Beauty Blogsophere

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

From Head...

Photoshop yourself...with makeup: I'm behind on this, but when I read about Make Up For Ever's ads with no airbrushing, I got excited. Then I saw that the ads were to promote their HD line of makeup, the idea being that you're basically airbrushed the minute you start wearing the stuff. Nevermind! (Also note the awesome oh-hi-armpit poses and fish-lip faces that nobody, ever, has looked like except when taking their own snapshot, probably after a couple of G&Ts, or am I alone here?)

"I feel like a queen": I'm just a hair skeptical of the Dove campaign, but still took delight in reading about their newest model: a 99-year-old Israeli great-grandmother.

Avon calling: In other senior beauty news: 82-year-old Texan man is recognized as Avon's oldest male rep.

Science sez: On the clean beauty front, a group of influential scientists have officially put forward a call for greater regulation in chemical testing. You know, chemicals like the stuff that goes on your lips, your skin, your eyelashes, your hair. (Thanks to No More Dirty Looks for the tipoff—and in general for their keen attention to this stuff.)

...to Toe 
Snakeskin pedicure?!?! I thought we were supposed to be getting away from scaly feet?

Is it worth the vegan beauty brigade's trouble? Girlie Girl Army, take it from here.

One false step: When I first saw this bit on toenail extensions, my eyes rolled back into my brains. But then with the pictures (not for the foot squeamish) and accompanying text that makes it clear this is sort of reconstructive surgery lite, it made me feel warm and fuzzy about the thought of fake toenails. (I'm of the "my feet need to breathe" camp, not the "feet are disgusting and should be covered at times" camp, and if I lost a toenail it would really bum me out aesthetically.)

...and the Things in Between 

"Skin balls" (ewww!): This happens to me all the time! Why some body butters "roll off" your skin.

My favorite coverline ever was "Erotic Sex!": Dense but worthy scholarly writeup on Cosmopolitan magazine. It's not that it tells you anything that the irregular reader of Cosmo doesn't know on some level, but it does a nice job of breaking down the data and examining the male gaze aspect of a magazine geared toward women.

Do we want models to look like us?: Glamour called out research that indicates that women say they're more likely to buy goods when the model looks like them. It sounds encouraging, but note that the scholar behind the research is also the CEO of an inclusive modeling agency (plus-size, older, even disabled). I'm eager to see what he does next, since he seems like he understands both the pull for non-alienating models and "aspirational" images. I'm just hesitant to hail this as a sea change quite yet.

Dads in the house: Nice essay on helping your daughter navigate making her way through the beauty myth. Step one: Don't ogle women in front of her, duuuuh.

The Good Girl's Drug: If there's a young woman in your life struggling with food issues, particularly binge eating, please go and buy a copy of this book now. Food: The Good Girl's Drug by Sunny Gold is a fantastic mix of personal story, hands-on advice, cheerleader, and sage. Binge eating can be overcome, and this book shows you how. 

I think I'm a Duchamp: Seems I'm not the only one who hates having her body referred to as a piece of fruit: An Australian underwear line is trying to rebrand women's body types to recall great artists—Rubens, Da Vinci, etc. A mild improvement, I suppose (less judgmental, to be sure), but the fact that the word "rebranding" was the most appropriate word I could find here says something.

Qu'est-ce qu'il y a? We American ladies are still after the Frenchwomen's je ne sais quoi? Apparently we're even taking product design cues from them. The airless pump? The mass brands designed to look like high-end, thus creating my mock-favorite word of the week, masstige? That was them.

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Fox News--Wait, No, the New York Times--Basically Blames Sixth-Grader for Her Own Gang Rape

My letter to the New York Times Public Editor in response to this article, which, among other gems, recounts how the 11-year-old victim of an 18-perpetrator gang rape "dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s."

Dear Mr. Brisbane,

I have always looked to the Times as the standard of responsible reporting. But the gross oversight and biased reporting in covering the rape of a child in Texas makes me rethink the Times' commitment to unbiased, gold-standard journalism.

It is never, EVER okay to refer to a rape victim's appearance. Because rape happens when people rape other people, not when a woman wears makeup or a particular outfit. It's never okay. And if it's never okay, then it is really, really, really NOT AT ALL OKAY to refer to the appearance of an eleven-year-old girl when reporting her heinous victimization.

Eighteen boys and men of Cleveland, Texas, molested, assaulted, and raped a child. Eighteen men did this to one girl. They are the problem.

Not her.

Never her.

Never her.

Sincerely,

Autumn Whitefield-Madrano

* * * * * * *

To write your own letter, e-mail public@nytimes.com
 
Or sign the petition here. (Normally I think online petitions do exactly nothing, but that's because it's not usually directed toward a media outlet, but at legislators. In any case this won't hurt.)

For better analysis and discourse on this than I'm able to offer here because I'm so stinkin' sad and mad—the appearance issue is only part of the messed-up reporting here, but it's what's relevant to my topic here at The Beheld—go to Jezebel, Double X, Diana Vilibert, Andrea Grimes, or Alternet.

Do Other People Determine What We Find Attractive?

A recent study suggests that people could be likely to adjust how attractive they find a face based on how attractive other people say that face is. There have been studies before saying that people will adjust their reporting of attractiveness based on the opinions of others—which held true here—but this study has the added gee-whiz factor of measuring reward centers of the brain, which correlated with the self-reported shift in attraction.

But the study needs a closer look—any study does, especially one that might seem to confirm insecurities, particularly women's insecurities. (Am I alone in the insecurity bit? I quote from a fellow I was unfortunate enough to go out with: "The rest of the world doesn't know what it's missing by overlooking you. You're beautiful!" Is it just me?)

1) Not only was the grand total of study participants exactly 14 people, all 14 of those people were men, and all of them were between the ages of 18 and 26.
What would the study have found if it had tested women as well? Certainly I don't think women are more immune to society's sway than men—and contrary to what some women (and men) have told me, neither do I believe that women have a broader spectrum of what they find attractive, nor that we're better able to find a man's "inner beauty" than they are ours.

What I do think is true is that women's looks are often spoken of in terms of currency, as though every woman begins with value X and that certain features incrementally add to that value. Now, this study wasn't about those features; it was about what others supposedly thought. I'm pretty sure that even people (men and women alike) who don't view women in terms of market value have been pretty well trained to think that there's a currency attached to women's appearance, like it or not—and currency is worthless unless we know that others around us assign it value. As a culture, we're more easily able to separate a man's value from his appearance; had women been asked to rate men, would we be so eager to change our number based on what others think?

2) The experiment measured neural pathways connected to financial rewards, not pathways connected to sensual pleasure. This experiment doesn't measure response to beauty at all; it measures calculated value.
(The researchers made this clear in their writings, but as so frequently happens, the journalists who wrote up the story morphed it.) And the study sample—men between the ages of 18 and 26—isn't exactly a population known for shying away from financial risk, you know? We don't know if the participants intrinsically changed their mind about whether a particular face was more or less beautiful; we only know that the perceived value increased or decreased according to other people's input.

3) Hot-or-not studies are sort of gross, right?
We can all agree on this? I mean, in college I did all sorts of shit for money in the psych lab, but I'm really icked out by the thought of being paid to sit there and rate faces on a 1-7 scale. But damn if people don't love to read about them! It validates our more shameful moments of being judgmental, and simultaneously serves to keep us wondering where we'd fall in the mix.

4) Attractiveness is not the same as beauty.
Of all the maxims about beauty, the only one I fully believe to be true is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder—that is, we really can't help what we find beautiful. The crowd might nudge us one way or another, but…if you're not a Gisele kinda lady, you're not a Gisele kinda lady, knowwhatimean? And this study, at first glance, flies in the face of that.

But attractiveness is something that is a little more generic, a little more across the board—and a little more easily agreed upon. Of the women I've talked with, many of them have said, unprompted, that pretty much anyone can be attractive with the right sort of effort; beauty, on the other hand, is a more elusive quality, one that might be easily mimicked but not easily faked. We find what is rare, beautiful; we find what we can agree upon, attractive. That's not to say we're all attracted to the same things (we'll save evolutionary theory for another post!); in general, there are certain things we all find attractive, but what we find beautiful tends to be more individual, in my definition of it. It's less easily packaged; it's even less easily rated, and it's not something that we could change even if we wanted to.

The Unreal Power of Pretty

Disclaimer: My landlord is not John Belushi. I repeat: My landlord is not John Belushi.

"The apartment is yours," says the man who would become my landlord. "On one condition—that you call me before you go sunbathing in your bikini so I can come over and watch."

He's got mottled skin and moves in this way that makes it clear that he's in an old man's pain, but he's got boyish features and occasionally wears overalls, giving him this bizarro-world Peter Pan schtick. His tired Queens accent makes everything he says sound like it’s a low-effort put-on, like he’s playing a bit part as a jokester in a film he doesn’t particularly want to be in.

But he's willing to rent me a junior one-bedroom with hardwood floors, butter-yellow walls, ample sunlight, and a backyard—a New York backyard, consisting of 90 square feet of concrete and a view of my neighbors’ garbage, but a backyard nonetheless. So when he raises his eyebrows and makes this stupid joke about seeing me in a bikini, I wave it away with a sort of laugh. Everything he says is a put-on, right?

In the weeks that follow, his comments keep coming, and I keep laughing them off like I believe I should. My legs, my hair, how stunning I look when awoken at 8 a.m. for temperature control checks. He frequently mentions how harmless he is, a comment I think is designed to put me at ease. It doesn’t work, but then, he makes me feel merely uncomfortable, not unsafe. Harmless? Yes. I believe he is that.

I think that we’re in on some kind of joke together, even if it’s a joke that I didn’t script and don’t really find funny. He’s twice my age, married, and harmless, after all; I’m the thirtysomething lady tenant who wears sleeveless minidresses with my sunglasses up flipped atop my disheveled updo. We’re in a middling 1940s screwball comedy, and he’s supposed to come around with his toolbelt every so often to help out his lady tenant, and then he’s supposed to say something about how fetching I look and wiggle his eyebrows, and I’m supposed to lightly swat him on the arm and say “Oh, Mister Smith!” And then he’s supposed to prune my hedges, or paint the stoop, and tra-la-la, plot resumes.

So I tell him that my back porch light went out—the first time I’d asked for anything—and instead of setting up a time for him to fix it, I hear how he isn’t legally required to have a light back there, he just has it there as a courtesy, but it’s too much goddamned trouble anymore, and I don’t have a right to it anyway, so thanks for calling but no.

And I am furious. Furious beyond reason. I’ve had bad landlords before—I once stepped over a bowl of water on my bathroom floor for two months because of a leak one refused to fix—and have handled it appropriately. Not now; my ire is matched only by my blood pressure as I look up housing codes, vent to anyone who would listen (any many who would have preferred not to), even as I just stay at home and think about it. I feel a swell of tension begin in my solar plexus and creep up my chest, my neck, my face, until I’m talking out loud to myself like a madwoman, red-faced, cursing at a man who isn’t there. My heart rate rises, and at one point I come dangerously close to throwing something across the room because I want the satisfaction of hearing something in that apartment break. In other words, I am being terrifically unreasonable over something that, while inconvenient, really doesn’t matter. (Tiki torches turned out to be the solution. The highly glamorous solution.)

It’s only several days after his refusal that I realize why I’m so unreasonably, and uncharacteristically, pissed off. I’d believed that we’d entered an unspoken bargain together, and that he’d broken it. My end of the bargain was that I’d shut up and smile while he lasciviously commented on my appearance, and his end of the bargain was that he would fix my fucking porch light. And I’d held up my end of the deal perfectly. I’d played my part, my oh-gosh-Mister-Smith lady tenant part, with a pert flair, only to find out that the script was rewritten halfway through.

There was, of course, no such deal, no such script. In his mind he could say whatever he pleased to me, a particular privilege given to him by being a man from a certain generation who probably felt that as long as it was clear he didn’t really mean anything and that he was being what he might have considered complimentary, it was all fun and games. And there are all sorts of reasons why he’s in error there, but that’s not what was making me flush through my throat.

What was making me so angry was my complicity in—nay, my invention of—this bargain. I’ve never consciously exploited being a young-enough, attractive-enough woman for personal gain. But that’s just it: I’ve never consciously done it. How many times have I told myself that I’m just being friendly—and meant it! I am a friendly person!—quietly knowing that on the back end there’s a small reward that I might not get if I weren’t a young-enough, attractive-enough woman? That I’ll get drinks a little quicker if I go to the bar myself rather than send my boyfriend; that the guy who makes my salad every day doesn’t charge me for all my toppings? I really do think it’s because I’ve got an open expression and a quick smile, an easy laugh. It might be. Or is it that I'm sailing through life expecting that if I play a certain part—the part assigned to pretty-enough women, which really just means any woman willing to play the role—that people will give me that drink quicker, or give me a discount, or fix my back porch light?

Some women blithely say that we shouldn't give up any of our power, even if that power is merely a genetic accident or a bit of trick grooming, and in certain moments I'm inclined to agree. But that only works when both parties play by the script: The power of pretty only works when the person with the real power gives it to you willingly. And other people's power can be taken away on a whim. On their whim.

So I showed up with my ace in the hole, the few things I had that he didn’t: youth, femininity, charm. I played my hand—the only hand I believed I had, besides simply being a good tenant who pays rent on time and possesses neither a mouthy pit bull nor a nagging meth habit—and then felt cheated when he trumped my best hand with his real power over me. He didn't want to fix my porch light, and he doesn't have to. My polite, eyes-averted giggles, my ingratiating tolerance of his speculation about my nightwear—no matter, those. My hand had been worthless all along.

I can't blame him, not entirely. Much feminist discourse on this sort of thing tends to point toward the one making the comments as being at fault. Which he is. But the fact is, I was complicit in all of it, because I was expecting perks for playing my part. I didn't have to laugh when he said that allowing him to watch me sunbathe was part of my monthly dues. It was a joke, of course, but it wasn't funny; it was gross, and to laugh showed that I thought it was the other way around. He’s my landlord, not my boss; all I would have risked by letting him he know he was being a dirty old man—or just not played along, even as I didn't invite his attentions—was some uncomfortable moments here and there. Yes, he should know that he’s wrong. But he'd know for sure if I told him.

A week or two go by after he tells me he won't fix my porch light. He calls to say he's coming by to do something in the backyard. I come home and see a bit of pruning done, and a new, fully functioning porch light.

"I know you didn't have to do that," I say to him. "But I appreciate that you did."

"No problem," he says, and continues working. I let him be. He knocks on my back door when he's finished, to let me know he's leaving. I open the screen door to see him off. He takes a step away, then stops, turns around, and looks at me. "By the way, you look sexy as hell in those pants."

"Scram!" I say, and close the screen door. I say it with my voice lilting, my pitch raised, the corners of my mouth upturned. I have no excuse other than habit. I watch him scurry off, exaggerating the hunch of his shoulders in mock defense. We're back to our parts, in a way. But he doesn't know that my choice of word is a beginning for myself, a way of finding language I can use with humor and grace but still keep my dignity in a script that I have an equal hand in writing. It's not perfect. It's just a start.

...and Shimmy!

I've worked in ladymags for nearly a dozen years now.

I've read all of the issues of the magazines I've worked for cover to cover, because that is what I am paid to do.

I've read about every new cellulite treatment, nineteen different ways to apply liquid eyeliner, cream blush versus powder blush versus gel blush versus bronzer.

I have read beauty stories that reached so far into the annals of beauty tips—for gentlewomen, I come to tell you that truly, there are only so many ways to wash your face, straighten your hair, and apply mascara—that at one point, I copy edited a real piece of writing in a real ladies' magazine that really suggested that in order to get "a glowy effect," grown women should apply lotion to their backs, take a piece of Saran Wrap, sprinkle it with glitter, wrap it around one's body, and shimmy.

These magazines are also obsessed with sex. Sex with men.

So why is it that in twelve years I've never read a quick fix for beard burn?

Do Anti-Aging Creams Work? A Potentially Weird-Looking Experiment

Please allow me to present my first official beauty experiment! Each week or month (depending on the challenge) I'll be doing a different beauty experiment. These will range from the external and product-oriented (finally, an excuse to, say, wear turquoise eyeliner!) to the internal and self-oriented (going for a week without looking in a mirror) to everything in between. If there's anything to report during the experiment, I'll keep you updated; if it's more about the end result, I'll just post the results at the experiment's end.

First up: I'm going to start using anti-aging cream...on half my face.

Which half of my face will be the lucky recipient of anti-aging cream?
Will the other half be sent home with a dinette set?

We've heard ad nauseam that anti-agers don't really work. In fact, it's hard to think of another product category that's such an object of skepticism but still manages to make incredible sales—with mascara your lashes are either darker or they're not, but with anti-aging creams, who's to say whether you actually look younger? Still, even skeptics say that retinols might do something—prescription-strength retinols in particular, but even over-the-counter stuff has a decent reputation among dermatologists. Beauty editor Ali has faith in retinols, but I thought that her explanation of why expensive skin creams might "work" better applied to anti-aging: "If you just shelled out $300 for a cream, your brain is in this mode of, This is going to work. You have that optimism that can actually make you radiant."

Now, companies have access to all sorts of weird measuring tools that can actually measure whether or not their snake oils reduce wrinkles. But I don't give a shit if my wrinkles are reduced 50%; what I do give a shit about is if I look better, you know? Fifty percent might mean jack squat on my face. What I want to know is: Does this retinol actually have an effect on my appearance? The optimism won't really come into play, and I'll be posting pictures after the fact so you can guess which half me looks 34 and which half of me looks 34 with reduced wrinkles.

Caveats: I have "fine lines," not wrinkles—I am, after all, only 34 and have been pretty careful about not over-sunning myself. Plus, my parents have fewer wrinkles than most people their age, so I'm pretty well set up. Still: I see the lines that weren't there before, and while I'm not freaked out about them I also know that the worry lines that have popped up in the last year or so make me look, well, worried. Not older, but worried—and nobody looks their best when they appear stressed out. (What's that you say? Try stress reduction instead of anti-wrinkle cream? Yeah, sister, it's on my to-do list.)

The product I'm using is Neutrogena Rapid Wrinkle Repair Moisturizer, which promises "Noticeable results in just one week!" I'm going to be generous with them and give them a whole month to turn one half of my face into a glowing, porcelain version of its current state. It's on.

Beauty Blogosphere

What's going on in beauty in this week, from head to toe. And ending with some older-gentleman NSFW material! (Fear not, it has nothing to do with Donald Rumsfeld.)

From Head...

Say "Airbrush!": Panasonic has a new camera that Photoshops you without Photoshop. I get toning down shine and even putting on blush, but there's a function that can make your eyes appear larger in proportion to your face. Call it the anime function. (From Jezebel.)

Me as captured by the Lumex FX77 camera. (Or me as anime character, by Svetlana Chmakova, who manga'd the CosmoGirl staff back in the day.)

Say "Glamazon!": The ladies at No More Dirty Looks are hosting another beauty challenge—all you have to do is put on some fabulous makeup (preferably with natural beauty products), snap a picture of yourself, and send it to them. The idea is to examine the spectrum of beauty (they'd earlier hosted a no-makeup challenge) and to showcase that clean beauty is just as glam as the toxic stuff. You could win a $100 gift certificate to Spirit Beauty Lounge, too.

Whitewashed beauty counter: It's hardly news that makeup companies are a source of dissatisfaction for women of color, but to see it laid out graphically at Those Three Graces shows how difficult it really can be.   

Smart girls: Nice insight on the differences between high-achieving girls and boys: Girls are less likely than boys to persevere through mentally challenging tasks, and in fact the higher the IQ, the less likely the girl was to stick with it. Heidi Grant Halvorson speculates that girls are likelier to view their talents as something innate, not something that can be developed. I wonder how that intersects with beauty? On one hand, your face is your face; on another, there are all sorts of enhancing measures we can and do take.


...to Toe:
Fish pedicures are under investigation. Which is sort of a shame, because it's the extent of what I know about the offerings of Malaysia (that's where they originated as far as I can tell), and it got me set to go visit. Is it an animal rights issue? Exploited labor?

...and the Things In Between: 

Never Say Diet! Virginia of Beauty Schooled is now the iVillage body image expert, which means that her smart, sane, and critical (but still fun!) eye on beauty is officially expanding. Check out her Never Say Diet posts there!

It's still OK to talk "Black Swan," right?: Claire Mysko's interesting take on how people reacted differently to Natalie Portman's and Christian Bale's weight loss for recent roles. (Neither of which could compare to Bale's frame in The Machinist. Yikes!)

Feeling worthy after ED recovery: I know Eating Disorders Awareness Week is over, but I found this essay on what you really give up when you recover fascinating. Sometimes it's difficult for ED patients to acknowledge what their illness gave them--the things that were cleverly disguised as benefits--and this is a frank take on it. (From a raw foodist, at that! My knee-jerk reaction is that raw foodism is a quick veil for an ED, but Gena seems to have a genuinely healthy philosophy on it.) Thanks to Cameo at Verging on Serious for the tipoff!


Bonus: Men!
Rouge rogues: What's up with men stealing cosmetics? Lipstick is sort of the teenage-rite-of-passage shoplifting for women who might be prone to such behavior (ahem) but some of these are pretty big hauls. I don't condone thievery, petty or otherwise, but it's interesting how there's sort of a perverse inequality here: I couldn't find any police reports of women stealing more than a pocketful of cosmetics, presumably for personal use, but some of these dudes were clearly taking large amounts for illegal resale--sort of the difference between having money and being wealthy, but in the criminal element. Where my big-haul ladies at? (Um, stay where you're at, please.)
 
Male skin care is a booming business in China. The most frequently cited reason for delving into the skin care world is job-related, but the male-female ratio is so skewed in China that I wonder if being forced to compete so heavily with other men might be a factor too? 

In defense of body hair: Kate at Eat the Damn Cake implores us to leave hairy men alone. For all the scrutiny of women's bodies, overall people feel much more free to comment negatively on men's bodies--especially when they're furry. And why do our tastes in body hair change so frequently? What happened to the Burt Reynolds love?

Are Conservatives Better-Looking Than Liberals?

 Donald Rumsfeld totally knew how to party in the Ford years!

Finally, my secret, shameful crush on Donald Rumsfeld* is explained! A Scandinavian study reports that right-leaning political candidates were judged as better-looking than their lefty counterparts. Photos of small-time Finnish council candidates--1,357 of them--were rated on a 1-5 scale by Brits and Americans (who, presumably, don’t keep tabs on names and faces of small-time Finnish council candidates, thus removing political bias from the study participants). 

Handsome little Rumsy aside, this makes no sense to me. I want to believe that our looks don’t actually have an influence on our values, but this flies in the face of that. Thoughts on why: 

1) Ca$h. In the U.S., even though overall the average Democrat is wealthier than the average Republican, the income spread is greater with conservatives--the richer you are the more likely you are to vote Republican. It follows, then, that if you’ve got loads of cash to drop on hallmarks of beauty that can be purchased--plastic surgery, dermatology care, access to ample leisure time, expensive grooming and upkeep (highlights?)--maybe you’re Republican. 

But Finland is unlike us in that regard. (And others, unless there’s an American heavy metal Lutheran mass I don’t know about.) The small size of the country dictates that political parties are forced to work together more than ours, and its enforced proportional representation means that it’s not a country nearly as divided as we are. I couldn’t find numbers on which party members were wealthier--but overall Finland’s income disparity is far lower than ours. Still, the moolah theory could hold true in the States, though, I maintain. (That is, if the same results would apply to American politicians, which they might not. Also, nearly 40% of Finland's MPs are women--rock on with your Finnish selves!--which might alter the results from being about appearance to being more specifically about female beauty.)

2) Even though the National Coalition Party--most conservative Finnish party--is probably laughably liberal by American standards, the bootstraps ethos holds strong, with individual responsibility topping the list of party values. Given that people perceived as attractive make more money, suffer less discrimination, and smell of daffodils--all without any effort on their part--I do wonder if some people born “attractive” (symmetrical features, clear skin, meeting height-weight expectations) might not recognize that not everything that comes their way is because of their hard work.  

This hasn’t been my personal experience with conventionally attractive women--my Helen of Troy gal pals are generally aware of the perks that come with beauty and have a conflicted relationship with those perks (and in fact know that oftentimes they aren’t perks at all). That said, the very definition of privilege is not knowing you have it. So I could see how for some people who might have had crueler lessons earlier in life that might have taught them that hard work and a good mind aren’t all that matter in this world--but didn’t get those lessons because of their appearance--you really might not be able to understand why some people actually do need welfare and other protections that liberal governments favor.

3) One of the study researchers, Niclas Berggren, posits this: “One explanation is that people who are seen or consider themselves to be beautiful tend to be more anti-egalitarian and hence more attracted to right-wing politics.” I wonder about this. My knee-jerk reaction is that while our own appearance shapes how we view the world, that it wouldn’t have such a unified effect as to make our genetic champions actually think that they were deserving of more worldly goods because of their beauty. That goes double for women--there’s such a hefty price tag attached to anything regarding our appearance that I just don’t buy that women would actually make such a simple equation. Maybe I’m being too generous, though, or maybe I’m only paying attention to the stories of individuals whose values go against the expected.

What do you think? Are conventionally attractive people unaware of their privilege, potentially leading them to a more conservative mind-set? Or are they so hyperaware of that privilege that they extend it beyond beauty and into a political realm that favors the haves over the have-nots?

*Not Donald Rumsfeld, the former Secretary of Defense, mind you--but Donald Rumsfeld, the man. If you just sort of close off your mind for a second, he's weirdly cute, admit it.

No Shampoo Goes Upscale

 The Unwashed took a vote; she's our new representative.

We, the Unwashed, have gone haute: W magazine has a piece about not washing one's hair; the writer went six weeks* without shampoo and chronicled her results—it's a well-written piece worth checking out. I'd also like to confess that I have been skirting the issue that the writer ends on: Yes, your hair can smell a little funky after a week of not rinsing it. But in my case it really does take a week, and so I just rinse it. I've entrusted my boyfriend with the task of gently breaking it to me if I ever really need to just wash up already (all of you are far too genteel to use the word scalpy** when referring to my essence, I know).

As for my update: My hair looks better than ever, especially once I decided to really rock the bedhead look and tease it a bit, with some Bumble & Bumble hair powder in for good measure. It doesn't feel as silky with the texturizing powder in, but it makes me feel just un peu de rock star, so I'll keep it. I also took a big leap and got my first haircut since quitting the shampoo. I'd rinsed my hair the night before so I wasn't presenting the stylist with a week's worth of grease and hair powder buildup, and I just asked them to only wet my hair instead of shampoo it. Nobody thought twice about it. And stylists usually comment on how healthy my hair is (I don't color it, that's pretty much my secret), but this time engendered raves.

I'm only now realizing that as fascinated as people are with the whole no-shampoo thing, nobody could seem to care less about the fact that my face has gone unwashed for the same amount of time. I don't know why that is—back when I was using soap/shampoo, I was much more likely to skip a day of shampooing than I would be of face wash. Maybe it's because plenty of men don't use soap on their faces, so it doesn't seem as out-there? Or because people have all sorts of ways we wash our faces—bar soap, liquid soap, creams, foams, even oils and grit powders—so it doesn't seem as drastic? Or maybe because you can look at my face and immediately tell there is absolutely nothing different about it, whereas hair requires a bit more investigation—an investigation that's potentially intimate for both parties? (Only one friend has admitted to covertly sniffing my hair while hugging me.)

In any case, now that W is catching on I feel, for the first time ever, like a trendsetter. Be on the lookout for other Autumn Whitefield-Madrano maverick moves: Quit shopping and wear the same five thrifted cashmere sweaters in Monday-to-Friday rotation until they die a proud, pilled death! Master the art of subway-sleeping so that you can get away with a smaller purse because there's no book in it! Transform your nervous habits to your beauty advantage—have you ever seen a pair of lips more exfoliated than mine? All you have to do is rub, dahling!

Thanks to No More Dirty Looks for the tipoff!

*The word wimp seems unkind, but I'm coming up on six months here, people.
**You wouldn't notice this unless you were, say, a month into not washing your hair while reading it, but The Corrections contains the phrase "scalpy smell" no less than three times. (I skimmed over all the Lithuania stuff so it could be even more.) Perhaps Jonathan Franzen is a secret devotee?

Debriefing: A Day Without Makeup

So I dipped my toes into my no-makeup-for-a-week resolution by trying on All Natural Day, author Rosie Molinary's body-image challenge. The rules: from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., nothing unnatural. No makeup, no hair products, no flatirons/curlers/etc. My reaction:

1) I became hyperaware of the ways in which I use various tools at my disposal. I had an uncharacteristic urge to wear perfume (also a no-no) because I felt so unadorned. I wore tights with a wild print; my updo was more teased than usual. (Teasing is natural, right?) I wonder if that's actually an odd sort of marker of self-confidence: While I do wear makeup every day to conceal flaws, when I was stripped of it I realized that I really do use makeup to enhance what's there already and had to find compensatory ways to showcase what's already there. Before I started this blog I would have taken a vaguely lazy route of assuming that was because I didn't trust that what is already there was "enough," and maybe that is part of it. But wearing makeup doesn't actually significantly change how I look; it just livens me up, tidies me up a bit, makes me feel a bit more vibrant, like fine-tuning an equalizer on a stereo so that the vocals come through more clearly.

2) I dressed up so that I wouldn't be tempted to "hide." Part of Rosie's direction specified not "dressing down," knowing that her students would be tempted to just throw on a pair of sweats to complete the just-rolled-out-of-bed look; they were to dress as they normally would. (Though don't college students go to class in pajamas? Or was that just the '90s?) I was planning on wearing my usual uniform of jeans and a sweater—but I took on the challenge to dress up a bit, because I was worried I'd just want to hide without "my face" on.

So I wore a black wool dress with the wild tights and wellies—and got more compliments on how I looked than I have in the past month. I'm not particularly into fashion, so pushing myself into doing something that, for me, was just a shade daring made me think about self-presentation. I think it's fun to put together a look that includes both clothing and makeup, and I love the feeling of being appropriate to the occasion. But my "occasion" was going to the office, not a grand ball; to look appropriate can totally mean wearing a body-conscious but conservative outfit, and nothing on my face. It was freeing to see that I didn't have to "match" as strictly as I'd previously believed.

3) I felt a bizarre (and probably one-sided) kinship with the men in my office. I kept hearing something Annika Connor said in our interview: "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." Yeah, well, me too. With the men I actually work with I didn't feel any different, but with men who just work on my floor and with whom I simply exchange coffee-machine banter, I sort of felt like we were on the same playing field.

I hadn't felt like we were on different playing fields before, of course. Casual relationships like those are formed on impressions; I don't know the names of most of the people on my floor, let alone any personal information about them. It's Dude With Tan, or Guy Who Always Puts Ice In His Water, or Man Who Helped Me Open A Quart Of Half-and-Half. (Am I alone in not being able to open a carton of milk properly?) And in those casual relationships, I guess without realizing it I was counting on a certain workplace dynamic: Introducing Autumn in the role of a younger-than-most-men-there woman who has an easygoing smile, playing opposite Dude With Tan who doesn't mind a little moment of respite from crunching ad sales numbers. I'm not a workplace flirt, but I'm also aware of what any social-ish interaction brings in regards to gender.

But on Friday, I found myself actually less aware of that potential dynamic, instead asking more genuine questions or just feeling more comfortable in silence. I felt more laid-back, less invested in bringing a bit of lady-with-lipstick vibe to these pseudosocial exchanges. I don't particularly like what that says about how I'd maybe been unwittingly treating such encounters.

4) I was surprised—no, shocked—to find that I really didn't feel more self-conscious. I fully expected that it would be on my mind when I talked with coworkers; instead, it really only crossed my mind in interactions when a colleague mentioned that she had actually worn more makeup than usual that day, just for fun. I was far more self-conscious when I was on the other end of the spectrum for my makeover. I suppose that shouldn't be surprising; certainly my face is transformed a negligible degree with my everyday makeup when compared to the difference between my everyday makeup and my bombshell look. But I expected to find that I relied much more on makeup as a crutch than it turns out I actually do—I thought it would color every aspect of my day, but it didn't.

I got an unexpected invitation to a dinner party that night, though—and it didn't cross my mind to keep the natural look. I had enough makeup rolling around in my purse to approximate my normal look, and I even took a trip to the drugstore to get what I was missing. Even there, I thought I'd be disappointed in myself for not keeping my natural look all the way through, but in fact I was able to appreciate my nighttime lipstick and mascara as a sort of transformation from day to night, from noontime sun to evening mystery. I didn't look much different than I would have any day of the week—but because I was doing it for night only, it took on a ritualistic aspect, giving me time to just think through what I hoped this dinner might bring. It gave me time to put on my "game face"—a face that is, after all, still mine.


Overall, this was an affirming experiment—but not only for the reasons I thought it would be. It felt good to let the world see my face as-is, with no apologies; I didn't feel any more or less confident, but I suppose the fact that I didn't feel less confident without my makeup crutch means my confidence reserves aren't depleted. But the biggest thing it did for me was show me, yet again, that my relationship with makeup doesn't have to be either/or. It doesn't have to be just about concealing flaws, or about having some wild sense of play. I know it might seem backward, but I think a lot of makeup I wear is actually to make me feel more like myself. I like bronzer because it makes me look like I've gotten more sun than I have—not because it looks sexy but because I'm happiest when I'm able to get some light. I like mascara because it helps me look alert even when I'm not quite there yet; I wear concealer yes, to conceal flaws, but also because it can help me mimic skin that doesn't show the signs of workaday stress, stress that's unnatural and isn't something I actively want to own.

I don't know if this is the effect that Rosie had in mind when she issued her challenge; she's not anti-makeup, but I'm guessing that the idea was to feel more comfortable in one's own skin at all times, in its organic state. I don't know if it did that, though I don't doubt that this is a part of getting there. I just know that it's sort of a relief to find that perhaps I've already done more work on reconciling my conflicting attitudes toward beauty and its accoutrements than I'd realized.

The Essence of Beauty Ideals

Victoria Beckham: an emblem of beauty diversity!

In general, I rather like Linda Wells and what she's done with Allure--it's not my favorite magazine but I also think that they give interesting treatment to topics that I'm interested in. That said, I'm not sure what to think of this interview with her about the shifting beauty ideal. It's hard to tell how much is her and how much is the reporter, but there seems to be a self-congratulatory tone here--not exactly self-congratulatory of Allure, but of Americans for having come so far, baby. Call the press: Americans are capable of finding women who aren't blond-haired, blue-eyed, and fair-skinned beautiful! (Is this news to anyone?)

Wells takes the route of acknowledging that a broader range of beauty ideals doesn't mean that we actually find more women beautiful, but rather that people who embody any particular beauty ideal are indeed "younger, thinner, and prettier" than the average woman. By its nature, a beauty ideal is exclusionary. But what gets lost here is that the reason we look at certain people as beauty ideals is that they possess a quality that appears to be both wholly natural yet simultaneously unattainable by the majority of us, no matter what artificial routes we take. She has that star quality that we often translate to mean beautiful; it's that quality that makes her special, not the idea that she's something that the rest of us need to strive for. Hell, if we're going to insist upon looking at any woman first for her appearance, we may as well appreciate those looks in their own merit instead of as a template for the rest of us.

The beauty ideal is not the same thing as the essence of beauty. I'm not even saying this in a you-go-girl way; I'm saying it in a practical way. I don't think for two seconds that the fact that America has apparently opened its mind to different beauty ideals means that we've actually shifted what we think of as beautiful. (I'd argue that most people detect and react to beauty based on their own internal meters, not on something based on what's essentially in fashion, but that's a different post.) I suspect what it's done is simply created more "categories" of women, taking what could ostensibly be a simple appreciation of beauty and forcing it to the top of a pyramid, with, say, Penelope Cruz at the top of one, Christina Hendricks  atop another, and Gwyneth Paltrow reigning over her own raw, vegan perch.

I remember what Rosie Molinary said about Latina stereotypes: That for Latina women there's one sort of representative from each country, so if you're Mexican but don't look like Salma Hayek, it's like you're not the "best" Mexican. (Which is funny, because her father is Lebanese.) I think that's particularly true for women of color, but I think it applies across the board too, which is why we're so fascinated with celebrity lookalikes. Kate Winslet—yes, I'm trotting her out, despite my wish not to Kate-Winslet-as-verb anybody—was such a breath of fresh air for women because she looked a little bit more like the average woman than other celebrities (except, of course, she doesn't; Kate Winslet is as ordinary as I am Portuguese). But it's not like I really felt better about my body once she came on the scene; it was more like, Oh, great, now I need to be a fucking Kate Winslet type? (Honestly, this is part of what irks me about "real women have curves": Besides implying that thin women are impostors, there's also a particular way in which it's acceptable to be curvy. Why else did that false meme about Marilyn Monroe being a size 16 circulate for years? My body will never resemble hers any more than it would resemble Gwyneth Paltrow's.)

I don't have a problem with us as a culture looking toward beautiful women and appreciating them as just that. (I remember once realizing that I'd spent 20 minutes doing nothing other than looking at photographs of Lindsay Lohan.) But I'm wary of saying that we've somehow made progress simply because beauty ideals other than Linda Evangelista exist.

Live Snooki Pouf Demo! At...Stonewall Inn! (Where Else?)

It's not often that queer comedy and beauty blogging intersect. Step 2 of rectifying that will be my upcoming interview with Kelli Dunham—boi comic, ex-nun, and "nerdalicious" author. Step 1 will be attending her Juxtapositions show on Monday, February 28, at the Stonewall Inn. Each month, the Juxtaposition crew (Kelli and cohost Jessica Halem) select a theme and interview people whose passions intersect with the topic. This show's theme is image and appearance, and photographer Syd London and makeup artist/hairstylist Bryn Kelly will be there to chat and do their thing. (In Bryn's case, "their thing" is a live demonstration of the Snooki pouf.)

Anyway: I'm excited to go because the more alternative perspectives on beauty and appearance we have out there, the more fun this sandbox is. If any New Yorkers want to join me, shout out or show up; I'll be the one in lipstick. (I can say that because it's Monday, not Friday, i.e. All Natural Day, as a part of participating in Rosie Molinary's experiment, for which I will fudge the rules and use my dry shampoo. If you haven't washed your hair since September, I think it's allowed.)

Makeup/No Makeup Challenges! Also: Women of Color and Eating Disorders

A couple of fun beauty challenges other writers are putting out there:

1) Author Rosie Molinary, who was interviewed here a few weeks ago, teaches a class on body image at the University of North Carolina. She issued her class a challenge: Show up to class all-natural this Friday. No makeup, no perfume, no hair products—if it isn't on you naturally, it isn't on you Friday. She's invited her readers to join her. Are you in? (I am. You know there's a way overanalytical post a-comin'.)

2) On the opposite end of the spectrum, the ladies of No More Dirty Looks (a must-read if you're into green beauty) are putting forth a glamourpuss challenge: "We want you to go wild with your clean makeup! ... Maybe it means putting on eyeliner for the first time in your life, or wearing a bright pink lipstick, or doing a face as bananas as the Black Swan’s. All we ask is that you have FUN with the challenge, and take at least one risk." Bonus: Submit your photo and you could win a $100 gift certificate to a natural beauty shop.

Both of these actually relate to two beauty-related resolutions I made at the beginning of the year: Go a week without makeup (I'm not there yet! But a day, I can handle), and have more fun with my appearance. I leapt into the deep end with the latter (lipstick report: still going strong! must return to MAC store to broaden options! and down the rabbit hole she goes...), and honestly when I gave myself that challenge I thought it would be more of a theoretical exercise than an actual prompt to shift my mind-set. I don't know if I underestimated myself or if I underestimated lipstick, but I honestly feel like I've expanded my views on beauty enormously by walking around all vamped out for a day. I leave the house without makeup frequently, but I don't think I've ever gone to work bare-faced, and I'm curious to see how this experiment goes. 

And in keeping with this week's theme: Check out Rosie's post on the invisibility of women of color who have eating disorders. It's not just the average-weight or overweight women I wrote about yesterday who are being shortchanged by our narrow ideas of what eating disorders are; it's any woman who doesn't fit the expectation of an ED sufferer.

I wonder about the double bind Latina women are in: Along with the "Latina mystique" that paints Latina women as smoldering sexpots comes an intense scrutiny of Latina women's bodies. And while the "ideal" physique for Latina women might be curvier than for white women, it's also an unrealistic ideal—and I wonder if that sets up Latina women to proudly flaunt their curves (if they have them) as a sort of ethnic signifier. And if that's organic and authentic for the individual, then it may indeed be a source of pride for some women. But it paints a pretty narrow space for Latina women—who are, after all, living in a white-dominant culture in which thinness is still heavily prized—to comfortably inhabit.

Images of Eating Disorders

Notice what's not in the official National Eating Disorders Awareness Week materials:
skinny women staring into mirrors.

I know that yesterday I made a point out of saying that eating disorders are only tangentially related to beauty. But one aspect of EDs that’s more directly related to beauty is the imagery we use to portray them, and what messages those images send. 

The #1 image selected—by amateurs and professionals alike—to illustrate eating disorders is a photo of an extraordinarily thin woman, who may or may not be staring into a mirror and seeing a distorted (larger) version of herself. Runner-up: same woman, but this time standing on a scale. (I’d put together a collage of them but that would defeat the point I'm hopefully about to make. Google-image eating disorder photos if you want to see what I’m talking about.) 

 The images often chosen to represent eating disorders not only leave out a huge chunk of sufferers, they also glamorize the disease, even if the sharp-relief ribcages and clavicles are selected to startle. We’re a society obsessed with the thinness of women and what women are eating (all the better when the two go hand in hand!), so it’s difficult to show the side effects of some EDs without glamorizing them to an extent. This goes double when we're talking runway images (which a lot of them are): If we can count the ribs of a model strutting down the runway, we simultaneously get to gawk at her perceived illness while also seizing permission to take her in as an object. I'm guessing that people putting these images out there in this manner claim that the subjects are so underweight that they cease to be attractive—a hollow defense when we’re talking about images of working fashion models. Anorexic Isabelle Caro’s billboards were indeed shocking (indeed, the pictures in the link may be triggering)—and now, after her death, tragic. But let's not forget: Isabelle Caro was a fashion model, i.e. a member of the profession that defines glamour. We couldn't help but glamorize her sickness even as we mourned it.

But on top of the accidental (I hope) glamourization of EDs, these images reinforce the idea that anorexia and bulimia are the only EDs worth mentioning. In fact, the most common eating disorder diagnosis isn’t anorexia or bulimia or even binge eating disorder, but ED-NOS, or eating disorder otherwise not specified. ED-NOS can encompass everything from someone who appears anorexic but is still getting her periods so doesn't meet all the diagnostic criteria for anorexia, to someone who chews and spits food, to people with selective eating disorder, to overexercisers, to people with unshakable food rituals, to people so obsessed with having a "clean" diet that it controls their lives. Last year the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders finally made binge eating disorder its own category; until then it too was lumped in with ED-NOS.

How this links to imagery: If someone as tragically sick as Isabelle Caro is the main visible face of eating disorders, what does that say to the average-weight or overweight woman who is torturing her body in different, less visible ways? I’ve known women who delayed getting treatment for years because their bodies didn’t match what their image of an ED was. In any addiction, there's always someone sicker than you whom you can use to justify not getting help, but it becomes particularly dangerous in EDs because of the perfectionism that's evident among so many sufferers. A normal-weight woman with ED-NOS can tell herself that eating nothing but raw vegetables for a week is healthy, not a sign of an eating disorder, because she doesn't look like that; a binge eater can rationalize that she just doesn’t have any willpower, because look at "those" people with eating disorders; an anorexic can always find someone “better” at anorexia to prove she’s not that bad off—or that she has farther to go.

And, you know, I get it: I’ve worked in magazines for a decade, and I know that dramatic images summon our attention. To complicate matters, the external symptoms of EDs make for easy pickings of illustration; it’s a helluva lot harder to effectively illustrate perfectionism and alienation from emotions than it is to illustrate someone who’s just lost a bunch of weight. (Google-image other mental illnesses to see what I mean. Did you know that hugging one’s knees in stark lighting is a side effect of depression?)

I’m not sure what the corrective measures might be. I’d love to see more media outlets cover EDs in a comprehensive way. There's some solid treatment of anorexia and bulimia in ladymags, but next to nothing on binge eating or ED-NOS: Sunny Gold’s Glamour coverage of binge eating disorder was literally the first time I’d seen BED discussed anywhere. (Her site and excellent upcoming book chronicle her journey in more depth.) I’d like to see press give as much ink to, say, Monica Seles’s memoir about overcoming BED as it did to Demi Lovato’s recent check-in to an ED clinic. (Demi who? Exactly. But did you even know about Seles’s illness and recovery? Lazy book publicist—or us preferring the glamour of visible self-destruction over a quieter tale of an athlete downing 10,000 calories in a sitting and gaining 37 pounds?)

But (ahem!) to keep this beauty-focused, what I as a beauty blogger want to see is more thought and creativity put into the images we all use to depict eating disorders. I want an end to ED images that have a dual reading as glamorous; I want an end to ED images that invite us to scrutinize patients' bodies; I want a close watch on ED images that perpetuate the idea that people with eating disorders must be thin, or white, or young, or pretty, or women. I want media outlets to choose images that show that people with eating disorders aren’t all thin—and that they do things other than stand on scales and look in mirrors. 

Some of them have a difficult time grocery shopping:

Many of them ascribe inappropriate emotions to food:

 

Some go through the long, hard process of treatment:

And others, eventually, recover.

But the best idea I’ve heard came when I e-mailed some friends about what images they think would be appropriate to illustrate stories about eating disorders. We hashed out the problems with scales (what number do you show?), food (could that be that a trigger?), bodies (best done verrrry carefully), and of course the mirror shot (invites the viewer to judge, and...yawn, so not original). And then, in response to my question, “What art would you choose to illustrate a piece about women with eating disorders?”, one woman quietly, simply replied, “Art by women with eating disorders.”

So today, I give you just that.

Top row: Art by Sarah Coggrave. Bottom: Art by Katie Seiz.

Eating Disorders Are Not the End Point of Body Dissatisfaction

I don’t write that much about body image on here, for a variety of reasons. When I started this blog I wanted to talk about female personal beauty and appearance; body image is certainly a part of that, but there is already so much ink on women’s bodies that I didn’t feel like my time was best spent there. Also, because body image issues have high visibility, there’s a broader permission for women to be frank there than there is regarding overall appearance. (When was the last time a conventionally thin woman told you she was having a “fat day”? I’m guessing it was more recently than the last time any woman told you she was having an “ugly day.”) We’re fluent in the accoutrements of beauty—makeup, skin care, hair—but don’t frequently voice their essence, and that’s what I’m trying to do here. Body issues come up but I try not to make it my focus.

But the National Eating Disorders Association has declared it National Eating Disorder Awareness Week, and they’ve asked everyone who cares about eating disorders to do just one thing this week to raise awareness. I’m one of those people, and I have this forum, so I’m doing my part.

Here’s the thing, though: The connection between beauty and eating disorders is much more tenuous than it seems on first glance. I don't think that the end point of body dissatisfaction is an eating disorder; it’s not like she who is most dissatisfied wins the booby prize of an ED. Body dissatisfaction is one of many symptoms of an eating disorder; it is not a cause. Other symptoms of an eating disorder include what we usually think of as the disorder itself: restriction, bingeing, purging, weight loss, weight gain, compulsive exercising, chewing-and-spitting, and so on. 

So if those are the symptoms, what’s the cause? If you’re interested in that, you should be reading the excellent ED Bites; this entry gets to the heart of it. In short: It’s a complex mixture of biology and environment, like pretty much anything when you’re talking mental health. People had eating disorders before our culture’s thin-imperative struck so heavily; yes, they’re more common now, but I think that’s in part because dieting (which certainly is prompted by “thin is in”) can trigger a latent ED. We see—and love!—the neat story arc of a chubby girl who goes on a diet and everyone thinks she’s way purdy now but then it just goes! too! far! And then, of course, she gets help and is redeemed. But it’s not that the diet causes the eating disorder (plenty of people diet, healthily or not so, and don’t develop eating disorders; 8% of “normal dieters” do go on to develop one); it’s that restricting one’s diet can serve as a biological trigger for something that was there to begin with, whether that be further restriction or binge eating or whatever. When you’re not eating enough, or when your body’s resources are going toward digesting a compensatory high-calorie binge, your thinking is cloudy; if you’re biologically predisposed to having an ED, whatever safeguards you might have against it crumble a lot more easily.

Treatment professionals know this, and some laypeople do too; so why does awareness about eating disorders so frequently focus on body image? In part, it’s because everyone can relate to it—even people who are generally satisfied with their bodies have moments in which they bemoan something about it. So the 90ish% of people who don’t have an eating disorder read that compact little trajectory and are better able to sympathize. It turns an eating disorder from something stubborn and frightening and alienating into something that’s understandable; something that, for a healthy woman with body image concerns, has a ring of there-but-the-grace-of-God.

And also, it’s not like body image and eating disorders are unrelated. It would be disingenuous to say that people with eating disorders aren’t preoccupied with their bodies—some more than others, to be sure (there are plenty of ED patients who neither have body dysmorphia nor are fat-phobic, including not just binge eaters but anorexics too). But overall, the body is the focus for many, many women with eating disorders.

But that’s exactly why we need to be wary of making an exclusive link between body image and eating disorders. Because if we focus on the easy arithmetic of negative body image (severity x) = eating disorder, we do exactly what women with eating disorders do. We make the body the issue, when the body’s appearance is not the problem, nor the cause, nor the solution. We need to look at brain chemistry, family history, perfectionism, alienation from emotions, depression, anxiety, temperament, and more, in addition to the thin imperative, fat phobia, and even the mirror. And until we do, we’ll consider those root causes of eating disorders secondary to appearance. Do ED sufferers really need that message reinforced?

Of course I’m all for awareness of body image issues, for reasons that are so obvious that I’m not even going to list them here. I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t, say, be calling out messages that we find harmful, or that body dissatisfaction isn’t really a problem just because it doesn’t lead to eating disorders. It is a problem, and every woman has a right to a positive body image. I’m just wary of taking a mental illness and using it as a means of communicating a message that serves a different end, even if that message is essential to the well-being of all women. 

I especially don’t want to use ED sufferers to legitimize the way we watch like hawks over other women’s bodies, even if our intent is positive. One example of this: Emily Gordon's astute piece (not about eating disorders) about the (unfounded) rumors about Christina Hendricks dieting. “They’re Kate Winsletting her,” she writes of the fetishization of Hendricks’s body, seized upon all too often as a validation of how “real women have curves” (as if curveless women are impostors?); when Kate Winslet finally had enough of everyone gushing over her “real” body, she lost weight and became...unreal? Or something. But the point is, when we set up curvy women as somehow liberated and slim women as lucky, or sick, or beholden to a beauty standard—any of which may or may not be true—we keep the focus right where we don't want it: on their bodies. We stare at women's bodies and imbue them with all sorts of characteristics and qualities that may or may not be pertinent.

That is, we do exactly what women with eating disorders do to themselves. And I’m trying to opt out.

Duh, Lara Logan's Looks Are Irrelevant (Mostly)

I just wanted to call out an aspect of the Egypt rape case (you know, "the" Egypt rape case!) that is pertinent to my topic here: It is surprisingly rare to hear someone say in a public forum that's not explicitly feminist that harassment is about the harasser, not about the harassee. Responsible news outlets might focus on harassment with a sympathetic eye, but it's often left unsaid or unthought that women who are literally covered from head to toe can be victims of harassment just as easily as the woman dolled up in a miniskirt. So, as a white middle-class urban left-winger, I'm proud to point you toward this NPR story that does just that!

There's also lots to be said about the attention given to Lara Logan's looks, but to be honest I've only read criticism of just that, not the attention itself, so I'll just point you toward Jezebel and Mary Elizabeth Williams's take on it.

It's also interesting to read this 2005 New York Times article (yes, I've name-checked both NPR and the Times, in the same story!) in that light. In addition to some bits that now read tragically ironic ("her knack for getting access to dangerous to dangerous places is reminiscent of a young Dan Rather"—well, sort of, except when Dan Rather was attacked nobody talked about his looks or his right to be walking down the street, though the bizarre circumstances may have aided that, and it wasn't in the line of duty), the piece focuses largely on her personal appearance and its possible role in her career. Overall I think it's an engaging piece that at least touches on issues pertinent to women in public roles and how their looks might intersect with their work. We even get to hear from Logan herself (though I wish that the story about her dogging the editor of her local paper at age 12 for a job had appeared above the fact that she was briefly a swimsuit model, but whatevs). Logan's looks here are not the issue—her attack is—but since some people insist on making it a part of the conversation, we may as well have it.

A Brief Interruption of Theory, Discourse, and Analysis in Order to Talk Mascara

I’ve always been curious about the job of a beauty editor because it seems like they’re privy to information the rest of us aren’t—I mean, how many of us have the word beauty in our job titles? And, of course, most ladymag readers share that curiosity, hence the whispered, insider-y tone of most beauty pages (and the reaction Ali gets when she divulges her job to a new acquaintance: “First they say, ‘Oh, how fun!’ Then they want me to look at their skin. I’m practically a dermatologist by now”). So even though traditional beauty tips are roughly #84 on my wish list for what this blog might put into the universe, now is as good a time as any to share the most useful and surprising (eyeshadow primer? really?) tidbits from my interview with Ali.

1) What anti-aging cream actually works? “After interviewing hundreds of dermatologists and hearing the same advice every time, yes, I now use a prescription retinoid. It’s called Renova; it’s a creamier version of the drug that’s in Retin-A. You have to ease yourself into it, using a pea-sized amount every third day for a while, because otherwise you’ll get red really quickly and then you’ll stop using it.”

2) Try an acne system, not just an acne product. “I’ve used the same cleanser for two years—Proactiv, I swear to god, that shit works! Doctors can prescribe benzoyl peroxide and salicylic acid together, but a single over-the-counter product can’t have both. I think it’s one of those FDA monograph things. So the systems work because they have a benzoyl product and a salicylic product, but you’re using two products so you get them both without having to see a doctor.”

3) Buy the good sunscreen. “People always want to know what you should spend money on. Sunscreen you should spend money on. SPF means nothing because it doesn’t measure the UVA protection. And UVA blockers are really expensive, so cheap sunscreens don’t include them. But nobody wants to buy the good stuff, because it’s expensive! And if you’re wearing it correctly a bottle will last you two days, tops, at the beach. Look at the back, for the drug information—each of those drugs protects you from a different range of UV light for different amounts of time, so you actually want a long list. Neutrogena makes a good one—but it’s still $12.99.”

4) If you care about “clean beauty,” Burt’s Bees is the way to go. “I’ve been to their factory, I’ve interviewed their cosmetics chemist. Their lab isn't even a traditional lab, it's in the middle of the office, because they don't use chemicals so they don't need lab ventilation. They have big bags of sugar and coconut, but they make products that work, and it looks cute and you feel happy buying it. There are other companies that do the same thing but they charge a lot more for it. Burt's Bees is more expensive than some drugstore brands, but there's a reason for it.”

5) How the “natural look” breaks down: “People say to me, ‘You're so pretty, and you're not wearing any makeup.’ I probably have 17 products on right now! I put on SPF 30 sunscreen, every morning—if you interviewed enough dermatologists you'd do that too. Then tinted moisturizer; I'm still looking for the perfect one. If my skin is looking weird I'll use Armani foundation; it’s real sheer and melts in. Then concealer, because everybody needs concealer even if they say they don't; I use Estee Lauder Double Wear, it doesn't crease, and I've tried a ton. Then eyeshadow primer in lieu of eyeshadow, because you know how your eyelids might look bluish and pinkish and weird? This evens it out. The primers I’ve tried aren’t all that different; if it's eyeshadow primer it works. Then I curl my eyelashes. If I do nothing else, I curl my eyelashes—all you have to do is squeeze! No product! Then mascara; I use Blinc, this weird Japanese thing that freaks everybody out because when you wash it off it looks like your lashes are falling out, like little spider legs all over your sink, because it wraps each lash in this mascara tube. Then blush—Julie Hewitt has this rosy cream blush, very sheer—and bronzer on top of that. I still haven’t found the perfect bronzer. On my lips I put on lipstick or lip balm or whatever I'm testing at the time. So if people think I'm pretty without any makeup, I'm like, Shit, you could look like this too! Women think that there are pretty women and not-pretty women. But it's all what you do with what you have.”

6) Primers aren’t necessarily a rip-off. “You don’t have to put makeup over primers. People always freak out over primers because they think it’s priming you for something—like, great, another product I need? But you can use them alone and get good results. It actually does something.”

7) If your favorite item is discontinued, look at partner brands. “All these brands are owned by the same handful of companies, and the same labs do their products. So you liked Prescriptives, which was discontinued? You should look to Bobbi Brown, Estee Lauder, MAC, and Origins—they’re all owned by the same company that did Prescriptives, so they have the same R&D as Prescriptives. If you Google it you can find out who owns what.”

8) Check out return policies. “It’s great being a beauty editor because I get to actually try everything, whereas the woman in the drugstore would have to buy it to try it. It could take years of testing to find out what works for you.” [Drugstore return policies vary: CVS and Rite-Aid seem the most return-friendly for opened cosmetics, followed by Walgreens (in-store credit). For a more thorough (but not user-friendly) rundown of return policies, go here.]  

9) Know where to look in magazines to find what editors actually endorse. “The beauty editors’ picks page is usually mostly truthful. If I work at a magazine and there’s a ‘My Favorite Beauty Products,’ page, I’m not going to pick some product just because they bought a full-page ad. The line credits in the stories, that’s where sometimes you throw the advertisers a bone. There’s still that separation between edit and ads in that sense, but everything else being equal and I just have to mention a shampoo in a hair story, why wouldn’t I put in an advertiser’s? But I’m not going to claim it’s the greatest shampoo ever in the beauty editor’s picks.”

10) My personal vindication: You don’t need to wash your face that often. “You’re stripping it. Just do it at night to take makeup off—if you don’t wear makeup, you can just splash with water.”

11) And you definitely don’t need a toner. “Toners are bullshit.”

Ali, Beauty Editor, New York City

In her 10-plus years as a beauty journalist, Ali has worked at some of the biggest ladymags out there—bridal, teen, lifestyle, more—and is now department head at a major publication (trust me, you’ve seen it). But I’ve worked with dozens of beauty editors; what made me track down Ali for an interview was that we’d joked before about “girls like us”: curious, intelligent women who always wanted to dig a little deeper. I assumed that we’d share the same healthy skepticism of the beauty industry, so I found her healthy—but not entirely skeptical—take on the beauty industry compelling and illuminating. In good ol’ service magazine fashion, I’ll be posting her inside-scoop beauty advice later (first up: toner is a scam); here, she talks about raising her eyebrow at the green beauty movement, why we shouldn’t blame the industry for our self-esteem woes, and the survival of the prettiest. In her own words:

On Evolutionary Theory
I think cosmetics make people feel good about themselves, not bad. It's healthy to want to look beautiful. Mental patients don't brush their hair or wash their face; they don't care about what they look like. Evolutionarily, we're meant to peacock around and look good to attract a mate, and these companies assist in that. You could say, Okay, but they're preying on women's insecurities. They are, in a way, but they're also creating an industry that does some beneficial things. I almost think that fashion companies prey on women's insecurities more than the beauty industry. That's an industry making a fortune off women feeling bad about themselves—those Victoria's Secret models? Compared to beauty ads, the ideal they present is even more unattainable. Then again, Victoria’s Secret models do have those beautiful lips and gorgeous hair. I don't know.

In college I did my thesis on the theory that there is a universal standard for beauty, and it was largely influenced by Nancy Etcoff's writings; her book, Survival of the Prettiest, touches upon how it's healthy to want to be pretty. And that, weirdly, the same things people think are pretty in the Unites States are pretty across borders. Lipstick deepens the red color of lips in the same way lips darken during arousal; when you're in love, your pupils dilate, and mascara gives you the same look. It's a part of our process—I don't think it's unnatural. A lot of women take it to this whole other crazy plastic surgery level, but mascara and lipstick? It's just part of being a woman. They used kohl on their eyes in ancient Egypt; we use eyeliner. The same things make women attractive, and there are evolutionary reasons for it.

 

Nefertiti to Cleopatra: Really, it's just a matter of time before we all look like Liz Taylor, right?

On Feminism and Self-Esteem Crises
I remember a study about aging that we did at a magazine where I used to work. Using objective measures, experts estimate about 10% of the population looks younger than they are. But when we asked people about themselves, 80% of them think they look younger than they are. Eighty percent! And when I worked at a teen magazine we did a survey; one of the questions was whether the girls thought they were above average in appearance. The majority said they were! And that’s the teen years, when there are supposed to be all these problems with self-esteem.

But it’s not going to make news if you say, “Oh, girls are happy with themselves.” What kind of headline is that? And what makes news is what we gather around. But I feel like people sometimes use the big bad beauty companies and their advertisements and quote-unquote unnececessary products as an excuse for why they feel bad. You don’t want to feel bad for no reason; you want to latch onto a reason for these insecurities we all have, so you don’t feel crazy, so you don’t feel like you’re unbalanced or negative. There are people who just don’t feel right inside, and it’s easy for them—and I don’t blame them—to say it’s because, “Oh, I’ve been looking at these attractive women.” But I think you have to abandon those external forces and look inside and be like, "Really, why aren’t I happy?" It’s not because you don’t look like some ad. If we excavated each woman’s insecurities, like they do on a Hoarders episode, there would be deeper things going on.

We’re not meant to sit in front of computers and go to offices; we’re meant to be hunting and gathering, so obviously our brains are misfiring in some ways. I’m sure some feminists would be like, “No, I’m totally normal—it’s society that’s wrong.” But I don’t know. I think some feminists might resist talking about beauty because they think the minute they open that discussion, it belittles their bigger points. But the fact that more feminists aren’t really talking about beauty and our insecurities about how we look in that way is part of why some of these things are still going on. It’s at the heart of what they’re trying to get across.

Some of my friends from college are journalists who really delve into current events and these intellectual topics, but they still e-mail me all, “Where do I get this beauty procedure done?” I’m like, “You see? You still need beauty advice even though you’re these smart feminist girls!” I guess that’s what I struggle with about this industry, personally—I feel like what I’m doing is not nearly as important as what they’re doing, like they’re “real” writers, and I’m a selling machine. But then I try to remind myself that people really like reading this. When a reader writes in about having large pores, she feels a whole lot better after I write to her with some tips or do an article with advice. Still, I don’t feel that intellectual legitimacy. But it’s funny that some people look down upon a journalist like me who’s in women’s service magazines. I may or may not want to know about the third reich of blah blah blah, but they always want to know what lipstick to buy!

On Trendsetting
The source of the best trends, if you really trace it back, it always starts with that person who isn’t necessarily physically attractive but is wearing something all balls-to-the-wall, I’m-awesome, look at me. And if you want what she has, you look at what she’s wearing and you copy it. Sometimes you meet these women and they have this aura about them, like electricity comes out of them. I’ve interviewed plenty of celebrities, and they have that. Like, Megan Fox has that. She’s also beautiful—I can’t even look at her, she’s so pretty—but it’s not just about that. People like her, who are so secure, so comfortable with themselves, they put you in a comfortable place and you feel better just being around them. So you look at someone who has that quality and you’re like, What does she have that I can get? And if it's black nail polish, then at least you can get the black nail polish.

But it isn’t always a person who starts beauty trends. You know how all of a sudden the same color is everywhere, like seafoam green? In Paris there’s this color show where they do textile and color trends. I swear to God, I think it’s one person who decides it all!  All these beauty companies send their product development people to the same forecasting companies and conventions, and then spring rolls around, and Orly, OPI, Revlon, you see their nail polish collections and it’s all seafoam green, coral, yellow, and gray. Same exact colors. I don’t think it works that way for fashion—there really are some artistic innovators in that industry who everyone knocks off, like Miuccia Prada. But these beauty companies aren’t reacting to anything in the zeitgeist—right now they’re developing products for 2013. They’re creating the zeitgeist.

On Green Beauty and Big Business
You could go to the Environmental Working Group and they’ll take any ingredient in a beauty product and tell you it’s going to kill you based on one study done 500 years ago on a rat in China. But I walk around New York every day breathing in carcinogens and eating red meat, and I just think no matter how careful I am about the beauty products I use, there’s no getting around exposure to harmful chemicals. You'd have to live in a bubble to get back to having a clean slate and then use natural products. There are people who have sensitivities to phthalates or parabens, but you could be just as sensitive to an all-natural essential oil. But people are into being green. That’s fine, except when you’re dealing with companies that lie. A lot of the big companies do that, just putting bilberry extract in their products—except it’s way down the ingredients list—and slapping a leaf on the package.

Some of the great, small brands that are green get bought up by the big ones. That doesn’t mean they’re going to change the products and make them shitty—a lot of times it’s better because now you have this huge R&D machine to work with. Clorox bought Burt’s Bees, and when I went to the Burt’s Bees factory and asked about it, they were like, “It’s the greatest thing ever—they let us continue doing what we were doing, but we have an infusion of cash so we can do more.” Not all acquiring companies do that. Some of the big companies treat lipstick the same as diapers; they move their CEOs around and it’s always some dude who has the MBA calling the shots and treating all the products the same. But other companies—Avon, for example—have strong female leaders and I think you can see that in the way they respect their customers.

On “Does It Work?”
There are some companies that can back up their claims, but if you were a regular consumer you'd never know. That’s because if these companies actually made the claims they technically could, their products could be considered a drug. For example, Olay: Their anti-aging creams do reduce wrinkles—better than some prescriptions—but if they claimed it that way on the box the FDA would investigate and they'd have to turn it into a drug, and then they lose money. But companies that can show me in-house studies—independently performed, double-blind—they're legit.

I think what makes it “work,” though, is if it makes you feel better. In a way, who cares if it’s going to make your skin look a certain way? Results are nice, but sometimes it just feels good to put on expensive face cream. If you’re spending $300 on your cream, of course you’re going to think it’s working better than your friend’s $30 cream—even though it might not really be. It’s like the confirmation bias in psychology: If you put money into something, you’re going to see any type of evidence supporting your belief that it’s working. It’s the placebo effect half the time. If you just shelled out $300 for a cream, your brain is in this mode of, This is going to work. You have that optimism that can actually make you radiant. If you’re thinking, Oh, I just got this $5 bojangle cream, I don’t give a shit—then no, it doesn’t work. If you squirt on a cheap, drugstore face lotion and you squeeze on an expensive department store one, you’ll notice a difference. One’s silkier and has a nice fragrance, even if they both do the same things to your skin. You want to believe in the dream.

Male Gaze X ≠ Female Beauty Y

Interesting study (PDF only) on how being objectified affects women's math performance. Female and male participants answered math questions after being given objectifying looks by a faux study partner of the opposite sex. The female participants who'd been gawked at scored more poorly compared with the control group. (Men answered the same in both conditions.) Thoughts:

1) The headline of the PsychCentral article sent to me by an alert friend reads "Are Good Looks Problematic for Women?" But the study literally had nothing to do with whether a woman was good-looking. It was a study about the objectifying male gaze, not a study about women looking so fiiiiiiiiine that the poor fellows couldn't help but stare. You could attempt to argue that conventionally attractive women are logically the object of that gaze more frequently--but A) you'd be wrong; any New York City woman can attest that simply by possessing a vagina and being roughly between the ages of 12 and 85, you become the object of that gaze, and B) that's a leap that wasn't explicitly made in the writeup. It's a case of erroneous reading of the study or erroneous reporting of it, and in either case it not only grossly misrepresents the intent of the study but effectively turns the ideas presented into women's own fault for being so damned good-looking as to affect our math skills. 

Now, plenty of news outlets accurately represented the study: "Ogling by Men Subtracts from Women's Math Scores" (LiveScience); "Women Subject to Objectifying Gazes Show Decreased Math Ability" (Science Daily). But PsychCentral and New Beauty both took this it's-cuz-they're-purty angle. Funnily enough, New Beauty is a plastic surgery magazine—do they want their readers to think they're bad at math? I'm guessing that New Beauty has some weirdo agenda about beauty and ability, but in any case this is a textbook example of reporters needing to check their assumptions. This study has nothing to do with how the women looked and everything to do with how the men were looking.

Yes, it was tempting to dot the "oo"s to look like nipples, but I am a lay-dee.

2) Lowered math skills aside, the study had some other fascinating angles: Objectified women were more likely to interact with their ogling partners, suggesting that there's higher motivation for a woman to engage with someone who is sexualizing her. I don't think this means women secretly want to be objectified (that varies by woman and situation), but rather that we internalize the position of being sexualized as our responsibility. 

And boy, do we ever. There's plenty of feminist rhetoric on girls and women being trained to be polite even in objectifying situations and how some men prey on that--and yes, some do--but there's something else at work here, which The Hairpin (via Beauty Schooled) makes a funny about, and which I will drain the humor from!: 

It's not that pretty girls aren't good at math. Or that pretty girls think they don't have to do math because they're so pretty. Just, when you notice girls are pretty and look at their prettiness, all they can think about is feeling pretty and there's no room in their brains left for math. Or something like that. I can't think straight when you're staring.

And, you know, I am capable of having my cleavage ogled and being competent at my work and patting my head and rubbing my tummy at the same time. But I also know that when I'm aware of being looked at in a sexualized manner, it can feel like the air is being sucked out of me. Whether that means I'm feeling adored by a man I want to adore me, or that I'm freezing because I know the dude halfway down the block is going to give me the treatment, when I'm the object of the gaze it is indeed difficult to stay in a state of flow about things other than my appearance—like, say, math problems. And even as I try to resist it, I find myself engaging in it, even if my engagement is also supposed to be a deflection. I often think that if I just engage more and make it clear that, oh, I have a boyfriend or husband, or just that I'm not looking for a pickup, I'll maintain my nice-girlness but get my point across. So yes, being objectified can make me interact more, much as I wish it didn't.

3) The most surprising part of the study for me was that body awareness and body dissatisfaction wasn't affected by whether a woman was ogled. All women in the study—objectified and the control group—had higher rates of body dissatisfaction during the study than men did, but that was due to their femaleness, not to whether they'd been stared at.

Honestly, I don't know what to make of this. The researchers hypothesized, based on other studies, that body shame would increase with being objectified. So other studies have found that there is a correlation. Now, I try not to get too into any individual study because a lot of it doesn't mean anything; at the same time, I'm writing this post, so clearly I give some credence to it. Personally, my body awareness does increase when I know I'm being sexualized—I may not feel worse or better about my body, but my consciousness of it increases tenfold. Maybe the women in the study were focusing so heavily on their assigned task that between calculating x plus y and interacting with their assigned pair of wandering eyes, they simply forgot to think about their own bodies?

If that's the case, I find that encouraging. Ideally, someone objectifying you should make you think about that person and what sort of interaction you'd like to have (or not have) with that person, not about your body and what signals you fear/hope it might send by its mere existence.

Heather, Blogger, Denver

When I first stumbled upon Faces of Beauty, I was mesmerized. I’m a chronic voyeur, preferring to (discreetly, but of course!) watch people on the subway rather than Sudoku, so any collection of faces is basically catnip to me. But what makes this different than a mere photo gallery is what each photo subject says about herself: Woman after woman proclaiming not only that she is beautiful, but why she’s beautiful. We see Clare honor her father’s rosy cheeks and her mother’s undereye circles; we see Katie define her beauty in verbs only; we see Alexia simply state, “I am beautiful because I say I am.”

Heather Disarro is the woman who gives Clare, Katie, Alexia, and dozens more beautiful women their voice on Faces of Beauty. After 14 years of struggling with disordered eating, Heather was able to see through the truth she’d been denying herself: Beautiful as-is, she’d been robbing herself for those years of the chance to spread her message of beauty. “We’re never promised tomorrow, and I’m not wasting one more second of this precious life...letting someone else...be the defining factor of whether or not I’m beautiful!” she writes. Heather wrote to me about her reasons for starting the blog, the role her religion has played in her path to self-acceptance, and why the “elevator meeting” might be triggering a spate of unhealthy behaviors. In her own words:  

 

On Blogging Beauty
The goal of Faces of Beauty is to bring about a revolution in the way we see ourselves. There are so many women who think they need to be a certain size, wear certain clothes, wear makeup, and conform to a certain look to be beautiful, when in fact the entire reason they are beautiful in the first place is due to their specific, unique, individual beauty. I think that even though we all feel that we should strive for a certain kind of beauty, we are still hesitant to claim it. Faces of Beauty asks you to shout out loud that you are beautiful!

More than anything it's been really cool for me to see what people love about themselves.  I think we focus so much on what we LOOK like on the outside and never really take the time to see what's beautiful on the inside. As Sophia Loren once said, "Beauty is how you feel on the inside and it reflects in your eyes. It is not something physical." I've seen that quote reflected in the things that women have said about themselves on the blog more than anything else, and it's been the biggest blessing!

On Faith
As a Christian I fully admit that I am sinful; my sin and my “god” for the longest time was trying to look a certain way, appear a certain way, be a certain way. But the fact that Christ died for my sins and I’ve been set free from a life of slavery to that sin is huge. I am free, I am loved, and I am beautiful because I am born anew in Christ, and not because of anything that I have done. I would say that it plays a very large part in me learning to love myself and in my becoming the woman I am today.

Psalm 45:1 reads: “The king is enthralled with your beauty; honor him, for he is your lord.” More than anything this passage is a reminder to me that my allegiance is to God, and nothing else...not myself, not my husband, not my looks. I'm to honor God above all else! If beauty is the one thing you worry about it and it's an all-consuming thing, that's not healthy. I would call that a sin, as I would anything that is an all-consuming issue.

I don't think we should judge anyone as we're called to love all people. I am a sinner, we are all sinners, and whether it's vanity, eating issues, adultery, pornography, whatever...it's all the same in God's eyes. As for how to find the middle ground, I think the biggest thing for me was learning over time that I don't need to wear makeup or a certain pant size to be beautiful. Honestly there were a lot of stops along the way, but it was really a factor of time and love from others that made me realize how beautiful I am...and I don't have to try.

On “Getting the Look You Want”
I think that we’ve become a culture where the “elevator meeting”—what can you find out about someone in the time it takes to ride an elevator—has become the norm, and therefore physical appearance plays a large role in that. We also are completely surrounded by media that portrays women in a very unrealistic way, but since there’s no equally matched authority saying that we’re beautiful as we are, we tend to accept what’s immediately in front of us. Being “beautiful” feels accessible all the time, and if you don’t like your look? Just save enough money and have surgery. It’s much more acceptable to do that now, and just the other day I heard an ad for MakeDenverBeautiful.com. Sounds like an environmental organization—but it’s a plastic surgeon’s office advising people to “come in and get the look you want.”

When I started reading Teen and Seventeen magazines I was probably around 13-14 years old.  If I were looking back on me now, I was at a fairly awkward point then, sporting braces and frizzy hair and trying to keep up with the latest fashion trends. At the time I didn’t realize that I had a longer torso, closer-set hips, and broad, athletic shoulders. I saw that my body looked different, and attempted to act accordingly. The thing is that I was adorable just like that, and I hope that my daughters (if I have any) are able to see the beauty in their awkwardness!

On Makeup
I wake up every morning and wash my face. I apply mascara when I’m going to work or church, and otherwise tend to go without. I brush my teeth, apply moisturizer, and curl my eyelashes.  That’s about it! When I was younger I tried doing the full beauty routine with concealer, powder, blush, and the full gamut in eye makeup, but when I entered college and was working out regularly I just decided it would be easier to stick with mascara—waterproof so it didn't run when I was running—and that habit has just stuck with me. It's not that I think makeup is bad; I think it's the attitude that it's worn with. I don't mind playing with it from time to time, but I know in my heart that I don't NEED it to be beautiful.

On Her Blog’s Tagline: “Do You Believe That You Are Truly Beautiful?”
YES! :)