We’re all of us struggling with the idea that we’re worth something. What are we worth?” he says. Which, I mean, yay! Talking about self-worth! Rock on, Dr. House! But in actuality, the message teeters on mockery: The quirky, chirpy background music lends the entire video a winking edge of self-ridicule. When he’s joking with the manicurist, it seems in sync; when he starts talking about self-worth one has to wonder if L’Oréal is cleverly mocking the ways we’ve come to associate cosmetics use with self-worth, even as it benefits from that association through its slogan. “Because you’re worth it” has a different meaning when directed to women—for whom the self-care of beauty work is frequently dwarfed by the insecurities it invites—than when directed to men, for whom the slogan may seem a reinforcement of identity, not a glib self-esteem boost. The entire campaign relies upon a jocular take on masculinity. Without the understanding that men don’t “really” need this stuff, the ad falls flat.

We often joke about how men showing their “feminine side” signals a security in their masculine role—which it does. But that masculinity is often also assured by class privilege. Hugh Laurie and Gerard Butler can use stuff originally developed for the ladies because they’ve transcended the working-class world where heteronormativity is, well, normative; they can still demand respect even with a manicure. Your average construction worker, or even IT guy, doesn’t have that luxury. It’s also not a coincidence that both are British while the campaigns are aimed at Americans. The “gay or British?” line shows that Americans tend to see British men as being able to occupy a slightly feminized space, even as we recognize their masculinity, making them perfect candidates for telling men to start exfoliating already. L’Oréal is selling a distinctive space to men who might be worried about their class status: They’re not “metrosexualized” (Hugh Laurie?), but neither are they working-class heroes. And if numbers are any indication, the company’s reliance upon masculine tropes is a thriving success: L’Oréal posted a 5% sales increase in the first half of 2011.

Still, I don’t want to discount the possibility that this shift might enable men to explore the joys of a full palette. L’Oréal’s vaguely cynical ads aside, if Joe Six-Pack can be induced to paint his fingernails and experience the pleasures of self-ornamentation, everyone wins, right?

Well—not exactly. In the past, men have experienced a degree of personal liberalization and freedom through the eradication of—not the promotion of—the peacocking self-display of the aristocracy. With what fashion historians call “the great masculine renunciation” of the 19th century, Western men’s self-presentation changed dramatically. In a relatively short period, men went from sporting lacy cuffs, rouged cheeks, and high-heeled shoes to the sober suits and hairstyles that weren’t seriously challenged until the 1960s (and that haven’t really changed much even today). The great masculine renunciation was an effort to display democratic ideals: By having men across classes adopt simpler, humbler clothes that could be mimicked more easily than lace collars by poor men, populist leaders could physically demonstrate their brotherhood-of-man ideals.

Whether or not the great masculine renunciation achieved its goal is questionable (witness the 20th-century development of terms like white-collar and blue-collar, which indicate that we’d merely learned different ways to judge men’s class via appearance). But what it did do was take a giant step toward eradicating the 19th-century equivalent of the beauty myth for men. At its best, the movement liberated men from the shackles of aristocratic peacocking so that their energies could be better spent in the rapidly developing business world, where their efforts, not their lineage, were rewarded. Today we’re quick to see a plethora of appearance choices as a sign of individual freedom—and, to be sure, it can be. But it’s also far from a neutral freedom, and it’s a freedom that comes with a cost. By reducing the amount of appearance options available to men, the great masculine renunciation also reduced both the burden of choice and the judgments one faces when one’s efforts fall short of the ideal.

Regardless of the success of the renunciation, it’s not hard to see how men flashing their cash on their bodies serves as a handy class marker; indeed, it’s the very backbone of conspicuous consumption. And it’s happening already in the playground of men’s cosmetics: The men publicly modeling the “individual freedom” of makeup—while supposedly subverting beauty and gender ideals—already enjoy a certain class privilege. While James Franco has an easygoing rebellion that wouldn’t get him kicked out of the he-man bars on my block in Queens, his conceptual-artist persona grants him access to a cultural cachet that’s barred to the median man. (Certainly not all makeup-wearing men enjoy such privilege, as many a tale from a transgender person will reveal, but the kind of man who is posited as a potential challenge to gender ideals by being both the typical “man’s man” and a makeup wearer does have a relative amount of privilege.)

Of course, it wasn’t just men who were affected by the great masculine renunciation. When men stripped down from lace cuffs to business suits, the household responsibility for conspicuous consumption fell to women. The showiness of the original “trophy wives” inflated in direct proportion to the newly conservative dress style of their husbands, whose somber clothes let the world know they were serious men of import, not one of those dandy fops who trounced about in fashionable wares—leave that to the ladies, thanks. It’s easy, then, to view the return of men’s bodily conspicuous consumption as the end of an era in which women were consigned to this particular consumerist ghetto—welcome to the dollhouse, boys. But much as we’d like to think that re-opening the doors of playful, showy fashions to men could serve as a liberation for them—and, eventually, for women—we may wish to be hesitant to rush into it with open arms. The benefits of relaxed gender roles indicated by men’s cosmetics could easily be trumped by the expansion of beauty work’s traditional role of signaling one’s social status. The more we expand the beauty toolkit of men, the more they too will be judged on their compliance to both class markers and the beauty standard. We’re all working to see how women can be relieved of the added burden of beauty labor—the “third shift,” if you will—but getting men to play along isn’t the answer.

The Beauty Myth gave voice to the unease so many women feel about that situation—but at its heart it wasn’t about women at all. It was about power. And this is why I’m hesitant to herald men spending more time, effort, and energy on their appearance as any sort of victory for women or men, even as I think that rigid gender roles—boys wear blue, girls wear makeup—isn’t a comfortable place for anyone. For the very idea of the beauty myth was that restrictions placed upon women’s appearance became only more stringent (while, at the same time, appealing to the newly liberated woman’s idea of “choice”) in reaction to women’s growing power. I can’t help but wonder what this means for men in a time when we’re still recoiling from a recession in which men disproportionately suffered job losses, and in which the changes prompted in large part by feminism are allowing men a different public and private role. It’s a positive change, just as feminism itself was clearly positive for women—yet the backlash of the beauty myth solidified to counter women’s gains.

As a group, men’s power is hardly shrinking, but it is shifting—and if entertainment like Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and the Apatow canon are any indication, that dynamic is being examined in ways it hasn’t been before. As our mothers may know even better than us, one way our culture harnesses anxiety-inducing questions of gender identity is to offer us easy, packaged solutions that simultaneously affirm and undermine the questions we’re asking ourselves. If “hope in a jar” doesn’t cut it for women, we can’t repackage it to men and just claim that hope is for the best.


This essay was originally posted at Feministe.

Beauty Blogosphere 7.29.11

What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between.

Neodymium magnetic blow-dryer (via)

From Head... 
Hair magnet: Styling products using magnetic fibers to create a fuller, thicker appearance are being developed in Israel. This is sort of brilliant, and a possible plot point in espionage films, when the femme fatale with a luscious mane walks by the supercomputer and erases all covert files.


...To Toe...
Ice cream pedicure: Okay, so they don't soak your tootsies in melted ice cream, but the fact that there is such a thing as a pedicure inspired by ice cream flavors pretty much proves the study we talked about yesterday. You know, the one about cosmetic use being primarily driven by emotion?


...To Everything In Between:
Thieves!: 41% of British men surveyed borrow their wife's or girlfriend's beauty products, with moisturizer leading the pack of stolen goods, followed by razors. 12% of women argued with said British men about this habit.

Eirebrush ban: The Advertising Standards Authority of Ireland has banned two L'Oréal ads for retouching them beyond what the product advertised would be able to achieve. You know, as much as I don't like airbrushing, this claim actually seems sort of hollow to me--am I oversimplifying here? Am I optimistic or cynical for thinking that while these ads are manipulative, the mere act of using Julia Roberts to advertise a product means that we as consumers sort of understand that the ad doesn't represent what the product is capable of?

Mea culpa or greenwashing?: Proctor & Gamble has vowed to go green: using 100% renewable or recycled materials for all products and packaging, creating zero consumer waste in landfills, and designing products that maximize the conservation of resources. Sounds good, but is it just a more elaborate form of greenwashing?

But do they use coupons?: Sixty-four percent of women surveyed earning $100k-$149k a year would continue buying a store-brand beauty product if they were pleased with the results, as opposed to only 50% of women making $50k-$74k. My question is, who wouldn't continue buying a store-brand beauty product if they were pleased with the results? Of course, I'm so rich I replaced all my teeth with rubies, so.

Did the beauty myth kill Amy Winehouse?: I think addiction is far more complicated than what Andy Martin posits here in the Times, but he makes some excellent points: "[H]er devastating — and finally lethal — self-critique tended to home in on her body."

U.S., U.K., and body image: American women report more body confidence than British women, but also want (and get) more plastic surgery, reports Allure. "We love our boobs and we love our butts, but we still want plastic surgery? What do you think is going on?" Allure asks. Well, since you asked! Maybe hyperfocusing on the body, even in a positive sense, leads to the sense that we have and should have total control over our shape? Or that hyping up our body's good points ("I love my butt!" say 30% of American women) just leads to a greater gulf between our ideal selves and our reality? Maybe we shouldn't be focusing so much on "loving" our bodies (for love can invite hate, as anyone who has ever shouted at a lover who would never shout at a friend can attest) and instead focus on caring for them?

Of corsets complicated: On the heels of Decoding Dress's post about shapewear comes a WWD piece (subscribers only, but the gist is that shapewear is now more acceptable, and the market is doing well). "It’s affordable and there isn’t the stigma of cosmetic surgery and the paranoia. It’s like, ‘I put on my lipstick, my perfume and my shaper, and I can take it off whenever I want.'" says stylist Phillip Bloch. Makes sense to me. Of course, so does the concluding quote by psychologist Jennifer Baumgartner: “When people have extra weight on, they don’t like the feeling of their flesh jiggling and shapewear often eliminates that,” she said. “Shapewear can offer a sense of security, but it’s a crutch and a quick fix. It can actually become addicting.”

Hair-care regulation in Ghana: The Ghana Hairdressers and Beauticians Association is lobbying for state licensing. This could have trickle-down effects in the States; unlicensed (and unqualified) hairstylists can flood the African/African-American hair-care market and spread misinformation that can lead to traction alopecia.

Not in favor of unsafe cosmetics, mind you: And in regulation news closer to home, not all small beauty companies are reacting to the proposed Safe Cosmetics Act with joy.

Is it really the makeup that needs to be how-to'd here?

"Ancient Chinese secret" not so ancient: Chinese cosmetics brands are reinventing their images to compete with global brands for Chinese consumers...by touting natural ingredients and traditional Chinese ways. I know, I know, we all thought the Chinese women applied their makeup by correctly channeling their chi. But this is an interesting look into how traditional production can be fetishized even within the country of origin.

Body-image sovereignty mad libs!: Allyson at Decoding Dress takes on questions of bodily ownership when you want to lose weight but don't want to feel like you're falling prey to the beauty myth in doing so, prompted by Virginia's earlier take on the matter in response to a reader question. (Also, if you liked my post on "dressing your figure," check out her post on the myth of horizontal stripes.)

"I woke up as a man today": Holly Pervocracy on gender performance ("Butt-ass naked and half-asleep, in a completely "default" state for a human being, I was about as masculine as a person can get"), and her gracious clarification when she realized she might've gotten it wrong. (She usually doesn't. Get it wrong, that is; she's a lucid writer on gender, though there are many places where I disagree with her.) "I, personally, feel like femininity is something that requires me to make effort and make changes, and masculinity is just how I am when I wake up. I, personally, am not everyone." 

On seeing, and being seen: Oliver Seth Wharton on a run-in with his neighbor that would have been unremarkable, were it not that it marked the first time he'd seen her without her chador. He questions his own complex reaction in light of seeing her outside of her usual proscribed role: "The smile disconcerted me more than her presence. It felt both like a gesture of neighborly kindness and a confession. Well, you caught me. This is what I look like. ... Maybe we just can’t bear the raw power of seeing each other."

"You are capable of much more than being looked at": Congrats to Beauty Redefined--their media-literacy and body-image billboards have hit northern Utah, and they are fantastic. Take a peek!

Musings of a recovering woman: Rachel Hills on her eating disorder history, and the ways it plays (and doesn't play) into being a feminist. "Having an eating disorder didn’t make me a feminist. I was a feminist a good few years before I started starving myself and throwing up meals. But I do suspect that the emotions and general sense of confusion that led to me doing those things might be the same emotions and confusion that led to my fascination with gender issues."

Independence Day: American Beauty Trivia

Happy American Independence Day!!! A few bits of trivia about the largest beauty industry in the world for you to chew on along with your tofu hot dog (or, for non-American readers, while you patiently wait for Americans to come down off this weekend's nationalist high; we apologize for our absence but can't help ourselves).

1) Estee Lauder (whose birthday was July 1, incidentally) got her start in high school, helping out at her chemist uncle's stop after classes. She worked with him to develop the Super Rich All-Purpose Cream; when the owner of the salon where she got her hair done complimented her on her skin, Estee returned with samples of the cream and gave demonstrations, and a business was born.

2) San Francisco-based BeneFit Cosmetics developed one of their most popular products, BeneTint, at the behest of a stripper who requested a potion to make her nipples look more pink.

3) Madame C.J. Walker is known for being the first self-made female millionaire in America, but her inspiration is less touted. Suffering from stress-related alopecia, she tried a variety of products to prevent her hair from falling out. Then she had a dream in which "a big Black man appeared to me and told me what to mix up for my hair. Some of the remedy was grown in Africa, but I sent for it, put it in my scalp, an din a few weeks my hair was coming in faster than it had ever fallen out."

4) Nail guru Deborah Lippman used to be a pro jazz singer. Guess that's why she knows the blues.

5) Legendary Charlie perfume was named after Charles Revson, the founder of Revlon. Why Revlon and not Revson? He partnered with a chemist, Charles Lachman, to develop the line's first product, a nail polish.

Beauty Blogosphere 6.24.11

What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between.

Uncomfortably numb.

From Head...
Because every girl wants to be a vampire: Am I old-fashioned for being freaked out by lip balm with Benzocaine, designed to "leave your victims’ lips numb and their hearts racing"?

...To Toe...
This case has no legs: New York man sues SoHo pedicure outlet for not complying with the Americans With Disabilities Act guidelines. His disability? He lost both legs in a car accident. (Interesting piece on him in Blackbook a ways back.)

...And Everything In Between:

BUSINESS
Men in the cosmetics industry: Fast Company asks if LinkedIn is a gender equalizer: Men thrive in the cosmetics industry, according to LinkedIn's analysis of user data. Yawn, yawn, male CEOs, blargh. But! Women rule ranching and tobacco! (Go cowgirls!) My initial hunch would be that the novelty factor of women in those fields might give them an advantage, though I'm hesitant to say the same for men. If that world is anything like another female-focused industry I'm familiar with—women's magazines—the business side is likely run by men while the day-to-day operations and development is run by women.

More pink Cadillacs: Mary Kay still going strong, signing up 165,000 new representatives in April—the largest monthly amount in a decade. These are independent sellers, meaning these workers may still be underemployed, but Mary Kay's endurance is a testament to the ability of woman-driven businesses to attract a work force looking for flexibility. (Per the above item, though, it's worth nothing that the Mary Kay CEO is a dude with an MBA, not a lady with a dream.)

Dollar stacks on the left are ad dollars from 2009; on the right, from 2010. Each bill represents roughly $50 million in ad budgets. (Via Ad Age and Marketing Degree.)

Ad budgets: Interesting graphic from Ad Age detailing ad dollars for various beauty companies. The buried lede here is Axe's ad cuts, though I suppose given the onslaught of, what, 2006, you can only go down from there. (The entire cross-industry graphic is here. Of note: Weight-loss companies went up, quelle surprise, as did Proactiv and Yoplait. Good to see the latter company can afford to swallow the cost of their pulled eating-disorder-littered ad. While jogging in place.)

Those hormones paid for your yacht, lady: Evelyn Lauder makes a good point in an unfortunate way at the Elly Awards Luncheon: "Older women should be on boards." Agreed! "There's just less hormones, less crying." Oh! I'd really like to see a broader conversation about women and aging happening (Naomi Wolf's piece in the Washington Post was a start, but am I alone in finding it a little dismissive of younger women?), and I suppose these sorts of fits and starts are a beginning? Maybe?

Holy house: Estee Lauder's synagogue in Queens gets a makeover. (Why am I so obsessed with Estee Lauder real estate? Between the casino and the graveyard I'm a one-woman watch.)

INTERNATIONAL

Behind the veil: A young Saudi-Canadian woman on feeling liberated from the beauty myth by wearing the hijab. "When I cover myself, I make it virtually impossible for people to judge me according to the way I look.  I cannot be categorized because of my attractiveness or lack thereof."

Characteristics of the Chinese beauty market: Chinese women as demanding cosmetics consumers. Interesting bits about how even though China is rapidly becoming more westernized, there's still a very strong Chinese ethos to cosmetics--hair-dyeing, for example, is rare except to cover grays.

Faux cosmeceuticals: False claims in cosmetic advertising increased five-fold in Korea last quarter, with products fraudulently advertising use of "stem cells." (Ew!)

NATURAL BEAUTY

More false advertising: Center for Environmental Health sues Kiss My Face and Hain Celestial (Avalon Organics, Alba Botanical) for falsely labeling cosmetics as organic when they're not. Say it ain't so! I love Alba lotions!

BEAUTY BLOGOSPHERE

Still from Dark Girls, which, from the preview, looks to be startling and poignant.

Help kickstart Dark Girls: Via Ashe at Dramatis Personae comes an alert to help fund a documentary that sounds incredibly promising about women's skin tone in the black community.

Wax on, wax off: Sally at Already Pretty on feminism and body hair, which has been a sticking point for me personally. I shave my legs, etc., because I feel more comfortable that way; I tried challenging that, and just felt unappealing to myself. Ironically, the way I came to peace with this was to start shaving all the time, not just when my legs would be available for public viewing. I realized that I truly do take my own pleasure in having smooth legs. As Sally writes, "Does this mean I’m willingly bowing to the patriarchy on this issue? I guess you could see it that way.... Everything we do to change how our bodies look, feel, and smell is a nod to societal norms. And I’m willing to nod occasionally."

Hup!: Allyson at Decoding Dress questions the symbiosis of fashion and the military—it might not be just a one-way conversation.

Reflections: Y'all know I'm a sucker for mirror talk, and Kate at Eat the Damn Cake goes in for it: "People say, 'This mirror makes me look weird,' but they only half believe themselves. The other half is saying, 'I think I might actually look like that.'"

Socrates' sister: Feminist Philosophers questions whether philosophy itself is gendered, and of course the answer is a flaming YES, which points to why questions of personal beauty haven't received their philosophical due. "The self of feminist philosophy...often knows that Descartes was wrong...to hold that the human mind is whole and entire unto itself. She cannot be the whole respository for the normativity that is needed for a theory of concepts, for example. Her intellectual thriving is dependent on social inputs, corrections and co-constructions."

Mentoring: Not beauty-related, but enough young women have contacted me through here for this to be pertinent: Australian feminist writer and blogger Rachel Hills has some excellent posts on women and mentoring for her recent Mentoring Week (well, weeks) project. Here is but one of them, with links to more at the bottom. You read a lot about the importance of mentors but this series explores unexpected angles, like mentoring and media and male/female mentoring styles.

BEST OF THE REST

Yes, I'm exploiting this bunny for its sheer cuteness, but I'm not going to pinch its ass, so we're all cool, right?

Bunny hop: This story at The Good Men Project about being a Playboy Bunny in 1978 is revealing about the effects of being in a highly image-conscious environment: "I was getting a thorough training at work in just how much looks mattered if you were female." Aw, hell, it's really just an excuse for me to recommend Gloria Steinem's classic essay "I Was a Playboy Bunny." (I can't find it online, but here's an excerpt.) The Good Men Project piece isn't as insightful, but it's more personal, as the writer's reasons for being a Bunny weren't journalistic.

Sweet smell of success: Between Mercedes-Benz perfumes and The New York Times-scented candle, can't wait to catch a whiff of the bourgeoisie!

Portrait of a perfumer: Better fragrance chat here, with Bella Sugar's Annie Tomlin interviewing fragrance legend Frédéric Malle.

Beauty exhibit skin-deep?: Thoughtful Tom Teicholz review of the "Beauty Culture" exhibit in L.A., asking the pointed question: "Is this exhibit really a conversation?" So much beauty talk isn't talk at all, but presented images. I still want to see this exhibit, but am eager to keep the beauty conversation going.

Beauty Blogsophere 6.17.11

The latest beauty news, from head to toe and everything in between.

From Head...

Behind Bare Minerals: Nice profile of mineral-makeup guru Leslie Blodgett. I'd argue that the piece overstates the revolution of mineral makeup (is it really that different than regular makeup? Or am I wearing it wrong?), and the comparisons to Estee Lauder are a little baffling, but it's an interesting read nonetheless.

 Sic McGruff on pedicure bandits!

...To Toe...

Nailed!: What's up with all the pedicure fraud lately? Between the Muncie, Indiana, pedicure bandit and the Great Park Slope Nail Salon Freakout, pedicurists are getting shafted. For shame!

Foot fault: The pedicure that nearly killed Serena Williams.

...And Everything In Between:
Men and beauty purchases: That ever-reliable source of meticulous research, MyVoucherCodes.co.uk, released a study about how grooming products are the #1 item purchased by men online, beating out tech. Forgive me for being a tad skeptical of the research methods here, but clearly something is going on here. Are men buying more body products online because they're embarrassed to be buying bath gel in person?

Beauty sales rising: Mass products fared somewhat better than prestige cosmetics in Q1, though prestige skin care easily beat gains from mass products. Let's call a victory for those pricey cosmeceuticals, shall we? 

Poker/Face: Estee Lauder facility on Long Island may become casino operated by Shinnecock Nation. 

Lush wants everyone to kiss and makeup.

Lush "Kiss and Tell" event in support of same-sex marriage rights: I am thrilled to see a cosmetics company taking action on an issue that's actually controversial. Once upon a time, breast cancer research was controversial. It's still important, but I tend to view corporations whose "women's issues" begin and end with pink ribboning with skepticism. Like WOW you're really taking a stand, aren't you?! So if you're near a Lush store on June 18, join the protest! Head on over with your partner at 11:38 a.m. local time (U.S.A. and Canada only)—1138 being symbolic of the number of marriage rights that are denied to same-sex couples under current law—and smooch!
 
Social media marketing: How ladybloggers yakking about Secret Clinical Strength proved a success for Procter & Gamble. Yikes!   

Beauty and the veil: Student project from a media literacy class at the American University of Beirut about veiled women and beauty. Things get interesting around 2:40, when we start to hear from Lebanese men and veiled Lebanese women about the signals the veil sends in regards to beauty and desire. Actually, the whole thing is interesting—I've heard so many stories of "...and in the Middle East CURVY women are considered BEAUTIFUL!" that I sometimes fall into the trap of "Orientalizing" body image and beauty concerns. This was a good reminder that not only are American beauty standards being heavily exported, but that each culture will interpret these standards in their own way.

Tila Tequila and root causes of eating disorders: Tila Tequila is (sort of) shedding light on an essential aspect of eating disorders that's often overlooked, especially when discussing their prevalence among professional beauties. "I put pressure on myself to constantly eat, but once I put pressure on myself, that's when eating is no longer a ‘natural’ thing to do for me and ironically becomes the opposite," she said in Radar Online. It gets to the idea of EDs being about control, not thinness, which is essential to an understanding of the disease.

Udderly gorgeous! Moo-tiful! Alert Hugh Heifer! (It's been a long week, okay?)

Cattle contest is so pageant: I'm not particularly into the whole Sexual Politics of Meat angle, though I think it's an interesting-enough discussion. That said, this piece at Der Spiegel about a dairy show, which the magazine terms a beauty pageant for cows, gave me the heebie-jeebies. (THAT said, a personal bit of trivia is that as a young 4-Her I had a flair for beef cattle judging, and I can tell you from personal experience that there is absolutely no wink wink nudge nudge about judging cattle. It is as earnest an activity as you will ever find.) 

Barbie-blaming: The F-Word takes on Greenpeace's campaign against Barbie as responsible for deforestation because of her packaging. "Were Greenpeace to roll out a complementary campaign featuring Action Man or GI Joe being court-martialled for his rampages through the rainforest...it would be an even-handed address....No such campaign exists."

Nail salon history: The contemporary history of the nail salon is the history of the Vietnam war, as shown in this article that traces the growth of Vietnamese-owned nail salons from mass emigration in the 1970s to today. New York might not be representative, but at the salons in my neighborhood, workers tend to be either Asian (usually Chinese or Korean) or Latin American. Given the slowing of Vietnamese immigration and the increase in Latin American immigration, I wouldn't be surprised to see more Latina-owned salons within the decade.

Chewable toothpaste: Effin' brilliant workaround for liquids restrictions on flights.

Shopping style: Sally at Already Pretty asks if you're a lone shopper or a pack shopper. I'm interested in how one's preference might translate to attitudes toward appearance—I always shop alone, and besides just being a solitary sort of person in general, I've wondered before if my need to shop alone has to do with my self-consciousness. It's one thing to be self-conscious, quite another to have someone witness it so up-close. shopping with others but it's because I feel so self-conscious about someone knowing I'm looking at myself.

Facebook fast: Courtney at Those Graces quit Facebook when she saw her self-perception changing—check out her self-portraits (none of which look phony to me, but which don't) to see what she means. "Instead of being me, I became the image of who I thought I was." Social media can indeed function as a mirror, in other words.

Feminist fashion bloggers on women in the media: Awesome collection of posts on women in the media, all from members of Feminist Fashion Bloggers (and beauty bloggers too!). Historical media criticism, a no-no to ecofeminist representations, tired old tropes, "Hollywood ugly", representations of feminism in the media, depictions of indigenous women (which, as a part Caddo woman who looks white and therefore doesn't get the tiptoe-around I might if looked more Indian, particularly resonated with me). 

Duff!: Remember Duff? She's also a writer, and she now has a column in the New York Daily News—fashion, beauty, and, yes, "aging gracefully," but her spin aims to be fresh, funny, and inclusive. This is a woman who has been included on People's Worst Dressed list, so it'd better be.