One Small Face of Beauty

I'm the face of the day over at facesofbeauty.org, a site that features (mostly) self-portraits of women in no or little makeup along with a writeup of why they're beautiful. Check it out! (It's much classier than my most recent use of my self-portrait, on top of the fruit. I can't believe nobody called me out on that ridiculousness.)

Stay tuned for my interview with the founder, Heather Disarro, coming up!

Apple Shape, Pear Shape, Bull Shape

I am not a pear. Nor am I an apple, or an hourglass. I’m not a pencil, or a triangle, or a bell, or a rectangle.

But how does she dress herself in the morning? you gasp. My god, how does she know whether to wear skirts at or above the knee? frills at the bust or at the hem? can she “get away with” a wrap dress? a cinch waist? BOOT-LEG OR FLARE?

Women's magazines assume that after decades of fruitspeak, every American woman knows by right where her botanical destiny lies; just in case there’s the odd raised-by-wolves type who needs to figure out her best dress shape, of course, there’s often a brief guide: You are to look in the mirror and assess which fruit your silhouette most accurately resembles. Oh, the terms might vary: You’re not a pear, you’re a spoon! You’re not a banana or boy-shaped—nay, you are a ruler! (Actually, in magazines’ defense not many of them try to get away with “banana” any longer, perhaps recognizing that few of their readers were long, curveless creatures whose hips perpetually jutted to the left.) Hourglass, of course, never changes; despite the thin-imperative, all of the corrective clothing picks in the “dress your shape” magazine columns are designed to basically make us mimic the hourglass shape if we don’t have it naturally. (Not to be left out of the not-quite-good-enough game, of course, “hourglass” women are sometimes recast as “busty,” in which case the page focuses on “minimizing” and controlling the mighty mammaries.)

If looking in the mirror doesn’t help you? You could try asking strangers on the Internet (Google “am i a pear or an apple” for further assistance); you could consult Wikipedia. I once actually started plugging things like my wrist circumference into an online form to determine once and for all what fucking fruit I am, but stopped when I realized I was crazy-making, and now I can’t find it, but it exists. In general, waist-hip ratio is generally agreed upon as the determining factor of pear versus apple. This might work fine and dandy for the bitsy newsy health tip about how apples are all going to die of something tomorrow, if they haven't already. (Can we make apples and pears Health at Any Size’s next battle? I can't believe that every apple out there is going to get diabetes.) But in any case, it does squat for the woman who’s deemed a pear by the measuring tape, but in fact just has a curvy booty as opposed to wide hips.

Am I alone in never, ever having fit a single one of these categories? My hips aren’t quite wide enough for me to be a pear, I’m a little too curvy to be a banana, my waistline doesn’t qualify me as an apple, and I’m not busty enough to be an hourglass. More to the point, am I alone in having this sort of magnetic attraction-repulsion to the idea that there’s this set of guidelines that determines our “type,” like a personality flow chart for your figure? It’s this weird little corner of magazines that feels specifically tailored for you—I mean, look, there are FOUR DIFFERENT “REAL WOMEN” on this page, and one of them is probably even not-white (it's a favorite place for ladymags to cram in some "diversity"), so clearly She is We, and We are She, and this magazine and I are totally vibing—but that actually has nada to do with how you might look in puffed-sleeve blouses (pears), flared jeans (apples, I think?), or high necklines (bananas!).

 Late-night Photoshoppin': Don't tell me I don't know how to party.

It’s a categorization that shows us, more blatantly than other tools in women’s magazines, to view our bodies as problem zones. The savvier fashion writers  tell you to play up your good parts instead of  trying to hide the bad, but in some ways that echoes the notion of telling a heavy-set woman “Oh, but you’ve got such a pretty face” as a supposed compliment—as though now she must do something to “match” her “good points.”

Now, listen, I’ve got nothing against dressing to flatter your figure. I do it every day (please leave polite, anonymous comments if I am grossly mistaken). Scoop necklines, boot-cut jeans, stretchy pencil skirts, and faux-wrap dresses line my closet, because they’re what make me look the best. They visually create a nicer picture than, say, empire dresses and flare-legged jeans would on me. (Did the Powers That Be just want to temper my bohemian bent by forcing me into J.Crew?) And I’m guessing that for many women who don’t trust their visual sense or their instincts, or who just want some guidelines, that those pages are truly helpful. They're sure as shit popular, a perennial high scorer in magazine metrics.

But you know what? I am about the least fashion-conscious person out there, and I figured this stuff out. (Of course, that could be part of why; when you only care about what looks flattering instead of staying on-trend, it’s easier to find what works for you. Some call my wardrobe boring; I vote “classic.”) It’s not because I pay attention to the magazines that I figured out what worked on me: It’s because I look in the mirror. I made a vow several years ago—around the same that I began to suspect that this whole apple-pear thing was largely bullshit designed to appear "helpful" but wasn't really—that I wasn’t going to buy any clothing that didn’t give me an immediate “yes.” Voilà, a wardrobe was born: Within a year of this decision, my closet was filled with pretty much nothing but the items above. My fashion guidelines don’t flatter a single piece of fruit, but they flatter me just fine.

This isn’t to say that I didn’t pay attention to the magazines, though. Did I ever. From my first issue of Seventeen until I figured out a few years ago that I was neither apple nor pear nor hourglass but a cornucopia, I memorized every pear-shaped and plus-sized trick in the book, despite not being either of those. Like so many issues surrounding body image, what I actually looked like wasn’t what the issue. My light case of body dysmorphia (just a cough, really) dictated that I fixated on the size of my thighs, which are certainly ample but A) aren’t hips, and B) aren’t broad enough to make me resemble a classic d’Anjou. But the closest thing I could seize upon to fix this perceived flaw was the pear. And, of course, I cleverly deduced that in order to look smaller (which, at certain points in my life, took on a vastly inappropriate importance), one should read the “plus” section. I spent years never even trying on pencil skirts, because they only worked for hourglass figures and I was a pear, right?, instead “preferring” A-line skirts that never felt quite right.

I didn’t really realize how much my old perceived flaws had dictated the way I dressed, though, until I saw a hint of it elsewhere. I'm reading the blog of my friend Andréa, who’s doing the 30 for 30 challenge, in which you pick 30 items from your closet and wear only those; she’s using it as a way of challenging herself to wear things that are out of her comfort zone. She casually mentioned that one of her combinations was a personal challenge because it emphasized her “boy shape,” and it threw me for a loop to see someone who is most definitely shaped like a woman (what else could we be shaped like? oh, yes, fruit and spoons) describe herself that way—especially because she looked fantastic in the item in question, a studded belt. 

Andréa’s studded belt, my years with no pencil skirts, a vintage color-block dress I bought but never wore because the saleslady told me as she handed it over that “only an hourglass can get away with this” (encouragement or admonishment? it didn’t matter; I disqualified myself from being its wearer and gave it away): What are we missing out on because of our ingrained notions of what actually suits us? Add to this a tidbit that Beauty Schooled recently posted on Facebook about how nobody actually has a waist—it’s a tailoring term, not an anatomical one—and all of a sudden it’s beginning to look like we’ve been wearing the emperor’s clothes for a while now.

Colette Nelson, Professional Bodybuilder, New York City

Mention the name Colette Nelson in bodybuilding circles and you can pretty much guarantee the response will be smiles of recognition all around. Over the years she has carved a niche for herself as one of the most respected and admired professional athletes on the circuit. However, what few people realize is that competitive bodybuilding is only one string attached to this woman’s bow: Colette is also a registered dietician and certified diabetes educator, holds a master’s degree in science—and still manages to fit being a hair and makeup artist into her demanding lifestyle. (She also happens to be a bit of an artist when it comes to spray tanning…)

 Photo: Kyle Quest Studios

But it’s the bodybuilding that intrigued me the most, as she’s one of the few competitors who manages to combine extreme muscularity with extreme femininity, which has likely been a key to her astounding success in the sport (check out her site for a rundown of her contest history)—and it’s what made me want to delve deeper into the phenomena of female muscle as the possible new face of beauty. In her own words:

On the Beauty of Bodybuilding
Bodybuilding—at least women’s bodybuilding—is simply a new way of judging beauty. They say “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” and for those who attend and judge women’s bodybuilding contests, the muscular woman is beautiful. Call her a female Adonis if you will. Now, this may seem like a somewhat arrogant statement but let’s stop to consider this: Do you call the woman who spends hours in front of the mirror doing her makeup arrogant? Of course not, so why should we give this label to the woman who works out hard in the gym and then chooses to display the results on stage? Both are seeking what they deem to be perfection. 

Some may think it’s a huge contradiction and that muscle and femininity—or indeed beauty—cannot go hand in hand. I like to think that in some small way, I and women like me are proving that muscle can be both feminine and beautiful. The qualification to that statement is, of course, as long as it doesn’t go to the extremes of drug use, which many women fall victim to. I’ve never been an advocate of drug use, and yet I have had a very successful career in bodybuilding. I’ve gone about as far as I can go without sacrificing my femininity, which I am never willing to do.

On Femininity
Yes, some women may fall into the trap of taking drugs that threaten their femininity in an attempt to be “bigger and better” than their rivals. And the price they pay is significant—it’s emotionally traumatizing. It’s not unknown for women to begin losing their hair due to “male pattern baldness” and have to shave every day to remove significant facial hair growth. It’s not my place to judge or criticize these women—but should they ask for it, I can offer them my help. That’s how I got involved in the hair and makeup side of competitions. I’m not saying that all my clients are trying to cover up masculinizing side effects of drug use, but there are a small percentage of women for whom this is true and those were the first ones I helped. Now I do hair and make up for all contest categories, from bodybuilding to figure and bikini.

As a female bodybuilder you walk a fine line. You love muscle, and yet you love being a woman at the same time. I have always embraced my feminine side. I love doing my hair, makeup, nails….and I love fashion. Go figure! I think that is what makes me interesting—being a sexy girl with muscles. I may not be the biggest girl when I compete, but I do have decent size. I am just not willing to sacrifice my femininity for size. I also think that more women would be interested in looking like Jillian Michaels with that type of body than to go to the extremes of muscle size that can only be achieved with significant drug use.

 Photo: Dan Ray

On Supplements
I have to touch on the drug issue because, like it or not, it is a part of the sport of bodybuilding. For myself, I have never considered bodybuilding to be my career, so I was never willing to take it to that extreme. You don’t make money in the sport—you make it from offshoots of the sport, be that modeling for fitness magazines, movie work, or whatever. You need to focus on the big picture, and when you take drugs the big picture outside the sport can go from poster to thumbnail size.

In addition, I have a career as a dietician and diabetes educator. I need to be conscious of the image I present to both patients and fellow professionals. For me, drug use would be professional suicide—and let’s face it, I did very well during my competitive career without them!

On Contest Prep
Contest preparation begins about 16 weeks before a show. You start becoming more aware of your hair, your skin, your nails—everything. I don’t color my hair until about two weeks before a competition. That way it’s clean, healthy, and not over-processed. I also exfoliate my skin—more than I would just for myself—to make sure I have no blemishes. I also get facials three weeks before the show and start tanning about 10 weeks prior to competing. I never tan my face—only my body. Tanning can be extremely aging to the skin, and I’m not into that!

 Photo: Dan Ray

On Adolescence
When I was 12 years old I saw pictures in a magazine of Cory Everson and Rachel McLish and liked that look. My dance teacher at the time was muscular and I recall her saying she wanted to be thinner. But I loved those bigger, muscular bodies. Back then I was really skinny—I came from a family of skinny minnies—and I never considered myself as looking good. To me I looked frail and not interesting. At that time I was also diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, which made me feel weak, broken—even damaged. I remember asking my doctor what I could do to make this situation better, and he said I had to pay attention to my diet and start working out. So I started going to the gym at a very young age—I really didn’t know what I was doing, but I went! It gave me a feeling of empowerment. I felt stronger and ultimately more accepting of my body. I got hooked on feeling strong.

On “Attention: Bodybuilder Ahead!”
I really don’t use this body I’ve built as a tool to get attention in everyday life…but I have to admit that I do love attention. People make comments—which are for the most part positive—and I get a kick out of how some people respond to me. Like, they always say, “Oh, I want to arm wrestle you.” I live in New York and the people here are very accepting of individualism, so I rarely get negative remarks aimed in my direction. 

People aren’t used to seeing a woman with muscle, though, so they do stare. We aren’t really brought up to know how to respond to a muscular woman. All I know is that it gives me a level of confidence and strength which I was lacking before, and people can feel that from me. That tempers their response.

On Perfection
Bodybuilding challenges our conditioning about what beauty looks like. With a muscular body you are creating art. I was always classed as “pretty,” but I wanted more. I am a total type-A overachiever—I’ve always been that way. And for me, building my body and reducing my body fat was a logical step toward perfection. When you have toned your body, you have altered it, nurtured it, re-created it—and when you are lifting those weights you feel like a superhero. Bodybuilders may seem neurotic in their attention to detail, but who said that trying to achieve an ideal of perfection would be easy? It may not be easy, but is it worth it? Do I really need to answer that?!

 Photo: Ivana Ford

Glamour Gals: Makeover Do-Gooding

There’s an interesting discussion over at Beauty Schooled about Glamour Gals, a nonprofit founded by an ambitious young woman in 2000. The idea of Glamour Gals is that small armies of young women—mostly high school students, though there are college chapters as well—go into nursing homes and give female residents makeovers.

I was inclined initially to feel as Virginia first wrote:

OK, I am a mean horrible person and Oprah loves them. But if you want to volunteer with old folk, can’t you just spend time with them? Do you have to put makeup on them like they five, instead of grown-ass women who have been deciding what looks good on them all by themselves for oh, decades now?

But the comments made me (and the writer) rethink:

It seems kind of, pointless, maybe, BUT – many women, especially older women, really really enjoy getting made up and being made to feel “pretty.” Living in a hospital or assisted living facility can obviously be very, very dreary. Even if it doesn’t actually DO anything, maybe it can make an elderly woman (who maybe can’t do her makeup as well anymore) FEEL happier and better, a little like she did when she was young; and isn’t that worth SOMETHING?

It’s not easy for everyone to interact with people but doing hair and makeup has given me a platform to being more extroverted. Sure, it would be just as valuable if I went to sit and read with the elderly, but this is fun too. I know what I was doing at 17 and it wasn’t nearly this productive.

You’ll see my comment at the bottom there; I was sort of grumbling before I’d had my coffee and that’s not exactly my problem with it (even if I do think that breast cancer activism can take on a faux feminist sheen at times; see Barbara Ehrenreich, who says it much better than I do). So what is my problem with Glamour Girls? I mean, I’ve documented on this very blog how unexpectedly engaged I felt by getting a makeover. Besides the reflections (and lipstick purchases!) it prompted, it also just plain felt nice to sit there and let Eden tend to my face; I can only imagine that feeling would increase tenfold if I were living in an assisted living home, widowed, with few visitors, as is the case with many of the Glamour Gals. I mean, when was the last time you touched your own grandmother’s face? When was the last time you touched anyone’s face but a child’s or a lover’s? (Am I the only one who gets bashful when I brush a fallen eyelash from a friend’s cheek?)

But you know what? This is all conjecture: I wouldn’t know how it feels for the makeover recipients, because they’re invisible on the Glamour Gals site. There are bios and journal entries from volunteers (“Victoria’s First Makeover”—Victoria is the volunteer, not her elderly counterpart), internal and external news tidbits ranging from press to updates on its volunteers (“Marisa Parrotta, chapter president of our Bolton Central School chapter...is a finalist for the NYC teen pageant”), and clips from The Glammys, the organization’s annual awards event. We hear from the Glammys host (style expert Robert Verdi), from the founder, from volunteers, from Oprah. Nowhere do we hear from the senior citizens who are getting services from Glamour Gals. Their voices are literally mute, only static, smiling photographs giving us an illusion of what the senior set might actually feel.

Buried in the site’s “Our Story” section, I did find a news clip from the Metro Channel—that is, something not produced by Glamour Gals itself (though it had a promotional feel to it so perhaps it was a joint project; I don’t know)—in which some of the makeover recipients get a chance to speak. Or, in one case, to wheel over at the volunteer’s prodding to her bureau in order to fetch a Polaroid of the two together. “Do you still have my pictures?” the volunteer chirps.

I suppose it’s really this that bothers me: “my pictures.” I understand that in order to stay afloat, nonprofits need to emphasize their achievements—and upsetting and counterproductive to the group’s goals as it may be—a bevy of fresh-faced 17-year-olds in candy striper aprons may be more palatable to potential donors than elderly women sporting lip stain. And Glamour Girls is vocal about its mission being a two-way street: elderly women receive sorely lacking personal care; young women strengthen their leadership skills. But on page after page, I saw only the volunteer’s voices and nada from the other side of the supposedly mutual exchange. I suspect that Virginia was onto something when she initially pinned it as the “best college application padding activity I’ve seen in a while”—and, criminy, I remember the terror of college applications back in 1994, when it wasn’t as competitive as it is now. I get it. And it’s worth noting that Glamour Gals has been noted by an organization devoted to eldercare: the American Health Care Association named it Group Volunteer of the Year in 2004. That’s encouraging; it shows that there is a real response to the group’s efforts, which isn’t surprising.

The group also deserves props for taking this kind of stuff seriously. When I first heard of this group, I was working at CosmoGirl magazine, which honored Glamour Gals founder Rachel Doyle as its first-ever “CosmoGirl of the Year.” (I’ve never met Rachel but remember that the staff at the time was supportive of her efforts and admired her outreach, marketing, and PR skills, which are remarkable now and certainly were when she was a teen.) I groan-laughed on the inside at the time, because it just seemed so damned appropriate, a teenage girl volunteering by putting makeup on old women, snapping some photos, and gathering a scrapbook. Who could ask for a cuter, sunnier, more winsome story? And, c’mon, the polar ice caps are melting and there’s bride burning and you, Teenage Girl, have very limited access to contraception—but, sure, let’s put makeup on old women and call it a day, okay? But I see that was shortsighted and cynical of me: Beauty is a major concern to a lot of women, and that doesn’t just stop once one’s hair turns gray. For a young woman to grasp that and turn her attention not toward herself and the beauty woes that go along with being a teenage girl, but to an under-served population who could benefit from the simple, human act of course—that’s prescient and gracious, and Doyle’s dedication and ambition have helped perform a small healing for more than 10,000 women. There’s a guileless earnesty here that I regret having rolled my eyes at years ago; Doyle saw something that I’m only now beginning to give credence to.

The founder of the group is now, by my calculations, 27 years old, so I don’t feel like a total Scrooge for mentioning my concerns (let’s think of them as suggestions!) here. If it were still the brainchild of a 17-year-old girl who was looking for a creative way to honor her grandmother and maybe come up with something to put on your college app as a nice side bonus, I’d keep my trap shut. And, again, I don’t have a problem with what they’re actually doing, even if I’d like to see it broaden out a bit (if the group can harness its resources to put on the hot-pink-carpet Glammy Awards, maybe it could also find volunteers versed in, say, massage therapy or senior yoga, which has as many mental health benefits as lipstick. And yes, I know I’m nitpicking here). I’d also love to see the group expand its nascent attempts to have a larger dialogue about beauty: The group partnered with photographer Annie Levy for “Conversations in Beauty,” a 2010 photo exhibit at a New York nursing home documenting the group’s work and exploring intergenerational ideas of beauty.
 

But I think that a resourceful group of young women who have managed to find a unique niche way to help the community can also find ways to truly frame it as a more mutual experience. The site says, “Our teen volunteers become the voices for these women writing about their experiences in GlamourGals journals, school essays or college applications.” And of course teens are web-savvy and are the ones who have broader access to public mouthpieces, not the older women. But I’ll keep my eyebrow a tad raised about this idea that a teenager—even an intelligent, kind one—can appropriately "become the voice" of a woman with decades more life experience, and that a college application is the best place for that voice to take center stage.

Championing Jane Eyre

Kate at Eat the Damn Cake meditates here on the word plain. My favorite part is this:

Personally, I don’t believe in plainness. I don’t think it exists. I’ve never seen a person who looked plain. And I refuse to allow people to be rendered invisible and meaningless by their appearances. How can you have a face and be plain?

In my interviews with women, the word itself has come up quite a bit (in the transcripts, not in what I've published), but I've noted that the word only comes up when the speaker is talking about other people. "I have friends who think they're plain," "Somebody might be what you might call plain"—that sort of thing.

You know what word hasn't come up? Ugly. Except in one distinct context: When the speaker is saying what they're not. "I mean, I know I'm not ugly or anything," "I don't think you'd look at me and say I'm ugly," and so on.

It's an interesting contrast: People like to say that women are critical of one another, but the women I've spoken to (who, granted, are self-selected) have been very hesitant to suggest that another woman could be a word that's as ugly as, well, ugly. It suggests a sort of aggression, a sort of personality disorder in addition to any lack of physical graces. Plain, on the other hand, seems somehow kinder, even though, as Kate points out, it means that "you're not even fascinatingly strange looking." But it suggests someone who may have a strong moral character, someone whose features are assembled as one would expect.

I'm not sure what to make of why women are more eager to apply it to themselves as a contrast point of what they're not. I'm guessing that it's because by setting up a contrast of how they think they look, setting up an aggressive standard like ugly sounds less conceited than something more neutral like plain. Saying you're "not ugly" could mean that you conceive of yourself as being plain, or as being pretty or beautiful or striking or whatever—but it leaves it up to the listener to think on it, without being specific, which is interesting because ugly is a pretty specific word.

"Not plain" means that you acknowledge that you're—I dunno, decorated? The very notion of the word plain and how it's used in older books is more of someone who hasn't been graced with the features of what our society traditionally considered beautiful—that you haven't been "decorated" not by your own hand, but by the powers that be.

 Clearly a certain art director never read the book.

I'll be honest: I dislike the word too, for the reasons Kate enumerates, but honestly I'd rather be called plain than ugly. It fits into that whole notion of thinking of myself as low-key, leaving whatever beauty someone might find in me up to the other person, not my own actual features or what I've done with them. And let's not forget that there's a whole subsection of romance novels devoted to "plain" heroines. There's something deeply appealing about the notion that "plain" women, by virtue of their charm, charisma, kindness, vitality, or other virtues, can become beautiful—physically beautiful, not only full of what we refer to as "inner beauty." We want to champion that heroine, and we feel more virtuous in doing so, because we're all so attached to beauty that we feel as though we're automatically rooting for the underdog.

Housebound Beauty

Not leaving the house in two days plus recently discovering the existence of lipstick has made me feel vaguely like Baby Jane.

Blanche, you aren't ever gonna sell this house...and you aren't ever gonna leave it either.

Normally I don't wear makeup at home alone, but because of Snowpocalypse (SnOMG, Snowmaggedon, etc.), today is the second day I've gotten ready for work, only to check my e-mail and see that my manager has kindly recommended I work from home.

It's been partly fun—I feel a bit like a saucy housewife (no pool boy, alas), what with the contrast between my college sweatshirt, pencil-updo, and bright red lips. But it's also making me feel a little ridiculous, like I am indeed waiting for a poolboy who isn't ever going to show up. It's a well-timed reminder that my recent plunge into the joys of 'stick is thrilling to me in part because it's a relief from decades of having approached my makeup kit with either a quiet sullenness or a sense of self-satisfied duty.

I love doing this project because of the varieties of viewpoints I hear from women I interview, and I'd initially thought that doing this would help me come up with some sort of beauty manifesto of my own. It's too early to tell, but thus far I'd say that what I've learned is that I needn't have that manifesto—that our attitudes toward cosmetics and beauty shift daily, even hourly, depending on mood, circumstance. Hell, it's built into the whole conceit: The stuff washes off, right?

The lipstick is still on, though. Happy snow day, America—

Rosie Molinary, Author, Charlotte, NC

I came across the book Beautiful You serendipitously, one of a few stray review copies at a magazine where I worked at the time. I’ve read plenty of “you go, girl!” works designed to increase self-acceptance, but what sets Beautiful You apart is its day-by-day actionability. Day 50: “Ask others to define beauty.” Day 192: “Lift weights.” Day 268: “Give flowers.” Some exercises launch enormous mental projects, of course (Day 114: “Let go”), but the book is a concrete, meditative guide to getting at the root of what makes so many women feel not-so-great about their appearance. 

Its author, Rosie Molinary, also penned Hijas Americanas: Beauty, Body Image, and Growing Up Latina; in addition, she’s a speaker, teacher, activist, and mother. Her own stories shine through in Beautiful You; by the time we actually spoke, I felt as though I were hearing a familiar, generous voice, one as mellifluous as her words (but with the faintest Carolina twang). We talked about the beauty of the unattainable, the reason Latinas get a disproportionate amount of plastic surgery, and why to get a professional bra fitting. In her own words:   

On the “Latina Mystique”

One of the things that has been emphasized over the years with beauty is searching for the unattainable. When I was growing up, there weren’t any Latinas in the media, so there wasn’t something anybody could consider to search for. The unattainable we were searching for was being tall, thin, and blonde. But in the last 10 years, there have been Latinas more prominently in the media—which, for those who aren’t tan or dark or what’s often called “exotic,” has created a craving for that. We covet beauty as what we literally can’t attain. 

I wrote Hijas in my early 30s, and I was talking to women in their late teens and early to mid-20s about Latinas in the media. When I was 18, if I said to someone I was Puerto Rican, they’d say, “Puerto what?” I grew up in South Carolina, and there weren’t other Latinas around. So I thought these women were going to say that it was so much easier to come of age now when there were Latinas in the media—and that ended up not being the reaction at all. Instead, they talked about how it created a really hard standard for them. I was getting “Puerto what?”, but fast-forward to young women now, and if they say they’re Puerto Rican and happen to be Afro-Latina, so they’re black Puerto Rican, people are like, “Why don’t you look like Jennifer Lopez?” Because in the media there’s a bit of a poster girl for each country. You’re Mexican, it’s Salma Hayek; you’ve got Jennifer Lopez for Puerto Rico, Eva Mendes for Cuba. If you’re African American, there’s not just one African American actress to compare you to; if you’re white, there’s not just one white woman to be compared to. 

On the Pain and Effort of Beauty

Something I didn’t know before researching Hijas was that Latinas get the most plastic surgery of any subgroup in the U.S., which is interesting because Latinas are not the wealthiest minority in the U.S. There’s a lot of discretionary dollars being spent on something that seems optional for someone who doesn’t have a lot of discretionary dollars. I talked about this with the head of plastic surgery at the University of Kentucky, who happens to be Latin American. And he said—I’m paraphrasing—that Latina women are aware that beauty takes effort, and that it’s not painless. He said something along the lines of: When I have a client come in from any background that’s not Latina, it’s 50/50 as to whether they’re going to get the surgery. But if I have somebody who’s Latina who’s already made this appointment with me for a consultation, there is nothing I’m going to tell them about the pain or recovery that will talk them out of it. Latina women are ultimately always aware that beauty is a sacrifice.

The other interesting thing he said was that he felt Latina women were more willing to own up to the effort. You might run into a woman of a non-Latina background and say she looks great, and she’ll say, “Oh, I just threw myself together this morning,” like it’s this effortless perfection. But if you run into a Latina woman and say, “You look really nice,” her reaction will be, “Oh, thanks! I worked overtime to buy this dress, I’ve got on this girdle, it took me three hours to get my hair like this.” She’ll own up to the effort, because part of it is wanting people to know they thought this event warranted that effort and respect. I see some truth in that. 

On Knowing But Not Believing

When I interviewed women for Hijas, I asked what they thought was beautiful. And to a person, they would say: confidence, being kind, helping others, loving others. In general, no one said anything physical in their definition of beauty! Then I would ask, “Do you consider yourself beautiful?” and they would say, “Who, me? Oh, no, no, I’m not beautiful.” Now, 30 minutes earlier, they were talking to me about how passionate they were as a schoolteacher, or how much they championed their younger sister. There were all these earlier references that indicated to me they matched their definition of beauty. I would lay this out to them, and I had several women after our conversations—I probably interviewed 100 women and 12 to 15 e-mailed me later about this—say, “It was significant to me that you pointed out the inconsistency in how I view myself and how I view others.” 

Women are raised to be demure and to deflect. And we aren’t really allowed to be gracious about ourselves. Often we’re raised not to just be good girls; we translate that into being perfect girls. So it’s not okay for us to judge ourselves on these gracious standards that we give others—we need to be higher than that standard. And it’s paralyzing, because what can happen is that we believe that if some aspect of our physicality changes, then we’ll finally be happy. And the truth is, a negative body image isn’t only about how you feel about your body. It’s rooted in so much more, and unless you deal with those things, you’re going to be unhappy no matter how long your hair or how much you weigh. 

But there’s a comfortable storyline in existing in what you’ve always believed. You know how it’s going to play out, you know what it means you can do, what you can’t do. All the choices are clear. So what happens when someone says—and this isn’t exactly what I’m saying, but it’s a part of it—if you feel bad about yourself, you’re making a choice to feel bad about yourself. What I’m inviting you to do is not make that choice anymore. Then all of the answers can be different, and how do those things play out? And that’s hard, because it’s the unknown. But it’s also ultimately the most satisfying place you can land.

On the “Beautiful You” Exercises

There aren’t that many appearance-oriented things that are important to me. But I do have some exercises in Beautiful You that are appearance-oriented. [Examples: Visit a makeup artist, get a professional bra fitting, get a haircut.] For some women those things reflect self-care, and that’s been part of the volition of some women—increased disposable income and what to do with that. I didn’t want to leave out those women from the Beautiful You journey. And I have my moments too—I had my first professional adult bra fitting a few years ago, and it made a significant difference in how my clothes felt. It had a really positive effect on me, and I hadn’t expected that; I just needed a bra and this woman came in and was like, “You need to try this,” and I was like, “Oh my god, that is what I need to try!” There are areas where we could use somebody who knows a little bit more than we do.  

That said, I don’t think that every single day is a fit for every single woman. I think it’s okay to make the book a choose-your-own-adventure book. But I think it’s important that if you’re particularly resistant to something that you do it, because there’s a reason you’re resistant to it, and you can get a bit of insight. 

On Day 73: “Use Something You’ve Been Saving for a Special Occasion”

I have this beautiful, expensive purse. I didn’t feel my behaviors warranted such a beautiful or expensive piece in my life—I’d literally used it twice. And finally one day I looked at it in this little bag gathering dust, and was like, “This is the most absurd thing. I have this beautiful thing...in my closet.” What’s the point of having a nice thing if you’re not going to enjoy it? Too often we deny ourselves pleasure. And part of recognizing beauty is experiencing pleasure. Sometimes pleasure is as simple as taking something out to enjoy that you don’t typically let yourself enjoy. What was that about, with my purse? Why was I punishing myself? Why wasn’t I worth it? Now I don’t take it out if it’s raining, but if I’m wearing certain outfits I am rocking that bag. 

On Her Definition of Beauty in 25 Words or Less

Giving and experiencing love. I think I have 21 words left? But that's it for me.

Our Very Well-Moisturized Chinese Future

To be frank, I don't usually pay much attention to the whole China-and-or-India-is-going-to-take-us-over-soon stream of news. I want my country to be a global presence and global protector, but given that we've failed so miserably in the latter I often just take a que sera, sera mindset and just hope that my new Chinese-and-or-Indian global emperor will give me health insurance already.

Seeing the numbers here, though, made my eyes pop. In 2010, high-end beauty product sales increased 4% in the U.S., 3% in France, 2% in Italy, and TWENTY-SIX PERCENT in China. Twenty-six percent! The future not only speaks Mandarin, the future is armed with Chanel.

Also interesting in the report is that "prestige beauty" posted the biggest increase in skin care, whereas the mass market saw its biggest increase in cosmetics. Are poor women sticking to the maxim of the lipstick economy while better-off women make a longer-term investment in their body's largest organ? (Not that most of it works anyway.)

Why Are Studies Giving Misleading Data About Women's Preferences?

The gross amount of coverage of the royal wedding notwithstanding, most readers here are American women. Still, this British study's findings about the importance of looks over health probably ring true on this side of the pond as well. The headlines resulting from the study read like, "Women Spend More on Beauty Than Health," "Women Choose Beauty Over Health," "Women Care About Their Looks More Than Health to the Tune of £108 a Year," and so on. The bloody horror of it all!

But one look at the type of questions being asked in the survey reveals that this is a classic case of faulty studies making headlines that make the ladies seem a tad vacant. The study found that an average of £336 was spent on cosmetic items, but £228 was being spent on vitamins and gym memberships. Vitamins and gym memberships: Yes, the only way to be healthy! Sure, it's not like Britain allows its citizens loads of opportunities for wintertime sports, but still: People can walk, hike, do yoga, go dancing, and do all sorts of things that are probably healthier than going to the gym because they're incorporated into one's lifestyle. (As for vitamins, when I duly presented my physician with a list of the supplements I was taking, she suppressed a laugh. "You're young, you're healthy, you're eating a balanced diet, you don't have any major health problems," she said. "You can save your money.")

 If you type "women" and "health" into a royalty-free image engine, this is what you get.

There's more: "Six in ten would rather live their life to the full and ‘embrace life’s excesses’ rather than worry about ‘being squeaky clean,'" the study bemoans--which, to me, indicates that these 6 in 10 are okay having that slice of chocolate cake instead of restricting themselves in order to be "squeaky clean," seems like a good thing. But in the context of the study, this is lumped in with evidence of how health matters less than beauty. Am I misreading? (To be sure, the study also had the prerequisite upsetting statistics—which are no less upsetting for how common they are—disordered eating is rampant in the name of beauty.)

I guess I've just started becoming more skeptical of the idea that most women just really hate the way we look. What I've found pretty quickly in the interviews I've been doing is that, yes, a lot of women have negative issues with their appearance, and those issues are far-reaching and immensely complex. But part of that complexity is those beams of confidence and not quite knowing what to do with those moments or phases. I think back to myself at 13 and the way I secretly embraced my utterly dorky looks, and I realize that even though my greatest doubts came after that time, there's also a strong core I have within me that is totally okay with how I look--and that has been true of every woman I've interviewed so far, even if they've engaged in negative behaviors when that belief has faltered. I don't examine those times much because, hey, I'm feeling fine! But if you primed me with a questionnaire about beauty, health, purchasing power, and what I would do to fit into size 4 jeans, the negative part of me would know to creep out and write in her answers on my behalf. Because that part of me knows it's needier than the breezy, carefree part, so she speaks louder when she's around. I'm guessing that's what was at play with these 3,000 women too--not that we don't have a long way to go, baby, but I don't think we need to be as grim as some headlines would have it either.

Personal Care Spending, Happiness, and the Young/Single/Fabulous Woman

I'm baffled by the results of this survey on personal-care spending, ranked by city. By "personal care," the study included dollars spent on fitness, cosmetics, toiletries, salon/spa visits, and the like.

The study was aiming to see if there was a correlation between dollars spent on personal care and levels of fitness among its residents. For the top and bottom cities, that was true: Austin spends the most money per person per month on personal care ($143) and is one of the fittest cities in the U.S.; Detroit spends the least ($18) and is also one of the unhealthiest cities. But then, as pointed out by The Hairpin, Portland, OR (always Portland, throwing a kink in the system! viva la revolucion!), is one of the healthiest cities in the U.S. but spends about the national average on personal care items.

Really, they couldn't have come up with colors other than red and blue for this?

How does this relate to beauty and women? A few ways:

1) The study's very premise is that spending on cosmetics and fitness are in the same category. And sure, they both fall under "personal care," but there are about a zillion reasons people work out (mental health benefits, lower cholesterol, stress relief, medically directed weight loss, rehabilitation--plus, sure, "those last five pounds" and the glow that working out gives you) and not that many as to why people wear cosmetics (my dissection of lipstick subtleties aside, but of course). I've always been sort of irked by the connection of beauty and health departments in women's magazines, even though the skin, after all, is an organ. And in this survey, in which both men and women responded, it skews the results: A man or woman buying, say, rock-climbing equipment isn't in the same headspace that a woman buying eyeshadow is.

2) No secret that self-esteem and happiness are complementary, right? Looking at the personal-care spending in the light of the happiest and unhappiest cities in America reveals that the people who are spending more money on personal care are also happier. Not all of the cities in the happiest/unhappiest cities rankings are listed in the personal-care spending chart, but of the top 10 cities that are: The happiest cities spent an average of $86.50 on personal care; the unhappiest, $68.70. And this is where I really wish that there were a demarcation between cosmetics/spas/salons and fitness, because of the antidepressant effect of regular exercise. But I wonder if happier people are also spending more on self-care that might relate to their happiness in less scientific, more aesthetic ways?

3) Four of the top 12 cities for personal-care expenditures are in Texas. Texas women also earn 81.4 cents on the (man's) dollar. I can't find all the data to bear this out, but I wonder if there's an inverse proportional spending on personal care to women's earning power--that in places where women earn considerably less, they need to increase their "net worth" by investing more in their looks. It's possible, but in looking at the cities where young, childless women outearn men, the average spent on personal care is actually slightly higher than the national average ($68.50 for these cities as compared to a national average of $60 on personal care).

Thanks to Beauty Schooled for the initial tipoff!

My $14 Cheerleader: How I Went From Hating to Loving Lipstick in One Easy Week

When Eden did my makeup, she pointed out that by wearing eye makeup but no lip color, I was actually putting my face a wee bit out of balance. "The face is in thirds--you see up here [eyes and above], this here [the nose area] and down below. If you don't have everything in balance, instead of one feature jumping out it just looks sort of strange." (This explains why I've always found the '60s-style "nude lip" cool but bizarro.) "If you're wearing eye makeup and then put on a little bit of lip color, you balance your face and your eyes actually jump out more."

 Brigitte at left: Sultry as hell. Brigitte at right: Vaguely alien-like, and sultry as hell.

Reluctantly, I saw she was right. I never liked wearing lipstick; my nervous habit is to rub my lips (I tell myself I'm "exfoliating" but let's be real) and I fear that if I wear lip color I'll wind up looking like a 6-year-old in her mother's makeup cabinet. But even with the exaggerated lip that Eden did on me, I saw that they still didn't overshadow my eyes. (The false lashes may have had something to do with that.) And off to MAC it was. As a wearer of lipstick for exactly one week, I'm pleased to report my preliminary findings:

I became less conscious of how I looked. Rather: I became less conscious of whether I looked pretty. I don't wear a lot of makeup, but everything I do wear is designed specifically to hide "flaws": tinted moisturizer evens out my ruddy skin tone, mascara darkens the blonde tips of my lashes, and so on. I don't wear makeup that is designed to look like makeup—that is, nothing that announces itself as being artificial. I'm comfortable that way, but it also means that there's zero sense of play in my makeup routine. It's just hiding all the stuff that I think is wrong with my face--how could that be fun?

But with this pert little brick-red Cupid's-bow announcing my presence, pretty wasn't the question. Instead, there was a sense of self-definition going on: No, I don't just look like a slightly Photoshopped version of how I looked when I woke up this morning; I have unnaturally red lips, and you can't deny it. I'm less aware of whether I look pretty because instead of merely presenting my face—which, really, I have little control over—I'm presenting something closer to a look. Now, red lipstick is certainly a signal of beauty, so in one way it's further putting myself out there to be evaluated. But the juxtaposition of bright red lips with the rest of my relaxed look—loose college-girl hair, jeans, barely-there makeup—makes me feel like the lips are a sort of boundary, defining something about me and how I move in a public sphere. I'm bringing something to the table that's me, certainly...but not quite the me I and I alone wake up with in the morning.

It was boiling in the office on Day 2 of my lipstick experiment, so I was sweating buckets. But when I looked in the restroom mirror instead of seeing all that shine on my forehead, I saw this bright little pucker of a mouth wearing this color that still doesn't look at all natural to me. Instead, it looks: a tad obstinate, insistent, amused, amusing. A colleague entered the restroom as I was washing my hands, and in saying "Hello" to her I saw how the slight exaggeration the color gave my lips seemed to also exaggerate what I was saying, even if only to myself. And it was in seeing my lips in motion that I understood what it was that was intuitively making the lipstick experiment more rewarding than I'd anticipated: My words felt just a little bit brighter, edgier, more present. In seeing my highlighted lips move, I saw the words themselves as being highlighted. I never thought I'd be feeling this way about lipstick, but here it is: I felt like what I was saying had more of a right to be said. The vehicle that carries those words was painted with color, verve, punch: How could their cargo not absorb a bit of that essence?

Certainly I'm not the first to connect articulation with lip color: While pigmenting one's lips has been in fashion for a few millennia now, lipstick—with its swivel-up tube that can fit inside even the smallest handbag, making virtually any woman able to swipe her lips and announce that she's playing ball—only showed up in 1923, just three years after the passage of the 19th Amendment. Women matched their new political mouthpiece with exaggerating their actual mouths—besides the bob, is any motif of the newly liberated Jazz Age woman more significant than lipstick? When a woman is described as lippy or mouthy, it's not exactly a compliment, but it's not exactly an insult either. It's more that she's sassy. A mouthy broad? It's not me—but where can I take lessons?

I'd say I'm conflicted about how lipstick made me feel, but I'm not, not really. In no way do I think that my words are actually more important when I'm wearing lipstick, nor do I take any other woman more or less seriously based on whether or not she's painted her lips that day. But I can't deny how I felt: more confident, more present, more rightful. I feel conflicted about a lot of aspects of traditional feminine trappings: high heels (love 'em! hate 'em!), jewelry (holes in our ears? but I happily wear a pair daily), leg shaving (who has time? me, apparently). And that includes the very idea of makeup--I rarely leave the house without it, and part of me really hates that fact, because I feel like I'm telling myself every morning that I'm not quite good enough as-is. But I feel none of those conflicts with lipstick. Instead, I just enjoy how it feels.

"Playing Ugly" for Oscar Nods

With Oscar noms coming out, it's time to look at what role beauty plays in which women—rather, which women's roles—are selected for top honors. I find this take at the Allure blog interesting; it asks if in order to be given the legitimacy of an Oscar nod, an actress has to "temper her beauty."

It's a good question and one I'll look at later, but for now I'm interested in the upside-notion presented here: Annette Bening and Michelle Williams are singled out here for their "makeunders." And it's true that neither actress was at her most glamorous in their nominated roles—but does that mean their beauty was being tempered? I see it instead as us as the audience being so used to the glamour element that's the norm in films that when an actress plays a role that isn't a glamourpuss, we  legitimately use the shorthand "playing ugly" to describe what's actually a perfectly normal look, in which one's beauty is either a relative non-factor, or is assessed by different means than we'd assess a traditional starlet role. Michelle Williams has the same face she did in Synecdoche, New York, and though she wasn't singled out for her beauty in that role, neither was anyone commenting on her downplaying her beauty. She was wearing standard leading-lady makeup and hair there; ergo, no comment.

Charlize Theron in Monster certainly "tempered" her appearance, to the point of utter transformation, but that's in a different league. The actresses mentioned here weren't onscreen looking disheveled and unkempt as Theron as Aileen Wuornos did—because their characters lived in secure shelters, not at road stops, and could do the things most women do to look standard: comb their hair, apply moisturizer, etc. They looked like normal people—beautiful normal people, to be sure—but normal people. Maybe normal people's looks are tempered by some definitions, but isn't is that what we're used to seeing is so exaggerated that we notice it when it's not there?

Retail Therapy: My Maiden Voyage to MAC

I literally haven't bought makeup since 1999, until last week. I wear it every day, but one of the perks of working in women's magazines is the phenomenon known as the beauty sale, in which the products companies send to the beauty department for consideration are put in the conference room and sold for a dollar. It's a snarling, savage madhouse of magazine staffers—but one that means that if you work there you can walk away with dozens of products for a sliver of cash. I don't use tons of products but for the past 12 years I've been grabbing every brown eyeliner, black mascara, concealer, and fair-tone powder off the tables. And even though I haven't held a steady job at a ladies' mag for the past two years, my stockpile has held out nicely. (I do buy tinted SPF moisturizer, because I'm picky about that.)

Besides the obvious benefits, this also shapes how you perceive makeup. When a $95 face serum is priced the same as a Wet'n'Wild nail polish that would fetch $2 at Target, your evaluation of a product's worth shifts. You can only base your reaction to a product on how well it works (or how it looks on your shelf), not what investment you put into it in your hopes of achieving greater beauty. I don't care if the name on the package is Chanel or Maybelline; only rarely have I found something that worked so well I'd happily buy it at its retail value.

But last week was a hard week--cramps, back pain, general stress. And after my bombshell makeover I decided I wanted to try wearing lipstick on a daily basis for a while, just to see how I felt in it--but because I never wear lipstick, I don't own any except a singular beauty-sale leftover called Rum Raisin, which makes me resemble a kindly retiree, so off to the MAC store it was.

As a copy editor, I'm more annoyed by the missing period after the "C" than I should be.

What's that? you ask. MAC? I thought you said drugstore stuff was just fine! That's exactly it, though. It didn't cross my mind to go into Duane Reade and pick up some Cover Girl lip liner; I specifically wanted the experience of walking into a nicer store and spending nicer money on a nicer product, even though  the effect on my face would wind up being roughly the same. (By all accounts, though, MAC really is the leader in lip color longevity and rich pigmentation, and they're reasonably priced.) Wearing lipstick was about one thing; buying lipstick was about another.

Now, I've gone my whole life without buying lipstick. In fact, the only time I've procured lipstick (besides the aforementioned Rum Raisin) was when I uncharacteristically swiped a tube from the drugstore at age 15, which I've since learned was sort of a rite of passage for a lot of girls. The sticky-fingered Daphne Merkin, in her essay "The Shoplifter's High," writes:

Ours is a culture in which women, more than men, are dominated by the ruthlessly depersonalizing ethos of materialism... We are, in other words, the face—and clothes—we put on in the morning. ... Seen from this angle, shoplifting can be viewed as a means, however misbegotten, of managing the tension induced by being at the beck and call of the marketplace.... Once money is not the issue, how much is too much to spend on a new lipstick? And behind that valuation lies a more lift-threatening barter: How much am I worth?

Now, I didn't shoplift the MAC pencil, of course (though I don't think it's just the size and portability that makes lipstick a frequent target for shoplifters; I'm certain there's something specific to the purpose of cosmetics that's behind it--if anyone out there is a habitual makeup swiper, pipe up as I'd love to chat!). But what Merkin is saying here applies nonetheless: The actual price paid, the actual 1,415 pennies, wasn't the issue. My budget allows me to drop $14 when I'd like (though not habitually). It's more that by assigning MAC-value to my time, effort, and cash instead of CVS-value, I elevated myself--back pain, landlord tensions, cramps and all--to a higher worth.

I'm not sure where lies the line between treating myself to a small, colorful, pricier-than-it-needs-to-be pleasure to boost my mood, and plain old American retail therapy, foolishly spending on MAC in order to join the legion raspberry-lipped girls who pepper the halls of places I work. I'm pretty sure a $14 lip pencil isn't crossing that line. But I'm still questioning the whole idea, and I continue to be surprised by the pleasure I feel when I find the sleek pencil in my bag and spend a moment giving myself some lip service.

Annika Connor, Painter, New York City

Like fragments of an ongoing daydream, artist Annika Connor’s lush watercolors focus on the feminine aesthetic in beauty—lovers in an embrace, ballerinas in flight, even decadent interiors. Annika’s work also extends outside of the studio; she’s the founder of Active Ideas Productions, which promotes emerging artists through education, publications, and more. The impetus to talk with Annika was, of course, her intriguing work, which frequently captures beautiful women in intimate moments. But I was also particularly eager to learn more about her thoughts on personal beauty and presentation: Even in the fashion capital of the world, she stands out as exceptionally stylish (legendary New York Times style photographer Bill Cunningham agrees; he’s photographed her several times) and effortlessly glamorous without sacrificing any of her natural warmth. In her own words:

On Seeing and Being Seen
I got glasses a couple of years ago for distance, and when I did I was like, “What?! You’re supposed to see all that?” [Laughs] I couldn’t believe that I was supposed to see the branches on trees 50 feet away—that’s nuts! That’s way too much information! When I go to the ballet or the museum I'll put on my glasses; other than that, I don't tend to wear them. I kind of like seeing what's in front of me and letting the rest be a little blurry. So I don't really notice people on the street very much, or notice them noticing me—I get lost in this little bubble. [Laughs] But I don’t take the glasses off in order to not see people; it’s just a byproduct.

 Marilyn Multiplied

 
I started this around the time I got glasses—Marilyn Multiplied, and it's obviously playing on the Andy Warhol idea. This is from How to Marry a Millionaire, where Marilyn Monroe plays this bumbling sort of fool because she has to wear strong prescription glasses, but she doesn’t want to. She’s this great comic character—she’s doing all these silly things because she can't see what's going on. In this particular scene, she's gone into the bathroom, she's had her glasses on, she's fixed her hair, she's fixed her makeup, she's straightened her dress, and here she's just taken off her glasses and she's putting them back in her handbag. So this painting is depicting the moment when she's decided to literally not see the world in order to be seen by the world as beautiful. She's playing a comic character, but it struck me as poignant that her character was deliberately operating blind in order to be seen.  When I painted her reflections—they're all her, but they could almost be different women too.  Overall the painting is about the various multifaceted sides one has, all the many women that one woman is, depending on the angle or the light or their mood.

Any flat surface functions as something you gaze at—there's an immediate association with the mirror.  So a painting, although it doesn't actually reflect your image, often functions as a mirror, both to the viewer and the artist. As an artist, it's hard to keep yourself out of your paintings. My paintings almost always have a self-portrait element, even if I’m painting a man or a forest, so when I am painting women, it’s natural that I project a bit of myself into them. Of course my mixed emotions and feelings also go in there on some level, but my paintings take a really long time to make, and my emotions change, so it’s not necessarily as direct as: I’m angry, and then the woman looks angry.

La Goulue

On Allure
I titled this painting La Goulue, which was a great restaurant on the Upper East Side but which also translated means “the greedy one.”  I gave her this name because in this painting she’s so greedy for the viewer’s attention. I was inspired by a Stieglitz photo of a woman looking at the viewer, sort of hanging over a sofa wearing a come-hither look that seems to say, “Look at me.”

In my studio, I actually had to hang La Goulue behind my sofa because she was so demanding of your attention that if she was on the other wall it was interfering with the ability to see my other work.  I love that she’s really insisting having on the viewer’s eye on her, but no, I don’t think I need to make sexy paintings in order to get the viewer’s attention.  When I make sexy painting, it is because my work in part deals with depicting romance and daydreams, and sex and allure is a part of that conversation.

I have a lot of notions that are feminine and super-idealistic—some might say idealistic or naive.  However, there's so much in the world that’s unpleasant, unattractive, uninteresting, and aggressive—if I have the opportunity to literally make something that never existed before, like a painting, why shouldn't I create something that's inspiring and uplifting and beautiful, as opposed to something that’s jarring? I definitely feel that by seeing the world as beautiful, I end up painting a world that is somewhat beautiful.


On Self-Presentation
I want to give gifts to my viewer, and I suppose that kind of extends with my love of fashion and how I present myself. If I’ve put myself together in the best possible way that is the most appropriate for the situation, it makes me feel confident. So for example, if I meet with my lawyers, I’ll put on a great suit, I’ll pull my hair back, I’ll look all...Corporate Annika. Doing this sort of attire makes me feel competent and I’ll ask questions about [faux-deep voice] intellectual property law.

Sometimes there's a theatrical element to what I’m wearing, a bit like costuming. Presentation is a big part of pulling together a look. When you put a frame on a painting, it’s the final touch. And a pretty dress without any accessories or makeup—something feels missing. Jewelry, makeup, hair—it's how you frame the figure. It's similar to how you paint a painting.

During the day I don’t wear much makeup, just the basics to make me look like I don't have dark circles under my eyes. But if I’m getting dressed up for an event, I enjoy doing something dramatic. That's one of the best things about being a woman—we can make ourselves look way more beautiful. I sometimes feel bad for men. They don't get to wear cover-up! That must suck! They just have to look how they look.

At the Les Liaisons Dangereuses: The Young Fellows Ball; photo, Yina Lou

As a woman, when you know you're looking good, you feel confident. Your day is better, you accomplish more, you meet more people, because you have that extra edge. Sometimes when I'm feeling blue, I'll put on an outrageous outfit and go to Whole Foods and grocery shop. The great thing about Whole Foods at Columbus Circle is that everybody goes there. You have no idea if somebody's just stopping and getting some food on the way to a dinner party, so I can totally be in a ball gown at Whole Foods if I feel like it!

So when I am sad I'll put on an outrageous hat or I’ll wear a super-colorful outfit, so people will smile at me. And maybe it's a bit because they’re laughing, but in the end when you’re walking down the street and people are smiling at you, you start to feel better, even if you had been sad.

 Left: At the Performa Red Party; House of Diehl created the umbrella bustle on-site; photo, Yina Lou.

Right: At the Veuve Cliquot Polo Classic.

On Actions and Reactions of Others
Obviously I notice when a guy catcalls or something like that—but I learned while living in Barcelona that that is a compliment.  Of course, you can get offended by it from a feminist perspective, but essentially they're paying you a compliment. There's certain ones I don’t like, but for the most part when I'm walking down the street and some guy is like, "Ooh, looking good!” it makes me smile. Maybe I shouldn't, but—I mean, "Ooh, looking good!" [Laughs]

I don't feel I get belittled for being feminine, because I'm embracing it. My hair is blond and I’m wearing a sequined dress—if the first guy I'm speaking with doesn't immediately take me seriously and think I'm, like, this crazy intellect, that's totally okay! When that person eventually hears my ideas, my smarts will show themselves.

Actually, it's sort of good when people underestimate me, because then it's easy to impress them. [Laughs] And they do—I tend to get underestimated. But when they see my work, the painting speaks for itself.

Held back by beauty? Honestly, I don't really see myself as a beautiful woman. I see myself as, you know, moderately attractive. I'm okay, but I’m not any kind of supermodel. So maybe if you're super-super good-looking, you get pigeonholed by that. But I'm not good-looking enough to be held back because of things like that. [Laughs]


On Fascination
Beauty encourages projection because it engages with fascination: Something that's really beautiful fascinates you. You want to keep looking at it, whether that’s sunshine through yellowing leaves in Central Park on a lovely Sunday, or a woman simply strolling by. 

Because beauty is evocative, you relate what you're seeing with what you're remembering. When you’re looking at a beautiful landscape, you're enjoying the transcendental moment, but you’re also remembering, say a hike you took with your mother some other time. So when you're seeing a beautiful painting and it reminds you of an experience you had, or someone you knew. A beautiful woman can remind you of someone you know, or almost someone you can imagine you want to be.

 Midnight Express

But I also think there is a flipside to the beautiful. In order for something to be truly beautiful, there has to be fragility, or perhaps a potential of destruction. Everybody says beauty is fleeting—it this sense that beauty won't last forever which is part of why it its hypnotizing.

I also think people project with beauty because there's a longing that comes with the beautiful—a longing to possess, a longing to be there, a longing to become, depending on what the subject is. That longing can contribute to that darker side of the beautiful.  And that darker side can intoxicate, intrigue, and destroy.

 Rivera Remembered

All Made Up: Thoughts on Being a Bombshell for a Day

At the end of my interview with makeup artist Eden DiBianco, she said, “Tell you what: Why don’t you come over to my place tomorrow and I’ll do you up? It’s one thing to talk about people communicating what they really want to look like, and it’s another to experience it yourself.” In the name of research (not vanity, my kittens, never that!), I accepted her gracious offer. 

Before and after: Dispatch from inside the Pussycat Dollhouse.

Thoughts on being a bombshell for a day:

1) It takes a lot to look this way. 

It took an hour and a half for me to go from Autumn to Bombshell. Eden used no fewer than 12 products on me, probably more. She used some tools I own at home and yielded vastly different results than I do—I haven’t tried applying false lashes for years, because I thought they made me look like a knockoff Kewpie doll, but you really wouldn’t have known from Eden’s application that I was wearing them.  

So the vixen look takes a lot of time, money (I should note that the products were a mix of affordable drugstore stuff and more high-end things—”Whatever works,” Eden shrugged), and skill: None of which I have or am willing to invest. Not to mention that while I didn’t have to touch up the makeup (I got a little shiny but all the color stayed in place for 12 hours), I was also hyperconscious of how I was eating so as to keep on my lip color, of not touching my face, of not wearing a hat in the frigid winter so as not to muss the curls. Looking this way ain’t easy, kids. 

2) Yet being a bombshell takes nothing at all. 

While the time, effort, and skill that go into creating the look are scarce, the effect is inevitable once you’ve got the basic structure in place. When I look at the photos of myself that my friend Lisa took that night, I see that what makes me look “good” at first glance isn’t the intricacies that also make it a skilled makeup job on Eden’s part, nor is it my God-given features; it’s the signals of beauty that do the trick—and a trick it is.

Bombs away, boys!: My sleight-of-hand.

You see a woman with long wavy hair in a red dress. She is wearing bright lipstick and is in a pose that is intended not for anything practical but only to be observed. These elements are what creates the bombshell, not what I bring to the table. I say this not to put myself down but to highlight the power of the signals, which transcend the individual. As Sarah, my first interviewee, says, “I can dress a certain way, put on makeup, style my hair, and make a stir when I walk into a room. But it feels like a sleight of hand. Where I succeed, the effect is more than the sum of its parts only in other people's heads. The imagination fills in the gaps.”

3) I am incredibly uncomfortable trying to look beautiful. 

A few days before the makeover, I interviewed photographer Sophie Elgort, who said the difference between people who are photogenic and people who aren’t isn’t so much genetic gifts as it is comfort in front of the camera. I recognized myself immediately: As a rule, I look okay-to-great in candid shots, and okay-to-horrendous in posed ones. And it’s because I’m trying so damned hard to look pretty when I know I’m being captured. I pout my lips, suck in my cheeks, freeze my eyes—all this without realizing I’m doing it. It’s reflex. And it’s not just in photos: The minute I recognize that I am supposed to be playing the role of someone beautiful (a slow-mo moment on a date, knowing that I’m being eyed by someone across the room), my face involuntarily contorts into this weird position that isn’t me. The irony, of course, is that it eradicates whatever beauty I might have at any given moment. As Sophie said, “How can you expect to look like your best self if you’re putting on a ridiculous face?”

So then there I was, sporting false lashes, heavy black eyeliner, bright red overdrawn lips, and a cascade of curls. I was telegraphing trying to look beautiful more heavily than I have since senior prom. It was terrifying. My normal look is low-key enough that if somebody happens to single me out as beautiful—well, whoopsie here! My, I wasn’t trying, I was just sitting here picking dandelions and choosing a nonfat latte flavor, and gosh that’s so nice of you! 

When it looks like I’m not trying to be pretty, I can act as though it’s all one big accident somehow, a happy bit of serendip that you, sir, found me attractive in this cosmic wormhole of a moment. But when you’re sending out these blaring signals of beauty—red lips! exaggerated eyes! was that hair in Gilda?—you are blatantly asking for attention, even if only of the visual sort. You are making a request, and that request can be refused. I tend to give a lot of eye contact on the street, but I found it very difficult to look strangers in the eye when I was so dolled up, because I didn’t want to see how they would respond to my implicit question. I didn’t want an enthusiastic, leering “yes,” I didn’t want the contemptuous rejection of a “no,” and I sure as hell didn’t want the “what? who??” of the invisible—even though normally I’ll default to that, my muted self-presentation giving the world permission to overlook me with little protest.

In my day as a bombshell, I gained an admiration for those women who take the hard sell, who dare us all to look at her and find her beautiful, or not, or to think she’s gaudy, or to make assumptions about her self-esteem. I tend to think I’m in control of my appearance by being so low-key—I believe that nobody will look at me and assume anything about me. That’s naive: By appearing to be a blank slate I allow the world to project quite a bit onto me, actually—and nobody’s a blank slate anyway. (The average person would probably guess at first glance I’m middle-class, and a professional in a relaxed job environment, and not a native New Yorker, and that I will happily tell you whether you’re on the right train to get to Times Square, and they’d be right.) 

The siren, the bombshell, the woman with a shade too much lipstick: She is telling you to think she’s a sight, that she is absolutely worth your attention, and that she is doing her damndest to tell you what she wants you to think of her. Perhaps I’m romanticizing, and I’m sure that these lipsticked creatures have reasons as varied as my little-makeup sisters do for our minimalist approach. And regardless, I'm going to stick with my soft-sell approach—less effort, more versatility, more in line with my personality. Still: Being a bombshell takes guts, and right now, tonight, back in my disheveled French twist and barely-there mascara, I salute them all.

Chrissie Eden DiBianco, 29, Makeup Artist and Hairstylist

Chrissie Eden DiBianco specializes in bridal hair and makeup; she also does fashion and editorial work. “I was cleaning out my filing system, and I found an unsent application to the Aveda Institute that I filled out when I was 17,” she says. “I always wanted to do this for a living.” The epitome of the sassy, straight-up New Yorker—she grew up on the Lower East Side as a first-generation American—I asked to interview her not only because of her profession but because of her forthright manner. We talked about looking at your face objectively, having the courage to communicate your fantasy look (indeed, the day after our interview she turned me into a bombshell), and the popularity of airbrush makeup. In her own words:


On Knowing Your Face
I started working in bars and clubs when I was 15, and I met a lot of interesting sculptors, photographers, all kinds of people. Everybody wanted to draw or sculpt me. That’s how I started—I was figure modeling, then tattoo and pinup modeling, and they never had any budget for hair and makeup, so I had to do my own. These artists were like, “Oh, you have such an interesting bone structure, very architectural.” I don’t think this face is interesting at all! It’s the one I wake up with every single morning—who cares? But it taught me to really look at my face and therefore look at other people’s faces—not just in terms of what’s good-looking, but in terms of what’s interesting.

Photo: Don Sun, Moss Photography

You look at faces differently when you’re so close to them. You get people who think they’re plain because they’re doing something blah with their look, but they’re not really looking at themselves. Women are trained to think we spend too much time looking at ourselves, that it makes us vain or stupid. But it teaches you a lot about yourself when you get to know your own face. Women aren’t looking at themselves, not objectively. We spend a lot of times looking at ourselves critically, which isn’t the same thing.

My clients usually have an idea of what they want to look like, but when people think about the idealized version of themselves, they still don’t actually see themselves. It’s still somebody else they want to look like. You can’t get up in the morning and say, “Maybe today I’ll look like Penelope Cruz.” You can put a stunning face of makeup on someone and if they look in the mirror and it’s not what they thought it would be—if they still don’t feel that “wow,” that connection, that awe at discovering themselves—it doesn’t really matter. I’m the expert in the sense that I have the technical skill to do the manual work, but you’re the only expert on your own face. And at the end of the day, you get one face for life.


On Comfort Zones
I had one bride who’s a lawyer; she spends all her time working or with her daughter. She said to me, “I’m really nervous about this. My time goes to my work and my daughter—I don’t really wear makeup. It’s not me.” I said, “If it’s not you, why are you wearing it on your wedding day?” She said, “Well, I have to.” I said, “It’s your wedding—you don’t have to do anything. If you want to get married, all you have to do is show up. So don’t come in here feeling judged and saying you don’t know what you want to look like. You know what you want to look like! Don’t be afraid to tell me.” So we did the trial, something very basic because I didn’t want to scare her. Bridal makeup can be scary for someone who doesn’t wear a lot of makeup; it looks soft and natural in pictures, but you have to put on a lot of friggin’ makeup to get it that way! A lot. I get a lot of, “Do I need this much blush? My eyes look so dark!” People are afraid of looking overdone and trashy, or like they’re trying too hard—everyone wants to look effortless.

So this lawyer was a little resistant at first, but she loved it. She went to pick up her dress later and still had her makeup on—and she didn’t like the dress anymore. She had bought the simpler of two dresses, and when she tried it on with the makeup she said that she felt like she was hiding in her dress. So she switched it out, got the more elaborate dress. That was, like, the crowning achievement of my career! She sent me a picture and said, “I want you to know that you changed this for me. I hadn’t felt like I was allowed to wear makeup.”

I did that low-key look for her trial, but on the day of the wedding I said, “Okay, you got the fancier dress—we’re going to kick it up a notch.” She was ready for it then. And now she does her hair a bit funkier, she wears a little more makeup. She got that confidence from being told that she could do whatever she wanted and that she had to feel good about whatever choice she made. It’s like being a shrink, it really is. And it’s the only non-medical profession where you’re licensed to touch the public.


On Flawlessness
Celebs get airbrush makeup, and now it’s available on the general market, so a lot of brides want it. And it looks flawless, but you know what else looks flawless? A more enhanced version of you, one that isn’t being plastered onto your real face. You know those cheap airbrush T-shirts on Coney Island? That’s going on your face. You can’t adjust it once it’s dry, and because it’s not blendable you get these flat faces sometimes. Skin is a combination of tones, especially African-American skin—it’s not just brown, it’s yellow and red and sometimes a warm orangey-tan color, and you can’t get that depth with airbrush. Airbrush is a good option for some people, but it’s not the best option for everyone. And if it’s not right for everybody, why do it at all?

I’m resistant to airbrush makeup because my perspective on beauty is so much more about revealing than about concealing. I just got married myself. I get that you want to be beautiful—you’re in these photos you’ll have forever and you’re paying a lot of money for them. But at the same time, you can’t erase your entire face and start from scratch. So I ask clients a lot of leading questions, like, “What do you worry will be the worst thing about your face on your wedding day?” People tell me right off the bat; they start touching their face. They become very frank, saying stuff you generally wouldn’t say to someone, even if you talk about your insecurities with your friends. There’s a balance between planning how we’ll work with that—how we can minimize whatever it is—and getting them to figure out what it is that’s really bothering them so much. Because no matter what you do with your hair and makeup—you can look amazing, and you might even look like a different person if you do enough—if you’re looking for those flaws, you’ll find them.


On Playing Ball
There’s a balancing act between doing things on your terms and being comfortable with what you do on society’s terms. You’re going to feel that pressure—especially as a woman—to appear sympathetic. People will give you attention, and they’ll sympathize with you more if you look like this pretty, sweet thing. I walk into my butcher and the little old Italian butchers fall all over me. Who doesn’t love a pretty, well-put-together girl? So, yeah, I’m putting on my face before I leave the house.

On the job, you can say ideologically, “It shouldn’t matter what I look like; I’m good at what I do.” But people make value judgments based on your appearance—not just your face and how you dress, but the way you shake hands, how you make eye contact. Beauty is a part of that overall picture. I mean, I hate business attire, can’t stand it—what is that, a twinset? But when I was in that world, I played ball.

At the same time, when I was working in corporate America, I sat in a cubicle all day. If I left for lunch it was miraculous. But I suffer from migraines, so sometimes I’d just put on my shades and go to work—and when I showed up to work with no makeup on, people thought there was something seriously wrong. Because you’re stepping outside that protocol where everybody else is playing ball. I play ball in certain ways because it does help me along, but when I feel like hell—when I’m brushing my teeth in the dark because of my migraine—you’d better believe I don’t care if someone notices I’m not wearing blush! You can use beauty to your advantage but you don’t have to define yourself by the standards you adhere to in order to play ball—it’s about more than just looking the right way for other people; it’s about taking care of yourself and maximizing your potential for impact so that you’re happy.

Sophie Elgort, New York City, Photographer

Sophie Elgort’s client list reads like a New York City fashion girl’s dream: Bloomingdale’s, Theory/Helmut Lang, Alice + Olivia, Women’s Wear Daily—and the list goes on. Her backstage and front-of-house work for lead designers at New York Fashion Week has helped her develop her personal style, which matches her low-key but composed voice. We chatted about what makes someone photogenic, the importance of letting the individual shine through, and why you’ll probably be wearing sparkly nail polish soon enough. In her own words:

On Being Photogenic
If somebody’s not comfortable—in person or in a photo—it’s pretty obvious. It’s a little awkward, and the feeling that’s going to come off in the photo is that this person is not comfortable with themselves, and I don’t think that’s ever an attractive quality.

Certain people are obviously more photogenic than others, and that helps me get a nice photo faster. I’ll be able to get 10 great shots of her in 10 minutes, whereas somebody else I might only be able to get one great shot in an hour. But the difference between somebody who’s photogenic and somebody who’s not is that people who aren’t photogenic are sometimes nervous in front of a camera. They make weird twitches, or they’ll sort of crane their neck or purse their lips or do something that’s obviously not them, because they’re nervous. A lot of times I’ll see photos and think, “Why is that person doing that? In person she never does that!” If you keep shooting, you can get them more into their natural element and you can get a good photo from people who say, “Oh, I’m not photogenic.” You’re not unphotogenic; it’s that you’re usually posing, putting on this ridiculous face that’s not you. How can you expect to look like your best self in a photo if you’re putting on a ridiculous face?

Certain people are always changing their expression, or they gesticulate a lot, and those people are hard to get a good photo of sometimes. But that doesn’t mean that not in a photo, they’re not stunning—they can be extremely charismatic and beautiful. That’s why I think video is interesting; it’s sort of like a photo but it has more movement to it, so you have more of a chance to see more sides of a person. I definitely think charisma can show in a photograph as well. But in a video, you wouldn’t have somebody just sitting there posed, and I think it should be the same thing for a photo. And there’s no way you can show your charisma if you’re not acting like yourself.
 

For vintage, custom, and DIY boutique ALIOMI.

This is a stylist and a friend of mine—she’s not a model. And this is what I mean in terms of capturing someone in the moment, actually showing their personality. Her boyfriend has asked me for that photo of her; he’s like, “I love this photo of her, she looks amazing.” And that’s because her personality is shining through; she wasn’t posed, she wasn’t pretending to laugh.


On Self-Portraiture
I started doing self-portraits recently—it’s an interesting project, and I think it would benefit a lot of people to do try it, if they have a camera with a self-timer. Because then they can start to realize what they’re not comfortable with when looking at the camera. Like, what am I doing that looks weird to me? What are my insecurities that are coming through in that photograph?

The first batch that I did, I was like, I look self-conscious in all of these photos. I was doing all these things that weren’t myself; I was putting my body in these weird positions. I was like, What? These are so not me! So I redid them—I went back in front of the camera, found an angle that made me look the best. I grew up in front of the camera—my dad’s a photographer—so I never thought twice about being in photos until I tried taking them of myself. It was just the tripod and camera aimed at me, but nobody was behind the camera so nobody was talking to me. I was really awkward because I was waiting for the timer to go off! It’s like if you’re in a room with someone and you’re sitting there and they’re staring at you and not talking, you’re going to fidget and look ridiculous. So my self-portraits came out awkward in the beginning because there’s no one on the other end to naturalize the process. I tried to do silly poses—I couldn’t just do natural, beautiful photographs straight-on without making funny faces, because I felt comfortable doing that even though I was by myself in my apartment. 

On Being Put-Together

If you can figure out your own unique style and how to put yourself together accordingly, it doesn’t matter how conventionally beautiful you are. I spent six months in Argentina, and before I went everyone told me, “The women in Argentina are so beautiful—they’re so gorgeous, they’re more gorgeous than any women anywhere.” And I went and was like...welllll, they’re really pretty, but just as pretty as a lot of other people. Then some of my guy friends who’d been saying this came to meet me at the end of my time there. I said, “I don’t really see that they’re that much more beautiful than other women of the world—what do you mean?” And they’d point out individual women, and I realized it was because they were totally put-together, flawlessly, each in her own way. Somebody who was very natural would have just black jeans, boots, t-shirt, perfectly straight hair, and a manicure. Somebody who was very done-up would have this dress and heels and styled hair—there wasn’t anybody who looked like she didn’t have her own sense of style. Each woman looked how she wanted to look. So my guy friends were all, “Most beautiful women in the world!” and I’m just like, “They just take a little extra time putting themselves together.” Or maybe they don’t take a little extra time but they know what they like and what they want to look like, so it’s easy for them.


On Reality and Lack Thereof
I was shot years ago for Glamour, a mother-daughter story. We had amazing hair and makeup people—they brought in the best. They put fake eyelashes on me, but it looked really beautiful and natural—it wasn’t supposed to be overdone. It was funny, the time they spent actually prepping me to look natural. I went out that night after the shoot and left the makeup on and hair as it had been done, and a friend of mine saw me and was like, “Oh my God, I’ve never seen you look so amazing.” I was sort of like, “Yay!” But in my head I was like, It’s because I was shot for Glamour and they did me up—of course I look better than ever! I had the best professionals in the world doing me up! People see this “norm” of models in magazines, and they’re like, “Wow, that model’s so beautiful.” And yes, she is. But you also have to realize that not only is it her job to be beautiful and perfect and amazing in photos, but that’s not what she’d look like if she were photographed before she was done up. It was interesting to have it done myself—there’s no way I could look like that all the time. Who has the time?
 

Backstage at the New York Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2011 Alexander Berardi show.

The images you see in an editorial are supposed to be unrealistic. By the time you see the model on the page, she’s become a work of art, she’s unreal—people have worked on her as a surface. It’s like a painting. If you look at pictures of actresses who are on a lot of the covers and in the stories—not all actresses are tall, or model-skinny, or whatever. But I think it’s a response to criticisms about unrealistic images, because while they’re not normal people, they’re not working as a model. If you went to a black tie dinner and had the glamour hair and makeup, you’re also going to look amazing that night. But it’s a little different between actresses and models—actresses have to look like that all the time, they have to uphold their image. Whereas models, they don’t have to look like that when they’re not modeling. A model can be off-duty—they’re obviously still beautiful, but they’re not going to look like they do in front of a camera—they'll probably have their own sense of style and will be way less done up. Whereas I feel like with actresses, they’re so often done up even in their everyday life. And when I see normal people who say, “I need to be a size 0,” I’m like, “Really? Who’s paying you the money to be a size 0?”  

On Working With Models
I feel very short, and I’m not short—I’m 5’6”! And I also start to think of myself as plain. Someone who’s assisting me might take a backstage shot, and I’m like, “Don’t photograph me!” You start to feel a sort of warped perception, that the models are the ones who are supposed to be beautiful, and I’m just behind the scenes. You start to feel like a non-entity, like, I don’t exist as a woman right now. But then you go back to your normal life and go out at night with your girlfriends and you’re like, “Oh, we all look so pretty!”—someone will take a photo of you, and those are the photos that go on Facebook, and you’re a normal person again. Whereas at a shoot you’re more worried about how the model looks, like—You drank last night, I can tell, you’re all puffy.

I would probably doubt myself more in a regular situation than on a photo shoot, around normal people. Not that I usually do—I don’t have a complex about that. But if you’re out at a restaurant and you see this stunning “normal” girl who’s 5’4” and really well-dressed, you’re like, Oh my God, she looks amazing! I’ve gotta step it up! She’s, like, a banker—she’s not being paid to look great, but she looks great. Then I just have to think about what I’m insecure about: Do I want to make a change? A lot of time for me it’ll be a weight thing—if I’m upset with my body image I want to figure out what I would rather have my body image be, and then maybe I’ll go to the gym or make a conscious effort to eat healthier for a few weeks. I think of it pretty practically rather than getting upset about it; I’ll think of a reasonable plan. Faces are things you can’t really change. And faces look different, so you’re not going to be like, “Oh, that girl’s face is so much prettier than my face.” Because it doesn’t make sense. You could be like, “Oh, she has such nice lips,” but if those lips were on my face I’d look really weird!
 

On Trends
Sometimes I’ll wear something and my friends will be like [wince] “Ew!” I’m like, “Trust me, they were just on all the runways—you'll probably like them in six months once all the new collections and trends hit the stores!" I’ll see them months later and they’ll be wearing that—I’ll point it out and they’ll say, “No, I never said that!” They actually have forgotten. Sparkly nail polish is coming back; for a while it was all matte. I said to my friend the other day, “You’re going to like it in a few months.” She said, “I hate it! And I don’t look at fashion like that.” I’m like, “Look, you do.” You might not think that you do, but even if you don’t read fashion magazines, you see it in Us magazine or on the street, and sooner or later you’re going to think, “Oh, she looks so pretty—what nail polish is she wearing?” Fashion has that underlying trend-setting tone that’s almost subconscious. It’s like the first time you hear a song, maybe you don’t love it. But then you hear it again and again and soon you’re like, “Wow, I love this song!” People don’t realize that that’s somehow how they’re forming their perception of beauty—but we are.

Anne Hathaway: "I'm Not Very Pretty"

Anne Hathaway thinks she has weird features. And, you know, she’s kind of right. Not that I’m critiquing her looks, but she has large eyes with wide brows and generous lips. Without putting her features on a grid or something I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing she falls pretty high on the features-to-face-space ratio.

But what I take from this is not that Anne Hathaway is a googly-eyed freak any more than that she’s a doe-eyed beauty. It’s a case of two things: 1) Someone not valuing in themselves what other people single them out for, and 2) the beauty standards for actresses being different than the rest of the population.

The latter gets attention on an evaluative scale: Oh, these professional beauties, we see them everywhere and it’s hard to live up to it. (Well, sure, but there are lots of actresses who are actually not so much beautiful as they are symmetrical and slender, which, when toyed with by a small army of makeup artists and hairstylists, is handily transformed into what we think of as beauty. My interview with Sarah gets into this, in the last section.) But on a different level: Large features invoke a child-like vibe, and on an adult woman that can communicate a lot of what we associate with femininity. As an audience, we simply see Anne Hathaway’s face and maybe feel protective, or sympathetic, more so than we might with performers with subtler features. Is it any surprise that the fine-featured January Jones was cast as a largely unsympathetic character on Mad Men? We’re supposed to find her beautiful but aren’t necessarily supposed to like her.

In a world of shifting astrology, it's good to know that face reading remains reliable.

I don’t believe in physiognomy (though I’ve been unsuccessfully trying to find a practicing phrenologist, out of sheer curiosity) but we are prone to associating certain physical traits with certain personality traits, or at least recognizing that to some degree you’re “supposed” to. (When was the last time you read  a book and the protagonist instead of the villain was described as thin-lipped?) And casting agents are fantastic at this. Certainly delicate-featured actresses aren’t left scaring up work, but a good look at Hollywood will show a lot of people who might look a bit weird on the street because of their face-to-feature proportion. (This is in addition to the lollipop-head phenomenon, which somehow made news in 2005 with the likes of Lindsay Lohan and Nicole Richie. Their exaggerated thinness was what was “newsworthy” at the time but performers frequently have somewhat large heads—they telegraph better both onstage and on film.)

But Hathaway follows up her statement about her “weird features” with this: “I’m not very pretty.” And this is such a weird paradox. The very thing that makes her watchable, the very thing that announces her beauty to her audience, is what she winds up being self-conscious of. Is that true for all of us?

Jennifer Miller, 35, Single Mom/Superhero

Jen and I became friends in the gifted and talented class freshman year of high school. I was the new girl, and entering a new gifted class meant reconfiguring my assumptions of what “smart girls” were. I eyed Jen with curiosity: With her wavy auburn hair, enormous green eyes, and killer curves, she defied my expectations of what my smart-girl cohorts should be. She rode horses, went out with older boys who could drive, and had a sharp, sassy sense of humor that carried a hint of the “bad girl,” even though she was just as beholden to the rules as I was.

At the time, I looked at Jen and saw the impossible: She was smart and beautiful, something that seemed beyond my reach, available only to students of, say, Sweet Valley High. Yet here she was, in my midst, first in the classroom, then in each other’s homes for slumber parties, later in one another’s cars as we drove around suburban Portland looking for just enough trouble to keep us feeling saucy. My envy of her never overtook our friendship, but for me it was a part of our connection, me always looking toward her for guidance on glamour, beauty, and womanhood. (She gave me my first-ever sex tip when we were seniors, which involved a soft-serve ice cream cone.) My mind permitted me to view her as both smart and beautiful, even as I felt that having both was somehow forbidden to me. The first time someone asked us if we were sisters, I was thrilled—it was one of the moments that allowed me to see that maybe part of what I envied in her, I actually possessed but was unable to see. I never had her Mae West-tinged attitude (or the mile-long eyelashes to match), but having her as a role model through the tricky waters of gifted girldom did me pretty well. Sixteen years after high school graduation, we chatted about beauty, brains, and the intersection between the two. 

Jen and daughter Annika.

On Feeling Beautiful
In all honesty, it’s been a long time since I truly felt beautiful. If pressed, I’d say I felt "sassy" a couple of weeks ago [see picture below], but I don’t know that I’ve felt really beautiful in years. Which I’m sure stems from my inability to like myself without some kind of male approval, but I’m working on that! Sadly, I think at least 80% of how I feel about my appearance comes from male approval. I seem to need a lot more in the way of compliments and approval than most people. I don’t know if that stems from it not happening in my childhood, or from middle/high school when I felt like a raging geek. It makes it hard in relationships, because I feel like if I don’t get compliments, then he doesn’t find me attractive anymore, even if that’s not the case. Caused more than one argument…

And the first time I felt beautiful? My first wedding. I think a big part of it was that I was in love, and marrying a man that I thought was way out of my league. Hindsight, I know… It was amazing to feel absolutely beautiful. I think it wouldn’t have mattered if my hair was a wreck and my makeup didn’t work—I felt like I was floating.

On Hearing “You’re Beautiful”
I blush. Like a total dork. And I make some kind of sarcastic comment about getting eyes checked. The only time it differs is when it’s my daughter telling me, and then I know she’s wanting something! My parents’ attitude toward beauty was pretty much to ignore it. Good hygiene, yes. Compliments for no reason? Oh, hell no!

A very sweet, older gentleman, in his 80s, maybe, stopped me at the grocery store one day when I was totally grubby—jeans, hoodie, hat—and told me I had beautiful eyes. I almost cried, and I’ve held onto it for a long time. The first time someone told me I remember someone telling me I was beautiful, it was senior year, and I’m pretty sure the guy said it so that I would write his English paper for him. But I do remember it gave me butterflies and warm fuzzies.

On Pretty vs. Smart
I was the “chubby, oversmart, drama geek.” I guess I still think of myself that way. I don’t know that I find beauty to be an asset. In my life, I’ve gotten a hell of a lot farther on my brains and perseverance than on my looks. I almost exploited my looks for personal gain once—I auditioned to be a stripper. I think I auditioned to know whether I was “good enough,” though I don’t think it would have meant anything to me at that point in life but being able to pay the bills. I didn’t take the job.

The idea that girls could be pretty or smart but not both? I know I absorbed that message. I was smart! I think it affected my attitude by making me try to hide my brains so that maybe people would think I was beautiful. I always tried hard in classes, but I’d also try to hide grades on papers, keep my head down so the teachers didn’t feel the need to praise me out loud, that kind of thing. I’m not sure how I got rid of that idea, but I do know that now I’m very proud of being smarter than the average bear… I try to get it through to my daughter that it’s cool to be smart. She’s in second grade, and loves school—goes to the third-grade classroom for math and the fourth-grade classroom for reading/writing. She has the advantage of also being tall, thin, and athletic to go along with her brains. She’ll be all-around awesome.

On The Most Beautiful Person in the World
My daughter, Annika, is naturally the most beautiful person I’ve ever laid eyes on. She has all the "physical" beauties that society wants—and I need another shotgun or two before she starts dating!—with long legs, super-fast metabolism, long hair, sparkly eyes. But more importantly, she has a generous spirit, does not judge anyone, and has never met a person that she hasn’t said many fabulous things about. I tell her she’s beautiful every day. I never heard compliments—unless it regarded grades—from my parents. I want the polar opposite for my daughter. I want her to never for a second doubt how much I love her, or how incredibly beautiful, smart, charming, and talented she is. And it’s my job to make sure she knows.

On the Beauty Ritual
I think 90% of me feeling beautiful comes from prep. If I take a hot bubble bath—with wine, please!—use body butter, straighten my hair, put on makeup and use perfume, I feel a hell of a lot prettier than when I just shower, do the bare minimum, and use deodorant. But in reality, I look pretty much the same both ways. I never have time for myself—it’s really rare that I can even find half an hour to devote to a book or an episode of Glee without interruption. I’m not sure what it is about the ritual that works, unless it’s just that I can lock the door and ignore everyone else and have a little me time.

On Confidence
I think I’ve actually gotten more attractive in my 30s. I have a bit more confidence, and I know who I am and what I want. Confidence goes a long way toward projecting a good self-image. An average/plain woman can come across as gorgeous if she has confidence. When I’m in a good/sassy/confident mood, I feel better about me—and I feel more attractive. I wish I knew how to make it happen more often…

One thing I’ve learned since high school is that the only person whose opinion of me really matters is me. If I’m happy with me, and proud of me, and sure of me, whatever anyone else thinks is nothing but window dressing. That doesn’t mean that I don’t want to be complimented, or that I won’t solicit opinions from whomever I’m with as to how they prefer my hair, clothes, etc. But in the end, it all boils down to being able to answer “Would you be proud to have you as a friend/mother/daughter/sister?” with a resounding YES.

Jessica Obrist/Jo Jo Stiletto, Burlesque Dancer/Roller Derby Queen, Seattle

I first met Jessica Obrist in 1997, when we were both involved in theater and magazine journalism at our university. But I first met Jo Jo Stiletto—her alter ego—in 2005, when I saw her gender-bending burlesque act involving a auto-work chassis, coveralls, and, of course, pasties. Jo Jo/Jessica performs and leads burlesque workshops in Seattle, and also has a heavy presence in the Rat City Rollergirls team, winning 2008 Alumni of the Year for her fairy-godmother-like dedication. She talked with me about beauty personae, self-exposure, the allure of athleticism, and drag-queen rash. In her own words:

 
On Having a Persona                        
If you gave me two words to choose from—beauty or glamour—I’d choose glamour. Beautiful, pretty…maybe I’m like—that’d be boring. Give me moxie, give me glamour. Would I describe myself as beautiful? Probably not. Fabulous? Yes. I consider myself a faux queen—like a drag queen, but, I mean, I’m a woman: taking this persona and making not even a real woman, but this crazy, over-the-top woman. I like the heightened reality of burlesque, and part of me thinks there’s nothing wrong with that heightened reality—this woman with no imperfections, with 10 pairs of pantyhose on. It’s fascinating to me. There’s the everyday Jessica who wears what I call my uniform: leggings, American Apparel skirt, T-shirt, sweatshirt. Jessica hates glitter. But this other person, Jo Jo, is the glitteriest person anyone seems to know! I want to wear wigs, wear the glitter and the fabulous makeup. It’s me putting on my clown face. And I kind of like to put on my clown face.

It’s for fun, this sort of exaggerated beauty, this fake beauty. It’s not real. I don’t have to do this to feel better about myself, and sometimes I do it in unflattering ways too—really gross-looking eye makeup, the "I cried myself to sleep" look, for dramatic effect. Why not? In some ways I don’t want to attract the male gaze. Maybe I want to be the center of attention, but it’s not about being the beautiful center of attention. It’s about—Oh, look at that wig, where did she get those shoes, that’s ridiculous! It’s the idea of making art. Being myself is expressing myself in these ways, and it’s okay to express yourself by wearing fake eyelashes and way too much glitter.

Right now I have drag rash, this rash on my forehead from a wig. The first time I experienced drag rash, I wasn’t on a show; I was just on this party bus as a fundraiser for an LGBT nonprofit benefit. It was a bunch of drag queens and regular people going on a pub crawl. The theme was “back to school,” and I was the best substitute teacher I could be—beehive wig, pencils in the hair. Could it have been as fun in jeans? Maybe. But every so often it’s fun to put on a dress and have a persona. It certainly makes it more fun to hang your cleavage out in the wind—that’s not me, not Jessica, but that might be my persona.

I feel beautiful if I perk myself up a little bit, put myself in drag. But a part of me also feels like I don’t have to have any of that to have that same feeling. It’s hard to remember that sometimes, especially for people who have a persona: If I take that away, I’m still the same person. Look in the mirror without all that and you’re the same girl, you’re still beautiful. Hearing it without that persona feels strange, but it’s true.

There are these girls with the perfect shoes, the perfect makeup. It’s who they are, from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to bed. I cannot put that effort in. I just can’t! And you know what? I feel fine. I feel fine if I put on leggings and a frumpy outfit. Because tomorrow I’m going to wear a vintage pinup dress and put on fake glasses and do something else, and I’ll feel a little pick-me-up. But then I’ll be back to a sort of frumpy outfit, and it’s okay. I mean, those people who feel like they always have to look perfect—I don’t know if that’s a persona. Is that a persona? I hope so. They’re wearing their game face for work, for everyday. But to me it just seems exhausting.

I was getting a dress for my wedding reception. Honestly, the idea of going to stores is horrible, because I hate trying on clothes in traditional stores. The idea of being fussed over sounded horrible. I go into these stores and have a miserable experience, buying cookie-cutter clothes for cookie-cutter body types and having people fuss over me. I guess I like making my own persona instead of being told who my persona is. The persona of a bride—maybe I’m not comfortable being what other people might define that as. Going anywhere and having someone call me a bride—I’m Jo Jo! I’m Jessica! I’m not going to play that role, that bride role.   

 Jessica as bride: at her wedding reception, November 2010

On Changing Faces
The public image is that I’m pretty happy with myself, but, I mean—my hair is matted down and I’ve got this rash on my head, and my skin isn’t perfect. I’m having my wedding reception this weekend and I’m thinking, I look awful. And then I’m like: You hired your friend, who’s a fabulous photographer. All you have to do is just look in the mirror again, and your face is going to look different. What’s in your brain is going to be what you see. Look back in the mirror and change that. I have that hating voice, and then there’s the good voice. It’s all in your fucking brain.

On Changing the Rules
Roller derby was theatrical at first. Girls in fishnets and lipstick hitting each other—wow, it’ll be crazy! [Laughs] From the get-go there was definitely a lot of sexuality at play, but it wasn’t supposed to be that we’re doing this for dudes. Early in our history we were offered pictures in German Playboy and we were like, Fuck no! There’s this idea of the hyperfeminine, but there’s this athleticism too. If you went to a bout today, there’s no difference between this and any other sport. They’ve trained for hours—it just happens that they wear lipstick. Why are they wearing fishnets? Because it’s fun! We write our own rules. Anyone who changes the rules, it’s not like the rest of the world just catches up to you. I always tell the girls: If you want to keep the fishnets and lipstick, wear it, do it—hey, sure, wear a push-up bra. If you want to wear an athletic jersey and pants to your knees, do it. It’s women being athletic and strong, but still having a wink and nod to something that’s not accepted into any other sort of sporting world.

With burlesque, it’s about accepting that there are many different types of beauty, that it’s not just the type of beauty that we see in magazines. For me it’s the world that I love, the world that people are creating that’s sort of free of what society is telling me is beautiful. I’m seeing what these artists are telling me is beautiful. When we do these burlesque classes, it’s your idea of sexy, and the person next to you is probably really different—let’s explore that. They’re both beautiful and sexy, let’s engage with that. 

On Self-Exposure
Burlesque is fun, and it is petrifying. It’s terrifying to expose yourself, whatever that means. Burlesque can be done without exposing any part of your body, but you’re exposing yourself creatively. Will I be accepted? Will people scrutinize me? You judge yourself more harshly than anyone else. So stand in front of a group of people, take off your top with confidence. Watch the audience, watch their faces change. You have this expectation that you won’t be accepted, and it’s the exact opposite. It’s beautiful and fascinating to watch. You’ve got different bodies, breasts, bottoms. You’ll find that the girl with the big tits hates her big tits and loves the girl with the tiny little boobies and thinks they’re awesome. It’s about finding what you appreciate in other people and what you appreciate in yourself. If a girl walks in and is all, “I hate my butt, I’ve got the biggest butt”—okay, okay, I hear that. But part of my thing is: Well, bend over. Bend way over. Now bend over all the way. Now bend over all the way with your legs straight. And it looks amazing, and that person is owning their giant bottom—everybody loves it!

In my world, it’s very much a bunch of women—I hardly ever think of men. But I do think of gender roles. It’s playing with sexuality, playing with gender roles and who you’re appealing to—or do you even want to appeal to someone? There was a man in the show this year, and I found myself trying to rewrite statements in my head. It’s so much focused on women for me, and I felt totally biased. How do I tell a man that he’s beautiful? How do I make him see that he’s dealing with what we all deal with?

Anyone stands on that ledge, exposing themselves, and you have to take that step. Burlesque and roller derby both happen in a room. It’s not filmed, it’s not recorded. It happens live, for an audience, an audience who will experience it, and then they will leave, and they can’t ever perfectly re-create that experience. It’s truly unique. Something is happening. And there’s a lot of beauty issues there, a lot of issues relating to self-image, to how women are perceived, and sports and art and sexiness, and all these things are being explored live, in front of an audience. You’re going to find that falling off the cliff is a thrill. It’ll be amazing, and people are going to love it. It’s the same for everyone, it’s no different for men, women, tiny women, big women—we all have the same fear. But if you actually step off the cliff, they’re going to love you.