Beauty Blogosphere 2.17.12

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

From Head...
Headucation: African-American hair salons have a long history of being hotbeds of activism. That thrives today, but the Beauty Is It salon in Staten Island is making it official with a news exhibit called "Black Women in American Culture and History"—including, of course, a nod to Madame CJ Walker.

...To Toe...
The pedicure of the future: When the Burgundy Girls dreamed up this galactic nail treatment they were picturing it for manicures, but I'm more apt to go wild on my toes than my hands. Am I alone on this? Either way, this look is glittery gorgeousness.

...And Everything In Between:

Girltanked: Know some young female innovators? (Of course you do.) Girltank, a new think tank of young female social entrepreneurs across the globe, wants to know about them. There are so many young women doing incredible things worldwide; Girltank aims to help them connect with one another and give them access to opportunities and resources that help shape communities and conversations across the world. This might not seem to have much to do with beauty, but it does: The public perception of young women is that they're there to be looked at, or that they need "our help." Girltank aims to change that perception by showing young women as change-makers and contributors to society. If you know of any women who fit the bill, visit Girltank's Facebook page and let them know! (There are raffle prizes too, as added incentive, including a $100 package from Lush.)

Corrupt much?: The beauty biz leads in consumer complaints in Singapore, beating out even the sleaze-ridden timeshare industry.

If you've got a problem, yo I'll solve it: I will forever get a thrill out of reading marketing analysis, as it reveals exactly how campaigns are designed to work on us. This one comes from market analysis firm NPD in regards to men's skin care: "There is a feeling that facial skin care products are not needed unless you have a specific skin problem... For men to use a product, he first must be aware that there is an underlying need that requires addressing," says industry analyst Karen Grant. That is, tell him what's wrong with him, then fix him. Sound familiar?

Sample sale: Birchbox-like cosmetics sampling services are catching on in Korea—because the sale of samples was banned last year.

Swift justice: Twenty-five years after being arrested for selling cosmetics fakes, a New Delhi man has finally been sentenced to a year of community service.

Straw feminist: I've been reading the Tumblr Pop Feminist Perblog for a while, and this screed shows why. I don't agree with every word she's saying here but she succinctly breaks down the dangers of posing the performance of traditional femininity as subversive for its own sake, and also lays out a point that's frighteningly easy to overlook in appearance-related discussions of feminism: "Show me a feminist who is saying we can't be feminine. Seriously, show me a feminist who is saying we can't be feminine."   

Meow: Intellectually, I buy the argument that Hello Kitty might contain hidden forms of cuteness-as-power in a postindustrial society. Practically, I can't stand the little bitch. Either way, this piece is interesting. "The gift under capitalism is the moment that circulation is affected by the introduction of an irreducible social aspect. As the gift of cuteness, then, Hello Kitty becomes a sort of value-analog that works by exempting itself from circuits of valorization."

Бунт Grrl: If you doubt the potential for the forcefulness of feminine motifs, check out Pussy Riot, a Russian feminist punk band protesting the current political climate under Putin. These summer-dress-clad performers are downright fierce, and the potency of their message has more weight than all too many punk bands in the U.S.

Stolen pink: I've been turned off "breast cancer kitsch" for a while, but if I hadn't been, the lede of this Anna Holmes piece in Washington Post would seal the deal. Apparently the pink ribbon was a grassroots effort from a survivor; when Self magazine and Estee Lauder asked if they could co-opt it in their campaign, she turned them down, fearing commercialization of her ordeal. But the show must go on: They tweaked the color, put pink on parade, and now we can all buy pink products (with nary an assurance a dime goes toward cancer research).

Economic models: The Economist covers the trend within the modeling industry of hiring "more aspirational young women" rather than the "very young, impressionable models" that have overwhelmingly composed the modeling workforce—think students and do-gooders. I think Sally Davies is onto something when she casually posits (and by "casually" I mean "on Twitter," where she called my attention to the piece) that "Maybe beauty's social premium has gone up everywhere, so industry trades prestige for pay and also creates more internal hierarchy."

Muslim makeup: Halal cosmetics and toiletries make up 9% of the global halal market, and demand may be growing. Halal cosmetics are basically vegan cosmetics with certification, so I'm surprised we don't see more "certified halal" branding. Oh wait, never mind. 

Prioritizing biology: The writer of this Slate piece is talking about Cynthia Nixon's statement that, for her, being gay was a choice—and that that shouldn't matter. But the larger point ties into the idea I was getting into earlier this week: Why do we prioritize biology over all else? In the gay rights movement certainly it was helpful at one point to frame sexual orientation biologically; it helped plenty of people understand that it was no more a choice than heterosexuality is for the majority of the population. But just as biology isn't what makes sexual orientation a perfectly fine way to live, neither do biological tendencies to prefer symmetrical faces or whatever mean we shouldn't question social construction of beauty. (Thanks to Rachel for the link.)

Default browser: Baby boomers buy more cosmetics online than other age groups, which makes total sense to me. I wouldn't buy makeup online unless I knew it was exactly what I wanted: exact shade, exact consistency, exact size, etc. And I'm guessing by the time I'm 50, I'll have damn well figured that out.

 What would the Venus of Urbino look like with a tummy tuck? Find out here.

Photoshopesque: We've heard ad nauseam about how classic paintings depicted fuller-figured women than what we tend to favor now—but this collection shows us, by retouching everything from Botticelli to Velazquez. Yikes! (Thanks to Meaghan for pointing me toward it.)

The loss of addiction: Medicinal Marzipan on the feeling of loss that comes with healing from emotional eating: "I miss the quick-fix, the bowl of beans and rice, the easy remedy that I could provide myself with the contents of my cupboards. Yes, I always knew this fix was fickle and short-lived, but in that moment, cheese solved most problems." It's a painful part of recovery, that sense of loss, but it's important to talk about.

What does "flattering" really mean?: "To me, flattering is another form of size policing and body fascism." I don't entirely agree with this piece at Persephone—I use the word flattering to mean I look how I want to look, and sometimes that absolutely includes concealing certain parts and highlighting others, which, you know, conforms to beauty standards. But the article is thought-provoking, and I know that I make a point to never use "flattering" as code for "It makes you look thinner" when talking to someone else. (So why use it for myself? Hmm.)

Books abound!: Congratulations to Elissa at Dress With Courage for her soon-to-be-published Thrifting 101, and to Kjerstin Gruys, who just signed with Penguin to publish a book about her year without mirrors. Excellent, excellent! 

More of me: Don't believe a word you read about me in Us magazine, the damned vultures. Instead, read these two interviews with me from two excellent organizations: Ma'yan, a research and education nonprofit examining identity issues facing Jewish girls, and Radar Productions, a literary nonprofit founded by Michelle Tea focused on giving voice to LGBTQ experiences. I don't blog much about blogging, because I gather that's not what you're here for, but if you're curious to know more about my thinking on what goes on The Beheld you may find them interesting.

Podcasting: Sally McGraw for Strong, Sexy & Stylish leads a discussion on the connection between looking great and feeling confident. She's pretty much the master of demonstrating why looking your best is a beginning, not an ending, to being your best self, so tune in, eh?

Comfort and style: Decoding Dress continues her series on discomfort and fashion by engaging with readers' comments to surge toward a thesis of fashion and comfort as social control. (Have I mentioned lately how much I think you all should be reading her?)

Have you ever seen a dermatologist?: Courtney at Those Graces asks why we're more willing to cover up our skin than to fix it. Yes, "fix" is a loaded term, but the point is that plenty of women spend money on concealers and foundations instead of going to a dermatologist, when really, if you have a genuine skin problem, that's where you should be going. Is it the paperwork? The hassle? The fact that it's less fun to visit a doctor than play at Sephora?

Like, layperson linguistics, totally: How does your voice influence the ways people think of you? A Valley girl thoughtfully shares her story.

Sister Nancy Ruth, Life-Professed Member of the Order of St. Andrew, Hudson Valley, New York

Paul Hoecker, Nonne im Laubgang von Dachau, 1897

Every time Sister Nancy Ruth turned on the television, a nun would be waiting. “Movies, TV shows—just something about nuns whenever I’d turn on the TV. Every time,” she says. She took it as a calling to become a nun, but her family responsibilities meant she couldn’t live in a convent. “So I prayed about it. I said, ‘God, you know what my situation is. I can’t go into a convent, I can’t be cloistered.’ The very next day, I opened a magazine called the Anglican Digest, and there was an ad for the Order of St. Andrew. He answered my prayer.” She’s been a nun with the Order of St. Andrew—which allows its brothers and sisters to live independently, hold jobs, and marry—for 17 years, and she became life-professed in 2000. In addition to her responsibilities within the order, she works as a pharmacy technician. We talked about the inherent femininity of a habit, the way our clothes might advertise our values, and where a gal can get a good vodka tonic. In her own words: 


On Femininity
I don’t think being a nun requires you to be unfeminine. I feel very feminine in my habit. I generally don’t dress for anyone but myself, so the idea of going out and trying to impress somebody else through what I wear just isn’t going to happen. Me in a strapless evening gown was never going to happen, whether I was a nun or not. It’s not because I don’t ever feel girly or sexy, but that form of sexiness isn’t going to be who I am.

I’m not sure if I’ve ever consciously tried to feel sexy. I’ve experimented a little bit more now that I’ve lost some weight; I’ve experimented with showing a little skin. Like, I have a dress that shows more cleavage than I’ve ever shown, and it’s a little uncomfortable to wear because it exposes more than I ever have in my entire life. But I found the right undergarment that gives the right kind of support, and I found the right necklace to go with it, one that sort of covers a lot of the area. The outfit isn’t necessarily revealing, but the effect is more intentional than anything I’ve worn before. I’ve survived! People have liked the look.

Makeup depends. Fingernail polish should be clear or very pale when you're in habit. Most of the sisters wear at least foundation. I normally wear eyeshadow, eyeliner, and mascara, but in habit I don’t wear any makeup at all. My eyes are one of my better features, so I like them to stand out. It’s just a way to feel girly, I guess. In the summertime I wear mostly dresses. They’re comfortable and cool without pantyhose, but I also wear them to feel girly. Feeling girly to me might mean a little bit of eye makeup, jewelry, perfume. My hair is short now, but I never had to cut my hair because I was a nun. I was worried about that because I had long hair when I first became a nun, but if you can keep it under the veil you can have your hair long.

Still, I don’t consider myself particularly feminine, at least not that classic Southern belle kind of feminine. I’ve always been very capable and strong, physically too, and I just couldn’t imagine acting like I wasn’t capable for any length of time. But as a nun, the first thing people see is that I am a woman. Having been mistaken for a boy on more than one occasion, it’s sort of nice to be seen as definitively female. Being a nun is a very traditional female role, and it’s an empowering role. People tend to think of nuns as being disempowered, but they’re not, not in my church. About the only thing I can’t do that a priest can is the actual mass, the different unctions, that sort of thing. But I can do sermons, I write homilies. I can counsel if someone asks me—it’s not as formal as it would be with a priest, but I don’t feel in any way limited as a nun. Women can be ordained in the Episcopal Church, but I was called to be a nun; I’m not called to be a priest. In college, a professor put the words “I am” on the board and had us finish that sentence three times as a way of defining ourselves. I don’t remember what I put then, but the answer now would be: I am a nun, I am a woman. I am an Anglican would probably be the third one.


On Wearing the Habit
The first time I put on the habit, it was like stepping into my own skin. It was wonderful. The order was probably the very first group I’ve ever felt comfortable with as quickly as I did; within two hours of meeting everybody I felt so comfortable. And it’s still comfortable to be with the order, and to wear the habit. When I put on the habit, it’s like putting on a hug. It almost feels like I’m physically being held by God at those times, more so than when I’m in my street clothes.

I used to joke that I became a nun so I didn’t have to make a choice about what to wear. And there are times when I’d really just rather live in the habit. One of the things I love when we get together as an order is that for four days, that’s all I wear. It’s interesting in those situations because someone will say “sister” and we all turn around! But it’s wonderful because we know each other’s personality more than we know each other’s looks. Depending on when each of us get up in the morning, there are some sisters I’ve never seen out of habit. So you have to look beyond the looks; you have to know the person. It’s a little different with the guys—they’re all wearing habits but they don’t cover their heads, and hair is such a distinctive feature on people. But even with them you get to know the person as opposed to the looks, and it’s a perfect example of how you can be friends with members of the opposite sex, even when you’re both heterosexual. Some of my best friends are brothers.

As a nun I represent my order, and I represent Christ, so there are things I can’t do. Like, I absolutely cannot smoke. It’s not officially written down, but when your mother [in the order] says no smoking… And we can drink, but we cannot get drunk. Our order meets twice a year, and before I moved and was closer to the order I’d fly up. We’d all go to one of the airport bars and you’d see six or seven of us, all nuns and priests, sitting around drinking. That was probably pretty funny to see—us stepping up to the bar and saying, “Can I have a vodka tonic?”

The habit has left me feeling not particularly self-conscious about my body. I’ve never hated my body or anything; I’ve been comfortable with myself for a fairly long time. But I’ve lost 80 pounds since 2009, mostly for health reasons, and it’s a nice feeling to look at old pictures of myself and see the difference. I suppose I feel more positive in that respect. If body image comes into play it’s more that I can say I look good, as opposed to just feeling comfortable. I tend to hide my body a lot, and you could say that maybe being in the habit does that as well, but it’s also like being the only pink bead in a bowl full of black beads. You stand out in a habit. So I don’t really think of it as hiding my body. When I started wearing the habit, I stopped being the fat lady. Instead I became the nun. It frees you up from a lot of society’s expectations; you’re exempt as a nun. You don’t have to be a part of a couple; you don’t have to be that certain societally defined form of sexually attractive. You can be by yourself—you’re expected to be by yourself, or with a group of nuns. So even though I stand out, I also feel less conspicuous. As a nun it’s not quite as uncomfortable to be alone.


On Modesty
Modesty is a Christian belief, in part because Christianity is about loving God and loving others as you love yourself. Being humble and not putting yourself first is probably the hardest thing a religion asks you to do. But at the same time, you have to value yourself before you can value others. So you dress in a way that shows you value your body, that your body is not out there for someone else to exploit. I see a lot of girls who dress in a way that looks a bit like they’re exploiting themselves. Sex is so much more intimate than whatever you’d wear to a bar. It’s so much more meaningful that I can’t imagine selling it that short, being that blasé about it. Your clothes are an advertisement of yourself: How do you value yourself? Are you modest? Are you for sale? The idea is that if you value yourself as a person, your clothes will reflect that. You’ll make yourself up because you want to feel good about yourself; you won’t wear makeup if you don’t really want to. And you’ll never make yourself up like a fool.

There might be some religious rules about not wearing makeup, keeping your head covered, not wearing jewelry—but that has more to do with showing off and being proud. In my case, I cover my head because it’s part of the habit, sure. But it also takes away from people looking at me as a sexual person. When I’m wearing my habit, I’m advertising that I’m a nun—I’m advertising that I’m not really supposed to be seen as a sexual person. I’m supposed to be seen as more of a religious person.

I consider myself married to God. I’m not wearing my wedding ring today; the ring has gotten too big, and my last ring guard fell off this morning and I can’t find it. Nuns in my order can be married, but your very first commitment is to God, before anything else. But I’ve never really thought about dressing for God, because God knows your heart. God knows me naked. He knows me naked physically and emotionally and spiritually. He knows all the dark secrets, even ones that I don’t want to know for myself, and the fact that he still loves me is important. When people say to take pride in yourself, what I take from that is that God created you individually as you are, and you’re a good person, and he loves you as you are. Does that mean you shouldn’t get better? I mean, God loved me when I was 265 pounds, and he doesn’t love me better now that I weigh less. My love for God helped me say, “God made something really good and I’m screwing it up”; I really wasn’t treating my body well. But when you’re talking about appearance, there’s not really any changes I would make for God. I dress in habit, okay. But living as he would want me to live—showing love to others, being humble, treating others with love and acceptance and patience even when it’s hard—I guess that’s how I dress for God.

Breaking Down Beauty: Physiognomy Revisited

 If you really want the magic decoder ring, scroll to page 61.

Just when you thought you’d read enough from me about physiognomy—the discredited pseudoscience of face-reading to determine character—for one month, here I come, wagging my charts with dimensions of bulbous foreheads and “lipless mouths” that “denote housewifery.” It’s just that in thinking more about the notion of “It” girls as a modern-day version of the science of face-reading, I realized I’d sort of fast-forwarded into that idea without looking at the more direct ways physiognomy is very much alive today.

Its rebirth isn’t called physiognomy, of course; it’s called something like "a universal conception of personality structure," which sounds much less nefarious than a discredited science based on phrases like “I have never yet seen a nose with a broad back, whether arched or rectilinear, that did not appertain to an extraordinary man.” Researchers use facial characteristics to explain things like gaydar, the trustworthiness of baby-faced adults, and women’s supposed preference for manly-men, and even conscientiousness. Even more so than with modeling, modern adaptations of physiognomy are often specifically not about beauty; they’re about classifying features in order to (supposedly) understand more about how we function. Physiognomy has its direct progeny in these areas of study. But the more I think about it, physiognomy is also a grandparent to the extraordinary attention paid to beauty by science researchers.

I’ve questioned the scientific drive behind beauty research before, and I don’t want to be redundant. In a nutshell: There’s an enormous body of research trying to pin down what exactly makes someone beautiful (rather, what makes someone conventionally attractive, I’d argue), and how/why people react to good-looking folks the way we do. I suspect it’s the very mystery of beauty that drives academic research behind beauty. There’s so much literature about how beauty leaves us powerless in its wake; why wouldn’t we want to demystify it in order to lessen its supposed power over us? (The next logical question question is gendered—why do we want so specifically to put a fine point on women’s beauty—but that’s a different post.)

Beauty science is the richest heir to physiognomy. What physiognomy attempted to do was pin down the mysteries of character and behavior, using a highly coded and essentially arbitrary system of classification. What scientists and economists are attempting to do with its glut of studies on beauty is pin down the mystery of fascination, using the highly specialized—and often subjective—tools at their disposal. When attempting to decipher what puzzles us, it’s assuring to turn to something unassailable to provide us with order. We can now look at physiognomy and see it’s ridiculous, but plenty today are happy to give credence to evolutionary psychology as it pertains to beauty without giving it a second thought. We can see the blatant racism, or at least the potential for it, in evolutionary psychology; we may not be as able to see how it enshrines subtler beauty norms, in part because there’s so much mystery, doubt, fear, and wonder about human beauty, particularly our own. (Is it possible to read any study on what determines beauty without attempting, however briefly, to figure out where you’d fall by its measure? I once actually measured the circumference of my wrist because it was supposed to tell me something about my desirability as a mate.)

I’m not trying to say that beauty researchers are as full of hocus-pocus as physiognomists. Where the father of 18th-century physiognomy Johann Kaspar Lavater said ,“Meeting eyebrows, held so beautiful by the Arabs...I can neither believe to be beautiful nor characteristic of such a quality,” the new set of beauty science at least attempts to set objective criteria. (At least, some of the time it does; much of the time it’s just as subjective as a 1794 fortune-teller. The aggregate study from Daniel Hamermesh that got a lot of ink last year examined five studies on beauty; four of them relied upon the beauty assessment of exactly one person.) I’m also not saying there’s nothing to the evolutionary science of beauty. I’m not qualified to make that statement, and it makes sense that the science of beauty, including evolutionary psychology, has a valid place in any thorough discussion of beauty. But what I’ve repeatedly found is that when people rush to bring in scientific “proof” of why we find certain features beautiful, it shuts down the conversation instead of enlivens it. It’s a way of saying, Sorry, babe, there’s nothing you can do about it, whether “it” is the incessant ogling of a woman with the desired waist-hip ratio, or someone feeling excluded from the realm of the beautiful because her features don’t match up quite right.

And that’s just a shame. I don’t think that the people behind these studies mean to shut down discourse about beauty; I think the actual researchers want to do the opposite. The most prominent researcher on the science of beauty, Nancy Etcoff, presents her work as a launching point, making it clear that she just wants the science of beauty to have a place in the conversation; her book, Survival of the Prettiest, is as much a cultural study as it is a scientific one. Actually, Etcoff’s introduction to her book makes it clear that she’s only trying to bring science back to beauty. Science had been concerned with looks at one point, she writes, until such studies became discredited as arbitrary, racist, and generally faulty. The science she was writing of, of course, was physiognomy.

Last week I wrote that it’s useful to look at a now-discredited pseudoscience in order to understand the collective cultural forces that go into taste-making, specifically in the modeling industry. But the consideration of physiognomy has a far more direct application to most of us: If we can give the science of beauty the same skepticism we now give to physiognomy, we may be able to see how little of the story evolutionary psychology really gives us when it comes to looks and attraction. Again, I’m not saying that Etcoff and the like are the equivalent of Lavater, making wild proclamations based solely on their own experience. But physiognomy’s, erm, limitations can illuminate those of the beauty sciences. More important, they can show us that there’s something more at stake than simple research. Lavater wrote Physiognomy in 1775—the early years of the Industrial Revolution, which would change the entire world more rapidly, and more radically, than any developments that came before it. The science of beauty began to see a resurgence in the 1960s, another time of blistering change. So let me ask you: What is going on now that might make scientists and economists put hard numbers on beauty? What sort of threat might a pretty face—or, for that matter, a not-pretty one—pose to social order? Why might we want to boil down beauty to a series of tables and charts, measurements and ratios, and why now? If we understand beauty in a rational way, who benefits—and whose power is curtailed?

Beauty Blogosphere 2.10.12

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

From Head...
The extravaganza: Seems that we've always liked to mock vanity, and there's none better than Sissydude's hilarious collection of antique images satirizing elaborate hairstyles of yore. (via Final Fashion)

Celebrate good times?: Mark Black History Month—with a sale on hair relaxers! Oh my. To be sure, hair relaxers have a place in black history; plenty of black women straighten their hair and they're not race traitors because of it. But couldn't Family Dollar have come up with a better way to celebrate Black History Month? Like changing their name for the month to Family Fifty-Eight Cents to mark the continuing pay disparity between black and white Americans? (Actually, I now see this was from two years ago. But the misguided idea here is unfortunately persistent, as this updated roundup shows.)


...To Toe...
I cannot believe this isn't more popular: Shoe stores offering pedicures.


...And Everything In Between:
Bad week for makeup makers: L'Oréal is closing a Cleveland-area plant because it's consolidating its shampoo and conditioner manufacturing, putting 260 out of work. And Proctor & Gamble is laying off and otherwise reducing work for several thousand employees making up 3% of its workforce. Counterintuitively, given the company's successful marketing campaigns, much of the reduction is coming from marketing and other non-manufacturing departments. (Also this week: Proctor & Gamble is responsible for killing lard. Lard! The best fat of them all!) 

Video star: I admit I don't really get the Lana Del Rey thing, meaning I understand neither the vitriol directed in her direction nor the passionate defenses of her—rather, I don't understand why her music has spurred such discourse. That said, the discourse is interesting, particularly this piece at Tiger Beatdown: "[D]udes are angry because they have been exposed to the artifice; because seeing Lana del Rey perform, they cannot claim that there is such a thing as a 'unique natural femininity.' They hate her, of course, because to acknowledge the artifice would, inevitably, lead to questioning the artifice behind their own notions of femininity and, again, inevitably, their own stereotypes of masculinity." I just sort of wish her music was as interesting as what people are saying about it. (I do like her music, for the record; I just don't how it's sparked this kind of discussion. Then again, I never understand music lyrics, ever, so maybe that's why she's lost on me? She could be singing in Cambodian for all I know.) 

Does this include Mary Janes?: What we buy when we purchase a named garment (like J.Crew's Minnie pants): "The emotional structure of a proper name sparks a relationship with pants that transcends the physical interactions that would normally occur in a store. Verbal and iconic structures confirm the pants are real, but the emotional structure connotes a person-to-person exchange. Online, the Named garment allows us to establish trusting relationships with products through action that simulates clicking personal profiles, rather than transactions devoid of humanity. That sweater? She’s Tippi. Those shoes? Mona."

 Ideally the spilling polish would also be a chocolate fountain.

Built to spill: Gimmick architecture of the year: Store designed to look like bottle of nail polish pouring onto the floor.

Ladyscience: Science writer Hillary Rosner's piece about her frustration on writing for women's magazines shows what goes on behind the scenes. I'm similarly frustrated by women's magazines and know what she says to be absolutely true (that is, I've never worked with Rosner but have seen this happen repeatedly in my career)—but I'm also a believer in what they've done for women, and what they can continue to do. Women's magazines were instrumental in women's health issues being taken seriously, and they do a good job of staying on-point with service for the reader. It's that very service—the single-minded aspiration to give readers a singular "takeaway"—that drives many of the problems Rosner is writing about here. We need the takeaway, but we also need credible science writing in women's magazines if they're to continue giving true service to women.

Cupcakes and cash: Cupcakes and Cashmere blogger Emily Schuman is signing on with Estee Lauder as social media editor, which makes sense, as she's "our ideal customer," according to the brand global president. It's an example of the crucial role of authenticity in brand marketing: Schuman has a loyal readership because they see her as speaking solely for herself, and by teaming up with Estee Lauder, that quality is transferred. (Also, and this is pure conjecture, hiring Schuman is probably cheaper than their usual promotional venues, which would make Wall Street happy instead of frowny over Estee Lauder's middling earnings.)

Shop after you've dropped: Thanks to Glamour magazine and the New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission, shoppers will be able to use their smartphones to buy luxury beauty products using special tags in a test flight of taxicabs. No word on a launch date for the "dream to shop" app that lets you buy shit in your sleep.  

Beauty at All Ages!: e.l.f. Cosmetics is having a downright revolutionary contest called "Beauty at All Ages," in which aspiring models can enter pictures of themselves in one of four categories: teens, 20s, 30s, and 40+. All ages, people, you hear that? All ages.

Oh Nicki: Clutch magazine casts a critical eye upon Nicki Minaj's embrace of the white beauty standard. "The fact that Minaj has generated so much success by merging the typical mainstream beauty standards of Barbie and Marilyn Monroe with the outlandish 'ghetto booty' that so many black men celebrate speaks volumes."  

On stand-ins: Maryam Monalisa Gharavi on the use of imagery in one of the most absurd news stories of late: the public use of a cardboard cutout of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to mark the anniversary of his post-exile return to Iran. "He who denounced immodestly dressed women as ‘coquettes’ (the Shah referred to them as ‘dolls’) has been dwarfed into a string puppet. ... I find myself more interested in what is really real in these photos than what constitutes simulacra of the real." It's an interesting story in its own right, but while reading I kept thinking: We can easily see the use of a cardboard cutout of Khomeini as patently ludicrous. But it's also an (admittedly dramatic) externalization of the way we do treat images as the real deal—worth keeping in mind with image-worship of beautiful women.

Haute hijab: Terrifically excited to see where Underwraps, a new Muslim modeling agency, goes.

The Chinese consumer: The state of cosmetics in China. Makeup was forbidden under the Cultural Revolution, paving the way for cosmetics education seminars targeting new consumers, including a "lunch and learn" program for administrative office workers.

Blue Ivy™: Did Jay-Z and Beyonce actually file a trademark claim on their daughter's name, with the intent of using it for a line of beauty products?

Easy peasy: Got acne? Put a frog on it!

Beauty Imagined: My reading list is a gazillion miles long, but this Bookslut review of Beauty Imagined: A Global History of the Beauty Industry bumps Geoffrey Jones's book farther up the list.

Gone raw: I feel pretty strongly that a raw-foods diet is way too close for comfort to eating-disorder-land, but if anyone could convince me otherwise it's Gena and her textured writings at Choosing Raw. And this piece about the dangers of pursuing a raw or vegan lifestyle as a beauty regime shows why. "There is a ton of pressure for people who eat healthy to also look 'the part.' It is assumed that healthy vegans and vegetarians will be slim, clear-skinned, and energetic at all times. ... I’ve been approached by readers when I was particularly exhausted before, and gotten worried: did I look pale? Did I have bags under my eyes? Obviously, those things indicate nothing more than the fact that I’m a full time pre-med student and blogger who doesn’t sleep enough. But the fear is that people will assume my healthy lifestyle habits are ineffectual, or a hoax."

"Appearance sports": Plenty of us are well-versed in spotting the signs of eating disorders. But this piece focuses on symptoms of eating disorders in female bodybuilders, whose symptoms may be less easily spotted because A) being thin isn't the point, and B) attention to physique is already a given in their lives.

"Repetition is the uniform": Brittany Julious, lyrical as ever, has a short prose piece "On Uniforms."

Also, owl tattoos: The Blind Hem looks at the "functionless fashion" of hipsters. "So instead of uselessly consuming the useless, as the readers of Vogue are wont to do, the readers of Vice consume—still uselessly—the useful. Hipsters pervert the traditional functionlessness of aesthetic objects by taking up, as fashionable, clothing that has as its only redeeming quality function (Carharts, Doc Martins, flannel, etc)... All this appears to constitute the kind of perversion that makes the non-hipster media not only uncomfortable but angry."

Dulce de leche: Breastfeeding glamour, courtesy Nahida at The Fatal Feminist. 

Bellies up: Danielle at Final Fashion looks at the fetishized belly throughout history, from Venus of Willendorf to Christina Aguilera. (The day I read this, I purchased my first-ever empire-waist item, a long aquamarine nightgown. Coincidence? I think not.)

Also, she's all of 53: Two differing but ultimately compatible takes on the issue of Madonna and age, spurred by her Superbowl halftime performance. Caitlin proposes a moratorium on jokes about her age, while Julie Klausner and Natasha Vargas-Cooper at The Awl ask why she insists on clinging to a girlish version of sexiness instead of a womanly version of it.

Let's get comfortable: Decoding Dress, with her ever-sharp critical eye, examines a fashion double bind: In part I, she presents the question of dressing stylishly versus dressing comfortably, and in part II, she breaks down the role societal authority has in both creating and enforcing the double bind.

Extra/ordinary: On eating disorders and the desire to be extraordinary. I don't agree with everything this piece says (and I got the feeling throughout that the writer hadn't quite liberated herself from the need to feel extraordinary, but then again, who has?). But it's a good look into the links between "impostor syndrome," eating disorders, and achievement. So many ED stories focus on the "need to be thin" from an appearance-based perspective, and I particularly like that this doesn't do that, preferring to look at that drive from the more complex place where eating disorders are actually born.

Thoughts on a Word: Glamour (Part II)

I’ve had my chance to expound on glamour (which, of course, I did from my chaise longue with a Manhattan in hand while my protégé took dictation), but the concept of glamour is intriguing enough to warrant a revisiting—not from me, but from four women who each have their own distinct relationship with glamour. I’m delighted that each of them—author Virginia Postrel, publicist Lauren Cerand, artist Lisa Ferber, and novelist Carolyn Turgeon—took the time and effort to share their thoughts on glamour with me. And now, with you.

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Virginia Postrel, author, columnist, and speaker who is currently writing a book about glamour, to be published by The Free Press in early 2013. She explores "the magic of glamour in its many manifestations" at DeepGlamour.net, a group blog.

Like humor, glamour arises from the interaction of an audience and an object. Someone or something is always glamorous to a specific audience. So there has to be something about the glamorous object that triggers and focuses the audience's desires—that makes them project themselves into the glamorous image and feel themselves somehow transformed. But those qualities are different in different contexts, and they may not even be things that are widely recognized as "glamorous."

A good way to understand glamour is to start not with fashion or people but with the glamour of travel. Think of classic travel posters and contemporary resort ads, with their images of exotic locales, peaceful beaches, or seemingly effortless transportation. What makes an image of the New York skyline, a cruise ship against the blue Mediterranean, or Ankgor Wat at dawn so alluring? Why does the sight of a jet rising against a sunset or full moon seem so glamorous?

The glamour of travel lies first in its promise to lift us out of our everyday existence. We project ourselves into this new and special place, imagining that there we will fulfill our unsatisfied longings—whatever they may be. Just getting away doesn’t make travel glamorous, however. Going every year to your family’s cabin on Lake Michigan may be fun, but it’s too familiar for glamour. A glamorous destination is at least a little bit exotic. It shimmers with the possibilities of the unknown. Its mystery not only stokes imagination. It also heightens the good and hides the bad (or the banal, like all the other tourists congregating to snap Angkor Wat at dawn). As the great studio-era photographer George Hurrell put it: “Bring out the best, conceal the worst, and leave something to the imagination.”

The glamour of travel illustrates the three elements found in all forms of glamour: mystery, grace, and the promise of escape and transformation. These elements explain why certain styles or codes seem to spell “glamour.”

Take fashion. If glamour by definition requires elements of mystery and aspiration—escape from the ordinary—then the clothes you wear or see on the street every day are not going to be glamorous. Hence we often associate glamour with the kinds of extraordinary evening wear that few people can afford and even fewer have any occasion to wear. But, depending on the audience, other forms of fashion can be glamorous. Vintage styles that represent some idealized period in the past are an obvious example. So are sneakers associated with great athletes. Even something as mundane as a business suit can be glamorous if it represents a career you aspire to but have not (yet) achieved.

The "codes of glamour" change with the audience and the times. The iconography of glamour in 1930s Hollywood films—bias-cut satin gowns, "big white sets," lots of glitter and shine—is quite different from Grace Kelly in the New Look, sweater sets, and pearls. Yet we think of both as classically glamorous.

Like humor, glamour sometimes emerges spontaneously and sometimes is actively constructed. Some things tend to stay glamorous, or funny, over time. Others cease to have the right effect. Mink coats used to be a quick way of signaling a kind of glamour. I'd argue that they've been replaced with another cliche: the hot stone massage photos you see everywhere. The massage photos also show indulgent feminine luxury, but they appeal to different longings—not so much for social status as for pampering and relaxation, a private experience rather than a social good. Similarly, I write about how wind turbines have become glamorous symbols of technological optimism, in the same way that rocket ships were in the 1950s and early '60s.

Finally, some things are glamorous without being widely recognized as such. The bridge of the Starship Enterprise is intensely glamorous to a certain audience. It elicits the same kind of projection and longing that other people feel when they think of Paris or haute couture, and it also shares the three essential elements of glamour.

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Lauren Cerand, independent public relations consultant. She shares notes on living at LuxLotus.com.

Glamour is the word, pertaining to me, that I hear most often from other people, and, in truth, the word I think of least on my own (conceptually, I gravitate toward things that are elegant, or correct, or comfortingly archaic, and, most importantly, eschew embellishment of any kind. I'm a minimalist with opulent taste). That makes sense, though, if, to quote Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie, whom I heard read her poem "Glamourie" in Edinburgh years ago, "glamour is a Gaelic word," intended to mean a sort of enchanting trickery, "fairy magic" cast down over the eyes of the unsuspecting (sophistication also had similar implications, of a gloss for the purposes of deceptive artifice, in its early usage, according to Faye Hammill's wonderful cultural study, Sophistication, on University of Liverpool Press). Glamour certainly seems to play out that way, as a quality of perception more than direct experience. I don't think then, that I could regard myself as glamorous. I simply make a living from having a semi-public life and the fact that people admire my personal taste enough to emulate it. While I never stretch the truth, as lying takes too much time and I am always short of it, I am a private person at heart and so I can see the tantalizingly faint trail of breadcrumbs that I leave behind, twinkling in starlight, inspiring one to imagine the cake from which they must have fallen. Perhaps now and then it really was that grand. It could be our secret, but I'd never tell.

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Lisa Ferber, artist, playwright, performer, and bonne vivante. Peruse her works at LisaFerber.com, and keep an eye out for her upcoming web series, The Sisters Plotz.

The funny thing about glamour is that an exact definition of the word is as elusive as the quality itself. The quality is like a special fairy dust that makes a person sparkle; you can’t put your finger on precisely what it is. I think it has to start from within. When I see today’s teenage starlets trying to pull off 1940s Old Movie Star Glamour, I just think, Um, no, you can’t just do a deep side-part and red lipstick and think now you’re Ava Gardner. But there’s this woman who works the bread counter at Zabar’s who I admire because there she is in her white bread-counter smock, but she’s probably in her 60s and always has a full face of makeup on, and sparkly barrettes in her nicely done hair, and she’s gorgeous and all dressed up to work the bread counter. Whenever I see her I have to repress blurting out, “You are my hero! You look like a movie star!”

It absolutely cannot be purchased, but I do think there is an aspect of formality involved. Glamour always involves looking pulled together. Even if the look is over-the-top, it has to come across as though there was care taken. That's part of the mystique. Glamour implies that everything you meant to do is coming across just as you want it to. It’s hard to be glamorous in a track suit, but if you really want to do it that way, you can go over the top with heels and baubles and make it eccentric, because eccentricity done right can exude glamour. I think the best glamour will teeter on eccentricity, because it’s about going just a little bit too far. All the photos I love from early 20th century photographers like Horst and Irving Penn are about going too far…giant hats, luxurious gowns...clothes that serve no practical purpose, and therein lies their glamour. Because glamour is about transcending the everyday.

When people have called me glamorous, it thrills me, because I have always felt a kinship with those old-school 1930s and 1940s women. People have always told me that I seem like I’m from another time, which I think is funny because it’s not really something I’m trying to do; it’s just how I am. I’ve painted from photos of Carole Lombard, Liz Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, Jean Harlow…all of them have that Something, where it would be impossible to imagine them ever looking disheveled or weighed down by life’s woes, though of course we know they were real women with all the problems people have.

Recently I shot the first episode of my new web series, The Sisters Plotz. I wrote it, and it stars TV icons Eve Plumb, Lisa Hammer, and me (Hammer also directs). Eve, Lisa, and I were shooting a street scene in which we are dressed like glamour girls from the 1930s, and everyone we passed on the street would smile at us and tell us how great we looked. And it wasn't just because we looked "good" or were dressed up; it's because glamour, particularly the old-school, dedicated, womanly glamour of the 1930s, has an effect on people. It says just check your troubles at the door and be your glorious self. Glamour is transportive in that sense. I think glamour means a person has a quality of being slightly outside—dare I say above?—the normal realm of boring problems. A few years ago, I was going through a tough time, and my wonderful friend Chris Etcheverry gave me this gorgeous green-tiled art-deco mirror, and he said, “I know things are hard for you right now, and you might not feel your best, so whenever you aren’t feeling so good, I want you to look in this mirror and remind yourself that you are glamorous.” And I knew what he meant is that I have something inside, that glamour is a strength from the inside that allows you to transcend life’s unpleasantries.

Glamour is a quality that makes someone look and seem Famous; it’s intriguing, it is the quality that makes people wonder who you are, and what your secret is. A person finds their own glamour—it’s not about being an 8-year-old wearing expensive clothes, rather it’s about developing yourself so that you’re a person with a Something. I was watching a biography on the fantastic Gertrude Berg, the entertainment pioneer who created The Goldbergs, and her son was saying that she always dressed a certain way and had a quality about her, where people would see her and even if they didn’t know who she was, they could tell she was somebody. That’s glamour.

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Carolyn Turgeon, author of Rain Village, Godmother, Mermaid, and The Next Full Moon, coming out in March. She blogs at IAmaMermaid.com about all things mermaid.

With glamour, I see images. I see red lipstick, I see arched brows. I see Marlene Dietrich, Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard, Greta Garbo. I see sitting in a satin bed with bonbons. I see glittery, shiny things, I see everything in black-and-white, old-timey, leopard print. Glamour takes what’s beautiful and chic and makes it over-the-top. The first time I went to Dollywood—I love Dolly Parton—I went to the museum, and it’s full of all her crazy rhinestone-crusted paraphernalia. There’s this quote there where she says that she knows people might think she’s ridiculous and laugh at her, but she was this girl from the mountains who grew up running around barefoot, so to her, this is beautiful. The rhinestones and the glitter. She doesn’t care if some people think it’s ridiculous. She’s like a little girl playing dress-up, reveling in the artifice of it. Glamour can be a little like that, a way to add fabulousness and fantasy and a little over-the-top shimmer to your regular life.

Glamorous doesn’t have to be beautiful. In terms of female beauty, you can take a natural-looking girl without makeup on the beach and she might be really beautiful, but not glamorous. Glamour is, by definition, unnatural; it's about adornment and style; it’s about knowingly adorning yourself in a way that hearkens back to certain images that are cool and dreamy, otherworldly. Not everyone can be beautiful, but anyone can be glamorous, because it's something you can actually do. I like that any woman can put on really red lips, get an old travel valise and a little muff, and wear sunglasses on top of her head. (Of course men can do all these things, too, and become, among other things, that most glamorous of creatures, the drag queen.) It doesn’t matter how old she is, what color she is, whether she's rich or poor, big or small. It's the woman standing in shadow in the doorway, Marilyn standing over the subway grate, Garbo emerging from the smoke in Anna Karenina.

Thoughts on a Word: Glamour (Part I)

Glamour is an illusion, and an allusion too. Glamour is a performance, a creation, a recipe, but one with give. Glamour is elegance minus restraint, romance plus distance, sparkle sans naivete. Glamour is Grace Kelly, Harlow, Jean (picture of a beauty queen). Glamour is $3.99 on U.S. newsstands, $4.99 Canada. Glamour is artifice. Glamour is red lipstick, Marcel waves, a pause before speaking, and artfully placed yet seemingly casual references to time spent in Capri. Glamour is—let’s face it—a cigarette. Glamour is Jessica Rabbitt, and it’s Miss Piggy too. Glamour is adult. Glamour cannot be purchased, but it can’t be created out of thin air either. Glamour is both postmodern and yesterday. Glamour is an accomplishment. Glamour is magic.

In fact, glamour began quite literally with magic. Growing from the Scottish gramarye around 1720, glamer was a sort of spell that would affect the eyesight of those afflicted, so that objects appear different than they actually are. Sir Walter Scott anglicized the word and brought it into popular use in his poems (“You may bethink you of the spell / Of that sly urchin page / This to his lord did impart / And made him seem, by glamour art / A knight from Hermitage”); not long after his death in 1832 the word began to be used to describe the metaphoric spell we cast upon one another by being particularly beautiful or fascinating. It wasn’t necessarily a compliment (“There was little doubt that he meant to bring his magnetism and his glamour, and all his other diabolical properties, to market here,” from an 1878 novel) but by the 1920s—not coincidentally, the time women started developing the styles that we now recognize as glamorous—the meaning had shed much of its air of suspicion.

Not that we’re wholly unsuspicious of glamour. Female villains in films are often impossibly glamorous, for as fascinated as we are with the artifice of glamour, we’re also a tad wary of it. Glamour keeps its holder at a distance, and it needs that distance in order to work; watch the magician’s hands too closely and you’ll spoil the trick. It’s unkind to glamour to call it strictly a trick, but neither is it inaccurate: On a person, glamour is a series of reference points that form its illusory quality. We perceive red lipstick and hair cascading over one shoulder as glamorous because we understand it’s referencing something we’ve collectively decided is glamorous. The same is true of glamorous looks with less direct artifice—say, a world traveler in a pith helmet and white linen—but in becoming a reference point, anything we code as glamour becomes artifice, even if it’s not about smoke and mirrors. It’s not hard to get glamour “right,” but since glamour is a set of references—a creation instead of a state of being—you do have to get it right in order to be seen as glamorous as opposed to pretty, polished, or chic. We don’t stumble into glamour; we create it, even if we don’t realize that’s what we’re doing. Call glamour a performance if you wish. It’s equally accurate to call it an accomplishment.

In 1939, glamour—rather, Glamour—took on an additional definition. In 1932, publishing company Condé Nast launched a new series of sewing pattern books featuring cheaper garments more readily accessible to the downtrodden seamstresses of the Depression; its more elite Vogue pattern line hadn't been doing well. Seven years later, Condé Nast spun off a magazine from this Hollywood Pattern Book called Glamour of Hollywood, which promised readers the “Hollywood way to fashion, beauty, and charm.” By 1941 it had shed “of Hollywood” and had already toned down its coverage of Hollywood in order to focus on the life of the newfound career girl; by 1949 its subtitle was “For the girl with a job.” That is, Glamour wasn’t about film or Hollywood or unattainable ideals; Glamour was about you. That ethos continues to this day: Glamour might have a $12,000 bracelet on its cover but will have a $19 miniskirt inside, and its editorial tone squarely targets plucky but thoughtful young women who want to “have it all.”

It’s all too fitting that the once-downmarket* sister of Vogue is titled Glamour. To the eyes of a nation emerging from a depression, the concept of glamour might have seemed faraway—but it also seemed accessible in ways that the gilt-edged Vogue wasn’t. The “girl with a job” knew that with the right sleight-of-hand, she could purchase aspects of glamour found on the magazine’s pages, pick up a tip or two about home economy (if one must be bothered with the terribly unglamorous domestic life, why not make it economical?), and find out how to enchant her suitors or husband—and she wouldn’t necessarily need money or social status to do any of those things. She just needed the know-how of glamour. Glamour magazine doesn’t target the highest end of the market, nor does it assume that its readers have the cultural capital of the modern-day gentry (“How to do Anything Better” is one of its more popular features; readers might learn how to make a proper introduction or throw a dinner party). At first glance this might seem counterintuitive to the spirit of its namesake, yet it’s anything but: With these specific moves, Glamour reinforces the notion of glamour as something actionable. In knowing that most of its readers, however stylish, aren’t among the cultural illuminati, Glamour acknowledges that maybe they have need of casting the occasional spell—which, of course, Glamour is happy to supply.

I should say here that I worked for Glamour magazine for several years as a copy editor.** I share that not only to disclose my relationship with the magazine, but also because my specific post there—as a professional grammarian—was tethered to the concept of glamour more than I realized. For gramarye, the root word of glamour, also gave birth to the word grammar. The route is fairly straightforward: Gramarye at one time simply meant learning, including learning of the occult, and it’s this variant that went on to be glamour. Grammar stayed magic-free and pertained to the rules of learning, eventually becoming particular to the rules of language. But the two are linked more than just etymologically: Both grammar and glamour function as a set of rules that help people articulate themselves and allow us to understand one another. I understand you are telling me of the future by the use of words like will and going to; I understand you are telling me about your vision of yourself with red lipstick and a wiggle dress.

Some may argue that the rules and articulations of glamour are confining. They can be, when taken as feminine dictates, but they also make glamour democratic. It’s easy to aim for class or sophistication and miss the mark, for there are so many ways we can make unknowing missteps. But because glamour relies upon references and images, with a bit of thought and creativity almost anyone can conjure its magic—and unlike fashion, glamour doesn’t go in and out of style, so you needn’t reinvest every season. You can be fat and glamorous, bald and glamorous, poor and glamorous, short and glamorous, nerdy and glamorous, a man and glamorous. Perhaps most important, you can be old and glamorous. In fact, age helps. (Children are never glamorous; neither are the naive.) Glamour’s illusion doesn’t make old people look younger; it makes them look exactly their age, without apology. Glamour can channel the things we may attribute to youth—sex appeal, flirtation, vitality—but it also requires things that come more easily with age, like mystery and a past. Think of the trappings of adult femininity little girls reach for in play: not bras and sanitary pads, but high heels and lipstick, those two most glamorous things whose entire point is to create an illusion. A five-year-old knows that with womanhood can come glamour, if she wishes. She also knows it’s not yet hers to assume.

In case it’s not yet clear: I am a champion of glamour. That’s not to say I’m always glamorous; few can be, and certainly I’m not one of them. I like comfort far too much to be consistently glamorous. But I’m firmly in glamour’s thrall. When I am walking down the street (particularly 44th Street, in the general direction of an excellent martini) in something I feel glamorous in—say, a certain navy-blue bias-cut polka-dot dress with a draped neckline, clip-clip heels, a small hat, and the reddest lipstick I own—I feel a variety of confidence that I can’t channel using any other means. It’s not a confidence that’s superior to other forms of assurance, but it’s inherently different. It’s the feeling of prettiness, yes, and femininity and looking appropriate for the occasion. It’s all of those things, but the overriding feeling is this: When I am feeling and looking glamorous, I am slipping into an inchoate yet immensely satisfying spot between the public and private spheres. You see me in my polka-dotted ‘40s-style dress, small hat, and lipstick, and you may think I look glamorous—which is the goal. But here’s the trick of glamour: You see me, and yet you don’t. That is, you see the nods to the past, and you see how they look on my particular form; you see what I bring to the image, or how I create my own. Yet because I’m not necessarily attempting to show you my authentic self—whatever that might be—but rather a highly coded self, I control how much you’re actually witness to.

Now, that’s part of the whole problem we feminists have with the visual construction of femininity: The codes speak for us and we have to fight all that much harder to have our words heard over the din our appearance creates. But within those codes also lies a potential for relief, for our own construction, for play, for casting our own little spells. That’s true of all fashion and beauty, but it’s particularly true of the magic of glamour.

I promise not to play tricks on anyone. But forgive me if, every so often, I might want to use a little magic.
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Stay tuned for part II tomorrow, in which an author and renowned national columnist, a multidisciplinary artist and satirist, a four-time novelist with a bent toward otherworldly enchantment, and a publicist who's one of the "cultural gatekeepers in the literary world" share their own thoughts on the concept of glamour.
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*Glamour isn’t “downmarket” any longer, I don’t think; it’s more middle-market. Or, as a marketing poster once floating through the halls there read, it’s “masstige.”
**Given the dual etymology, I think it's only fair to declare all Glamour grammarians to be sorceresses.

Modeling as Modern-Day Physiognomy

From Physiognomy Illustrated; Or, Nature's Revelations of Character, Joseph Simms,
pub. 1889, Crackpot Press

I’ve had my palm read and my astrological chart done, but what I really want to find is a physiognomist. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your purpose, physiognomy—the art of decoding character and temperament through the way our facial features are formed—has been discredited, and except for the occasional parlor game piece, it’s not something we readily find anymore (though if you know of a good physiognomist in the New York City area, holler!). Our faces already communicate so much to the world: We share conscious and unconscious expressions, of course, but our faces also telegraph something to the world just by dint of how they’re formed, even though—sorry, all readers who believe in physiognomy—that telegraph is woefully inaccurate. I have a “friendly face,” meaning strangers always ask me for directions; a friend of mine who’s just as friendly as I am rarely gets asked for directions because her neutral facial expression appears, to the unknowing eye, a hint angry.

The features of my own that I suspect make my face appear friendly don’t necessarily correspond with how a physiognomist would classify me (the shape of my eyes indicates “tenderness,” but the placement of my irises reveals that I’m “timid and phlegmatic,” so it’s a draw). But the ease with which strangers approach me—and the way I quickly deduce who I should ask for aid or directions when I need them—makes me think that plenty of us make our own amateur conclusions about what faces mean. Still, I’d love to zoom back to the 19th century and have my face read: The amateur scientist in me (okay, the kook in me) wants to “know” what my face means, even though I know full well it's more along the lines of astrology than even something as "scientific" as the Myers-Briggs personality test. (We ever-curious ENFP Geminis are always eager to learn.)

My chances of finding a physiognomist are slim: The art/science of face-reading fell out of favor after the turn of the 20th century, its detractors calling it a pseudoscience akin to palm-reading. Certainly today we wouldn’t take physiognomy seriously, if for no other reason than its outrageous racism: Typically African traits were signs of indolence, diminished intellect, and “sensualism”; American Indian features were compared more to those of animals than of humans; Asian characteristics indicated compliance and asexuality.

So physiognomy is dead, as well it should be. Except, well, it’s not. I kept thinking of physiognomy when reading certain parts of Ashley Mears’s sociological study of the modeling industry, Pricing Beauty. At the time I thought I was making the connection because I pictured photographers, stylists, and eventually photo retouchers slicing and dicing models’ bodies in order to create the perfect image, much as one might pluck a set of characteristics from a physiognomic guide to imagine the perfectly tempered, intelligent, generous, and wise person (that is, the person with a rounded forehead, eyelids situated perfectly horizontal above irises, arched brows, and angular chins). Modeling and physiognomy alike depend upon elevating certain characteristics above others. But when I delved into the practice’s most influential tome, Physiognomy by Johann Caspar Lavater (published 1826), I realized the connection was deeper than that. Consider these two passages:

“He only is an accurate physiognomist, and has the true spirit of physiognomy, who possesses sense, feeling, and sympathetic proportion of the congeniality and harmony of nature; and who hath a similar sense and feeling for all emendations and additions of art and constraint.” [Lavater, Chapter IV] 

“When asked how long it takes her to decide on a model in a casting, one major stylist in London summed it up: ‘An instant! You know, you know, you just know!’ Most clients...claimed to know the moment a model walks through the door...Yet despite their professed certitude, they could not articulate what it was that they saw. They said that they may not be able to explain what it is about a model that makes her ‘really good’ or ‘right’; simply, they are able to feel it.” [Mears, Chapter 4]

That is, physiognomy claimed to be a science but still relied on “sense and feeling”; similarly, players in the modeling industry claim to be prizing what’s inherently stunning, beautiful, or intriguing, but they rely upon a gut sense that’s cultivated through careful calibration of taste. Just as physiognomy was a reflection of social and scientific standards at the time instead of an actual science of character, the “It” girl is as much a reflection of tastemakers’ collective sense as she is an owner of her own talent. As Mears puts it, “The very fact that clients cannot articulate the quality of a ‘really good model’ suggests that it lies in their own roles and actions rather than in the masses of looks they see before them.” Physiognomy, with its mix of absurd detail (23 types of foreheads) and general pronouncements (“a lipless mouth...denotes housewifery”) about what features signify, overarticulates its own standards. Modeling, with its buzz about “It” girls and the sense that a good agent “just knows,” underarticulates them. But both overarticulation and underarticulation serve to cloud what lies behind the determination of those standards: a reinforcement of existing power structures.

The tastemakers Mears interviews have a set of guidelines just as strict as the ersatz science of physiognomy. The overwhelming majority of models are tall, slender, young, white or “high-end ethnic,” and symmetrically featured. But a recurring question in Pricing Beauty is what makes one 5’9”, size 2, fair-skinned, hard-working brunette a successful model while another 5’9”, size 2, fair-skinned, hard-working brunette—who, to your eye or mine, is just as likely to succeed as her counterpart—exits the industry in debt. The answer lies in a complex web of tastemakers’ reflexive social distinctions; codification and reinforcement of ideas surrounding class, race, and gender; skilled exhibition and concealment of forms of cultural capital; and, above all, the mystification and glamorization of all of the above. Similarly, though proponents of physiognomy purported it to be both an art and science, there’s a near-mystical approach to physiognomy that meant only certain people would be able to divine what various features really meant—the one-on-one tastemakers of the 19th century, those who grasped the “true spirit” of physiognomy. Forget that the “true spirit” of it was largely based on Lavater’s own personal observations: “Eyebones with defined, marking, easily delineated, firm arches, I never saw but in noble and in great men.” In defining the meaning of features so literally and subjectively, Lavater only articulated what tastemakers 200 years later would attribute to vague notions of “It.”

To be clear, as alike as they are, the pseudoscience/pseudoart of physiognomists and modeling tastemakers don’t assess the same thing—and neither of them defines beauty per se. While face-reading certainly favored characteristics found attractive at the height of its popularity, the point wasn’t so much to determine beauty as it was to determine character. (Cosmetics mogul Max Factor would make the logical leap between the two by using the sort of highly specific dictates of physiognomy to create the “perfect face” with his creepy-as-hell “Beauty Micrometer,” designed to help makeup artists tell women what features they needed to enhance or detract from to create the perfect face.) For that matter, much of the modeling industry isn’t about beauty, but rather fitting a set of criteria for a specific purpose—like keeping the power of fashion in the hands of designers, not consumers, by displaying clothes on whippet-thin bodies that don’t interfere with the garments’ “line.” But both of them rely upon specific notions of what looks denote—whether it be the glamour of high cheekbones or the “fortitude and prudence” of heavy eyebrows—using codes decided upon by a select group of people. As sociologist Pierre Bourdieu wrote, “Taste classifies.” We understand modeling to be a codified set of tastes, but physiognomy was no different. 

And, you know, so what? Today we laugh at physiognomy and see it as antiquated, quaint, or even dangerous; its transparency is laughable. And certainly we’ve become skeptical of the modeling industry as well, or at least of what it signifies: We critique its narrowness and exclusion, and more recently we’ve begun to pay attention to its questionable labor practices. But just as we can look at physiognomy today and cringe at its racist, classist constructions, we need to keep looking at what drives the defined aesthetic of modeling if we’re able to understand our own relationship with imagery and beauty. I don’t think most women strive to look like models; I think most who are dissatisfied with their appearance just want to look like better versions of themselves. But it’s hardly a controversial point to say that the specific ways in which we want to look “better” are often influenced by the aesthetics of the modeling industry. What I’d have us do is try to be specific where “the modeling industry”—that is, tastemakers, not the models themselves—is unable to be articulate. That’s not easy to do, given how easily we stumble over “It” girls without ever being able to define “It”; that’s why we came up with the term “It” girl in the first place. But I’d like to see us consciously keep the drum beat of the social construction of beauty behind us as we straighten our hair and totter in heels: That we are not mimicking the looks of Gisele Bundchen or Karlie Kloss if we attempt to appropriate their looks onto our own bodies. Rather, we’re attempting to channel and redirect what tastemakers tell us they signify: luxury, exclusivity, embodied cultural capital. We’re responding to tastemakers, not ourselves.

Beauty Blogosphere 2.3.12

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

From Head...
Blown: The Brazilian blowout has been officially declared carcinogenic. Now the question is, to its devotees, will that matter?

...To Toe...
Footsie: I can't be the only one who has a terrible time finding winter legwear, can I? Actually, I know I'm not, because Sally's guide to winter tights was a reader request. And if, like me, you're not a big boots fan (my legs are my vanity, what can I say?), you may enjoy Corporette's guide to comfortable heels (also via Sally, without whom I'd be naked from knee down).

...And Everything In Between:
Farewell, CFO: Avon fires vice chairman and former CFO in connection with the China bribery scandals; this is the highest-ranking executive to be let go as a result of the corruption charges.

Photo from the International Butler Academy, whose website I visit whenever I think about butling.

Fragrance butlers? Fragrance butlers.

China style: Minh-Ha Pham on the Chinese luxury consumer: "In the fashion world, especially, criticizing taste serves as a surrogate for definitions of race and class. The tacky Chinese luxury consumer stereotype is a form of coded racial discourse that links fakeness to race." The ethos of inconspicuous consumption as a stand-in for class is thriving.

Pajama rage: Thanks to reader Aoife, who pointed me toward a place where the pajamas debate I looked at last week is raging strong. Inner-city women and girls in Dublin have been wearing pajamas in public for some time now, and when a social services office posted a sign sort of a quiet rebellion against the social structure that keeps them in poverty, the issue came to a head. "In the booming, crashing world of the flats, it's the boys who make themselves heard. Meanwhile, the pyjama girls express themselves through the visual language of young women - clothes and fashion - in candy pinks, hot purples and brushed cotton: a soft, silent revolution." And now I want to have a viewing party of Pyjama Girls, a film about the phenomenon.

Women's health bust: We don't need to even talk about Komen, do we? All I'll say is that Komen's withdrawal of support for Planned Parenthood doesn't surprise me in the least, given their history of pinkwashing, fostering breast cancer kitsch, and de-politicizing breast cancer. (We may have needed breast cancer depoliticized at one point, but I think that time has gone. It's become a way for companies to say they support women while still making the chemicals that might be causing cancers in the first place.) Good gives five ways to support women's health here. Edit: Komen has reversed the decision, which is sort of incredible and is a testament to the power of activism (and plain old outrage). I still have my reservations about the organization but this news is fantastic, and quite literally life-saving.

The price of beauty: Guess which makeup brand is potentially going to be paying the highest retail rent in the history of New York City?

Million-dollar face: Revlon billionaire Ron Perelman owed a former associate $16 million, and a federal jury made him pay up. Obvs the takeaway here is that if your Colorstay 16-Hour Eyeshadow is bumped up, you can blame Donald Drapkin.

Tweens: An update a year or so after the launch of Wal-Mart's tween makeup line, GeoGirl, on how the 8-to-14-year-old cosmetics consumer is doing.

Nonfat beauty: We can put a man on the moon but we can't come up with a low-calorie face mask? Like, what's up with that? Luckily, Bethenny Frankel, Real Housewife and founder of Skinnygirl drinks, has a new Skinnygirl beauty line out. WHEW.

News for the Tashkent shopper: Last night, in bed, as you were drifting into slumber, you asked yourself, Hey, whatever happened to the daughter of Uzbekistani president Islam Karimov? And here I am, with the answer: She's started a cosmetics line called Guli.

Shrunken government: Indiana bill that would have eliminated cosmetology licensing is withdrawn from consideration, showing the power of collective action. Had the bill gone through, beauty workers and customers alike would have been left at greater risk of harm, because when there's no state licensing process, it's a lot easier for misinformation to work its way into processes. Cosmetologists work with some pretty toxic stuff; why would any state consider deregulating it instead of other forms of hazardous production? Could it be because we're girls?

Making history: Interview with the Procter & Gamble archivist, i.e. the person who has access to originals of all those wonderful old Max Factor ads. "By saving the history of the brands, we’re basically respecting the consumer, I think."

Latina beauty: Insider look at what it means to market cosmetics to Latinas. "From an early age, it’s important to have the right ponytail, makeup etc.," says marketing expert Graciela Eleta. "For us, outer beauty really reflects who we are. I know I’m stereotyping, but it’s all right. For Caucasians, it’s more about fitness and lifestyle. For Hispanics, it’s all about the end, the lipstick and the blusher.” Hell yeah it's stereotyping; that's what marketing does. And I don't want to paint Latino women with a broad brush, but as shown in Rosie Molinary's excellent Hijas Americanas, artifice does play an important role in Latina culture, and marketing reports like this are a first-hand look.

Belly up: Congrats to Davinia Hamilton, whose short film on the transformative power of belly dance, The Beat of Her Own Drum, is garnering some attention.

Our prince has come: Enough parsing of the Disney princesses. What about the princes? (Thanks to Debbie for the link.)

Computer models: Tech writer Glenn Fleishman argues that revealingly-dressed models at gadget shows might have a negative marketing effect--not just because it's a signal that female tech consumers aren't the target audience, but because the men feel weird about it too. At the MacWorld/iWorld show, "There were plenty of booths with good-looking, well-dressed women (and men!) that employed traditional marketing tactics of being appealing and inviting, listening to and answering questions knowledgeably, and behaving in a positive and upbeat manner. I gravitated there.... I can never fully appreciate how women are continuously presented with images of perfection that they are covertly and overtly pressured to emulate. The models at Macworld/iWorld are just another component of that, presenting a contrast to the vendor’s professional staff and possibly driving away the women who attend the show." (Thanks to Tim for the link.)

Narcissist check: I hear the term narcissistic applied far more often to women than men (as has Meg Clark at The Blind Hem), and certainly there are plenty of women who truly are narcissistic. Still, it was refreshing to read Barry Nolan's tongue-in-cheek DSM-IV diagnosis of Bill O'Reilly's narcissistic personality disorder in Boston Magazine.

Sleeping Beauty, directed by Julia Leigh

Debtor dreams: I mentioned this yesterday, but really, Malcolm Harris's piece on Sleeping Beauty, a film about a student-turned-sex worker who enters a troublesome arrangement, is a must-read: "Unlike mortgage or credit-card debt, student debt is premised specifically on the value of the debtor’s body. The exorbitant size of U.S. college debt is justified by the students’ imagined future productivity; if you take out tens of thousands of dollars in loans for school, it’s because the debt will enable you to command enough on the labor market to pay it back. But when lots of workers need jobs, employers need any particular worker much less. In a sick twist, the known size of the general debt keeps wages down and young workers desperate, making their personal debt even harder to pay back, making them even more desperate, and so on until the wage goes literally negative in the form of unpaid internships. Sleeping Beauty dramatizes this debtor relationship: The old men who sleep with her might as well be the banks holding Lucy’s loans, taking payment in time with her flesh."

More on body labor: Writer and model Dana Drori on her unease about accepting working conditions that Americans have long fought to ameliorate: "In most other professions, there are very clear parameters determining right and wrong behavior, but looking at my career as a model, I realize that I’ve become the easy-to-work-with, comfortable-with-her-body ideal, and that I’ve broadened my own parameters of comfort to include moments that should make me feel squeamish, but now don’t." Drori had a column at BlackBook (which I'm now poring over and love), but this piece comes to us from Model Alliance, a nonprofit aiming to organize models to agitate for better working conditions in an industry that's pretty much unregulated.

Gone, glitter, gone: People, for several years I read literally every single page of every single issue of Glamour magazine, ever. If there's a generalized beauty tip, I know it. Except! For how to remove glitter nail polish! (Thanks to Ashe at Dramatis Personae for the link)

The cloak of invisibility: I've heard from a number of middle-aged and older women who have reported that aging out of the prime years of being objectified is a relief, and Alice Bradley articulates that relief beautifully. "Maybe my gray hair pushed me over the edge into a new world, one where I'm considered worthy of respect. Or, more likely, I'm not considered at all. This is just fine by me." Worth reading for the coinage of the term "Penis Fairies" alone. (via Sally)

Intended audience: Fascinating read from Phoebe about fashion, desire, and the male gaze: "Dress to please men, and you're dressing to please men. Dress not to please men, and you're really just distinguishing yourself from the kind of women who require a looks-boost from their artifice, announcing that you're so good-looking that you can get away with pink eyeliner and frizz." (Thanks to Rachel for the link.)

The bravery of glamour: The Gloss hilariously responds to xoJane's no-makeup photo meme with a "GLOBS OF MAKEUP" meme. Heh. For the record, I think it can be brave to not wear makeup, and I also think it's brave to wear shitloads of it too. It depends on the person and the roots of her (or his, for that matter) reasons for their makeup default. I felt a helluva lot more self-conscious walking around town after my bombshell makeover with Eden than I do on the rare day when I go bare-faced, and judging from what Siobhan pointed out in our interview, I'm not alone.

New favorite Tumblr: Niqabs and Kitaabs, particularly this l'awesome snapshot.

Playing femme: S.E. Smith on moving beyond beauty, and how playing around with what it means to be "femme" helps her do that. "Some people say I don’t do femme right, or that I am not succeeding in going for a feminine look, to which I say 'bollocks,' because there is no 'right' way to be femme, nor am I cultivating a feminine appearance."

Wonder Woman: Seems I'm not the only one this week wondering about fictional characters and beauty. Elissa at Dress With Courage, inspired by this NYTimes piece on cartoon character palettes, wonders if the girlish playfulness comic-strip makeup inspires could potentially be the tonic for the humdrum makeup routine we may fall into as adults.

2-4-6-8, biceps we appreciate: The "Girl Crush Chronicles" at Fit and Feminist are always worth a read, but this one of Anna Watson, America's buffest cheerleader, is particularly swoon-worthy.

Announcement, Announcement!

So I sort of yelled out “surprise!” a day early in my efforts at transparency, but here’s the scoop: Starting Monday, February 6, The Beheld will be syndicated on The New Inquiry (as well as continuing as usual on here, but I’ll get to that). If you’re a regular reader here, you’re already familiar with TNI from the review I published there a couple of weeks ago. If you’re not: The New Inquiry is a journal of ideas, one that might cover anything from the revolutionary potential of Justin Bieber to our accidental autobiographies as ghostwritten by Mark Zuckerberg. (The best way to get to know the site is to read it, but TNI also made a splash with this New York Times profile, which of course resulted in a sort of internet hazing but that's to be expected.) The site officially relaunches on Monday, with a complete redesign, a fantastic cache of bloggers, and a magazine you can buy to support TNI.

One of the things I appreciate about The New Inquiry is that it pays attention to gender issues without trumpeting itself as The Intellectual Site About Gender. (Not that I wouldn’t love to see that site, mind you.) Its writers and editors skillfully use gender to illustrate political and philosophical concepts, and to show how the two are inextricably linked. To write of precarious labor (a recurring topic at TNI) without considering gender, for example, is to write incompletely; the team there knows and intuits this, and it shows.

I’ve frequently argued on here that to not take beauty seriously is to not take women’s lives seriously. From the ground up, The New Inquiry understands that to not take women’s lives seriously is to not take the full spectrum of culture, intellectual life, labor, education, and public discourse seriously. Some wonderful examples of this include Malcolm Harris’s review of Sleeping Beauty, Elizabeth Greenwood’s examination of the wives of Woody Allen, and Sara Wookey’s account of bodily labor and Martina Abramovic. TNI also manages to not make “gender” code for “women”: Max Fox’s look at how Grindr reflects a shifting gay community, Elissa Lerner’s take on the “muscular Christianity” of Tim Tebow. And, of course, there’s plenty that isn’t specifically about gender at all. Look around. You’ll like what you see.

My fellow bloggers are also pretty fantastic. Two are new to me—political bloggers Evan Calder Williams and Aaron Bady—but I'm eager for that to change. Others I’ve been following for a while and may be of particular interest to readers of The Beheld. Christine Baumgarthuber of Austerity Kitchen writes on “plebian culinary practices, past and present, in their historical context.” (I suspect the fashion historians among you may find your interests dovetailing with hers.) Designer and creator Imp Kerr is the mind responsible for the series of fake American Apparel ads that slyly poked fun at the company’s ethos. Maryam Monalisa Gharavi examines concepts of the global and conceptual south in the aptly named south/south, including issues of visibility, which you know I just eat up. And faithful readers of my roundups will recognize Rob Horning of Marginal Utility, whose writings on the cultivation of the self have shaped much of my own thinking on the topic. (Truth be told, half of the books I draw on repeatedly here are plucked from his library, but shhhh. I’m hoping he won’t notice that his entire John Berger collection has vanished.)

As for how this will change The Beheld: It won’t. It’s a syndication, not a move, meaning that the-beheld.com will continue as usual, as will my already-existing syndication on Open Salon. The TNI blog will have some cool features that I don’t have here, including a nifty margins footnote tool that I’ll probably go way overboard with for a while, but the rest of the content will be the same. (Huge thanks to Imp Kerr for the awesome logo for The Beheld at TNI, which you can see at the top of the page. Now where was Mlle Kerr a year ago when I spent eight hours trying to attach a fake ponytail to my picture and then silhouette it at 60% shading?) It’ll also remain the same in topic, scope, and tone—though after seeing the ways my thinking and writing have shifted over the past 12 months just from exposing myself to more thinkers and writers in my general field, I’d be surprised if the syndication didn’t affect my thinking in some ways. And that’s a good thing.

So that’s that! I just wanted to let regular readers here know that there’s a mirror blog at TNI. I try to always respond to comments over here and plan on continuing to do so; it remains to be seen if there will be a different vibe in the comments over there, but if you’re craving more dialogue you may want to pop your head in over there to see if there’s a conversation happening that you’d like to join. But like I said, things around here are going to remain the same. The New Inquiry asked me to team up with them because they like what I do, after all, so changing what I do now would be beside the point.

And with that, onward!

On Ladyblogging and the Slumber Parties of the Internet

An early editorial meeting at Beheld HQ.

As a feminist who started my career at Ms. and wound my way through Glamour and Playboy before winding up at CosmoGIRL!—the exclamation point was part of the name—finding Jezebel shortly after its 2007 launch was delicious. I enjoyed it as a reader, and I enjoyed it even more as a worker in the industry they frequently critiqued, especially as I learned that some of their writers had been in my position—simultaneously excited and dismayed to be in the “pink ghetto,” eager to up the feminist content in glossy ladymags but frustrated by the conditions that Gloria Steinem labeled a “velvet steamroller.”

So it’s not surprising that I’m more kindly disposed to ladyblogs than n+1’s Molly Fischer appears to be. I was 30 when Jezebel launched, and was still eager for what blogs of any sort provided; Fischer, at 20, had gone through adolescence with public critique a click away. I’ve also contributed to two of the four sites Fischer critiques—Jezebel and The Hairpin—and my work there has brought me a portion of The Beheld’s readership, undoubtedly coloring my attitude toward them. I cannot pretend impartiality.

Given the impossibility of impartiality, I admit to being both excited by and uneasy about the n+1 piece. The whole article is worth a read, but in a nutshell, she looks at the evolution of ladyblogs, sites that give traditional women’s topics signature treatment. (Seventeen assures you that masturbating is totally normal; Rookie tells you how to do it.) The bigger the sites get, the more they adhere to what Fischer frames as a particular form of triteness endemic to ladyblogs, in which Zooey Deschanel is shunned but eco-friendly cat bonnets are squeal-worthy. Drained of the gravitas of other alternative women’s media, like explicitly feminist spaces, the potential for ladyblogs to become a true alternative to women’s glossies becomes watered down; the tool for revolution is rendered in scratch-n-sniff. “The internet, it turned out, was a place to make people like you: the world’s biggest slumber party, and the best place to trade tokens of slumber party intimacy—makeup tips, girl crushes, endless inside jokes,” Fischer writes. “The notion that women might share some fundamental experience and interests, a notion on which women’s websites would seem to depend—'sisterhood,' let’s call it—has curdled into BFF-ship.”

What this argument overlooks is that a slumber party is sisterhood. Junior high slumber parties might have brought anything from makeovers to pained sobs over family dysfunction to raging tear-downs of pervy gym teachers. The adult slumber party touches on these, with our adult wisdom added to the mix. The voices of women online have brought me my birth control (“Ask Me About My Mirena!”), lessened my shame about my belly bulge, shined an uncomfortable light on the way social and personal notions of beauty can collide, and opened my mind to what I, as a biological woman, can learn about my own position in society from trans women. There’s fluff, of course (“Watch Kristen Bell Adorably Lose Her Shit Over a Sloth”), but just as silliness coexists alongside our more meaningful concerns, fluffy pieces can comfortably coexist alongside essays on healing from sexual assault. (In fact, for some of us, the fluff was a way to heal.) The slumber party goes all night, after all.

By talking about issues particular to women and treating them as though they matter, we create sisterhood. Ladyblogs do that in tones earnest, flip, and everywhere in between; the “Women Laughing Alone With Salad” Hairpin post Fischer mentions is downright effervescent, and it went viral because it brilliantly encapsulated the way women are painted into a corner where if we’re happy to be eating, it must be because we’re being guilt-free. The post caught on because we all got it, and because we were all fed up with it too. Women laughing alone with salad was, in its own way, sisterhood, and to dismiss it as mere quirk is to dismiss the day-to-day stuff that makes up the particulars of a woman’s life. Fischer ends her piece with a rallying cry for sites that stem from “the notion that women might share some fundamental experience and interests,” but I’m not convinced that the sites in question aren’t doing exactly that. They’re doing them in a more lightweight fashion than Fischer might desire, but the things that constitute gravitas (formality, for example) are frequently structures that purposefully omit the validity of the personal, that look to an “objective” viewpoint (as if there is any such thing) as the end-all, be-all. That is, they’re structures that dismiss the ways plenty of women have written for centuries. Here it comes, that clichéd rallying cry we feminists say over and over: The personal is political.

So it’s unclear what Fischer wants the reader to do—what, when I worked in women’s glossy magazines, we called “the takeaway.” Are we to eschew The Hairpin in favor of today’s equivalent of The Bimonthly Period, the newsletter of the women’s resource center Fischer’s mother founded during her college years? Sites like Feministing, Pandagon, and Feministe play a crucial role in feminism, and therefore in women’s lives—even for women who have never heard of these sites, as they keep the activist fires burning. They can also occasionally feel alienating. I greatly enjoyed my guest blogging stint at Feministe last summer, but I also walked away from it understanding, for the first time, why some people whose politics roughly parallel mine refuse to call themselves feminists. For every commenter who thoughtfully critiqued my message, there would be one who’d say I was a tool of the patriarchy, and another who’d accuse me of abusing my class privilege. It’s a vibrant, razor-sharp community and I was honored to be a part of it, but my point is, if explicitly feminist blogs are the only acceptable online outlet for feminists to inhabit, we’d get exhausted mighty quick. (Let’s also not forget that the number of people who wouldn’t label the targets of Fischer’s critiques as forthrightly feminist is pretty small. The other day I mentioned to a new friend that a mutual writer acquaintance was a “radical feminist”—as in, menstrual art—and her response was, “Oh, does she write for Jezebel?”)

Fischer hits plenty of nails on the head (you know, my opinions being the bed of nails), especially her questioning of the age-appropriacy of ladyblogs' tone. I enjoy Rookie, helmed by 15-year-old Tavi Gevinson—in fact, I enjoy Rookie so much at age 35 that I began to wonder how many teenagers actually read it. I’ll happily cheer unabashed femininity, but like Fischer I’m wary of mass numbers of adult women inhabiting teen spaces. In fact, many of my feelings on this topic can be neatly summed up by an excellent Julie Klausner piece that—oops!—ran in Jezebel.

Still, despite finding aspects of adult-girl culture downright creepy (Hello Kitty?), I see other aspects as liberating. Where women’s magazines place readers on a trajectory of traditional womanhood—teenager to single woman to mommy to retiree—ladyblogs generally treat their readers as though they’re child-free adult women. Ladyblogs don’t mommy-track their readers—and that’s part of why “lady” makes so much sense in describing them. Classically speaking, ladies were put into a somewhat separate class. Ladies of recent centuries had social status; earlier, they had feudal privileges. The ladyblogs don’t use lady in that sense, but it carries a separatist air: We needn’t be quite as serious as we might when using the broader term women, but we don’t want to be girls. Fischer asserts that “On the ladyblogs, adult womanhood is a source of discomfort, and so when we write posts or comments, we tend to call ourselves ladies.” I’d argue the opposite: On the ladyblogs, adult womanhood is a given, and within our shared womanhood we carve out a comfortable space we can all inhabit. Within ladyblogs, we all become ladies.

The lingo may be why the presumably adult women on the ladyblogs (Rookie excluded, as it is aimed at teenagers) might seem to be clinging to girlhood. Fischer questions both the hallmarks of ladyblog style and the way its commenters pick up on it. In my own writing I rilly rilly try to avoid the clichés of the ladysphere (amirite, ladies?), because I don’t want to rely on those methods to convey my point. But as Emily Gould points out, it’s not like “commenter sycophancy” is particular to the ladyblogs. Still, it’s particularly easy to slip into ladysphere lingo, for the very reasons these clichés evolved in the first place: When skillfully employed, ladymags’ “endemic verbal tics” connote personality. Instead of the self-seriousness of magazines, ladylingo gives a tilt to the voice, one that implies we’re all in it together (which, again, is why it’s contagious). The tics serve as a friendly politesse, a way of conveying that you’re typing with a smile.

In fact, that seems to be Fischer’s larger point, and one I’m ambivalent on: Ladybloggers and their commenters are typing with a smile. “They bake pies with low-hanging fruit: they are helpful, agreeable, relatable, and above all likable,” Fischer writes. “Surely one can’t, and shouldn’t, strive to like and be liked all the time. But how else can one be?” (I couldn’t help but wonder how much time Fischer spent actually wading around in comments sections. The culture of “like” looms large, but ladyblog commenters can get vicious, and they’re certainly not afraid to disagree.) The point is an excellent one, but two key points give me pause. First: What’s so wrong about wanting to be liked? I want to be liked; I want my writing to be liked. When I started The Beheld I repeatedly said that all I wanted was to be a part of the conversation. Some writers become a part of the conversation by being controversial, but that’s not my style. I’m a good girl from birth, and it’s built into me to want to be liked. But being liked isn’t my goal in writing; likability is a tool I use to pave my way toward the larger goal of being a part of the conversation, and occasionally hosting it too. There’s plenty to critique about women having a compulsive need to be liked, and it’s something I’ve wrestled with a good deal on a personal level. But I’m not going to apologize for couching arguments in a softer way than I would if my goal were to win.

But the larger issue here about likability is this: Maybe if more women writers were published in gender-neutral publications, writing stories that treat “women’s issues” as people issues, we wouldn’t be paranoid about being so fucking likable. This is a much deeper issue than I’m able to address here, and since most of my bylines have been in explicitly female-oriented spaces, I’m not particularly credible on this front. What I’ll say is that I’m not alone in being a female writer who writes about women’s issues who would be happy to publish in more gender-neutral spaces—and that I rarely pitch those spaces because there’s still a little voice inside me telling me that what I write about is just girl stuff. And people, this is what I do, every day: I write about girl stuff, and I treat it with the gravitas it has in my own life. But that voice is still there, and it’s a result of all sorts of things—internalized oppression, the realities of the “pink ghetto” of women’s issues, fear that if I did start writing more for gender-neutral outlets I’d have to face harsher criticisms than I usually do (the only time I’ve been forthrightly called stupid is from self-identified male commenters, and never on ladyblogs). It’s also a result of me specifically wanting to write for women; as they say, I “write what I know,” and what I know is being a woman. And I don’t particularly want it to be any other way; like I said, I’ve written for ladyblogs, and I wouldn’t bristle at The Beheld being categorized as such. Obviously I believe in what ladyblogs do. But I’m a fool if I think there are no other reasons I align myself with them—reasons that have to do with the “belonging” Fischer criticizes in her piece (“[Ladyblogs] tell us less about how to be than about how to belong”). I know I “belong” in ladyblogs, for I am a lady. I’m not so sure where else I belong.

Despite my misgivings, I liked Fischer’s piece. I like the questions it asks, and I just like that it exists. Recent discussions about women writers and where our bylines ought to be need to continue, and they can’t continue in an authentic manner if we’re afraid of critiquing one another. Ladyblogs aren’t above reproach or critique, and given that some of them serve as watchdogs to traditional women’s media, if we become lax in watching the watchdogs we’re perpetuating the problem. I just don’t want the conversation to be a ping-pong of should we or shouldn’t we, of ladyblogs versus the rest of the Internet. I want the sentiment behind Fischer’s piece to be explored so that whatever these spaces look like in five years, they’re serving women’s needs even more.

Perhaps it’s the women’s magazine veteran in me, but I want a “takeaway” from Fischer’s piece, and I want it to be something like this: We’re in an interesting time as far as gender and access to the public, and we’re also at an time when “voice” is a prime asset for online visibility—“voice” being something women writers have traditionally been told they excel at. We’re also living in a time of fragmented, personally curated information streams, one in which a person could read a handful of sites—even ladyblogs, depending on the blog—and have a reasonable handle on what’s going on in the world. So we’re at the era, and if the proliferation of ladyblogs is any indication, we’ve got the talent. Now what are we going to do with it?

___________________________________________________________

On a related note: I’m thrilled to announce that starting February 6, The Beheld will be syndicated at The New Inquiry. I’ll write more in-depth about this tomorrow but given the topic of this post I thought it would be downright dishonest to not share this bit of news, since TNI is a gender-neutral space that looks at my ladybloggin’ background as an asset, not a ghettoizing detraction. But more on that tomorrow!

Fictional Beauties: The Heads of Princess Langwidere

A bit of personal trivia: I adore Wizard of Oz. The movie, yes, of course, but specifically the books, all 16 of them, though the only ones I recall in detail are the first four. L. Frank Baum lived for a while in the town I grew up in—Aberdeen, South Dakota—and was briefly the editor of the local newspaper, where he penned terrifically racist editorials clamoring for the extermination of American Indians. But never mind that right now! He also provided oodles of entertainment for children worldwide! (He was an outspoken advocate of suffragism as well, and in fact when Susan B. Anthony visited Aberdeen she stayed with Baum, and Matilda Gage was his mother-in-law.)

Dorothy fascinated me, of course, with her sage youth quality. At age 4 I would purposefully get lost in K-Mart so that I could then wander to the customer service desk and ask them to announce over the loudspeaker that the mother of Dorothy Whitefield-Madrano should come retrieve her daughter, fully believing that if my name were Dorothy over the K-Mart loudspeaker it would somehow actually become Dorothy. But it’s not Dorothy I’d like to look at today, or Glinda the Good Witch, or the Wicked Witch, or even Ozma, the true ruler of Oz, whom you meet if you stick around the series long enough. They’re all fantastic characters, but as far as beauty goes, there’s one character whose existence cries for a shout-out here.

"By the aid of the mirror she put on her head."

Princess Langwidere, a supporting character in Ozma of Oz, had a collection of 30 heads that she could rotate at will, like the rest of us wore clothes. (Langwidere herself simply wore plain white gowns. The thrill of merely changing one’s clothes was lost on her, as it would be on you if you could change your head.) All of Princess Langwidere's heads were “in great variety, no two formed alike but all being of exceeding loveliness. There were heads with golden hair, brown hair, rich auburn hair and black hair; but none with gray hair. The heads had eyes of blue, of gray, of hazel, of brown and of black; but there were no red eyes among them, and all were bright and handsome. The noses were Grecian, Roman, retroussé and Oriental, representing all types of beauty; and the mouths were of assorted sizes and shapes, displaying pearly teeth when the heads smiled. As for dimples, they appeared in cheeks and chins, wherever they might be most charming, and one or two heads had freckles upon the faces to contrast the better with the brilliancy of their complexions.”

So, hey, even a genocidally inclined gentleman recognizes the whole "all types of beauty" thing, so, um, points there, right? But the first thing we know about Princess Langwidere is that she’s so vain that she refuses to seize power, even though the rest of the royal family has been imprisoned. “At present there are at least ten minutes every day that I must devote to affairs of state, and I would like to be able to spend my whole time in admiring my beautiful heads,” she declares. We’re not meant to like Langwidere; we’re meant to see her as a “horrid creature,” even though she gladly cedes power to people who know what they’re doing instead of trying to manage the land herself. (Contrast this to General Jinjur, the leader of the girl army who overtook Oz in a previous book—she’s shown as selfish in her ambition, while Langwidere is selfish in her lack of it.)

I liked her anyway, or perhaps I just envied her. Having not just different hairstyles and outfits, but different heads?! It seemed logical somehow, for isn’t that an exaggerated version of what we’re doing sometimes when we play with makeup? Most of the time I’m trying to just be a more polished version of myself, and I think that’s true of most women—but sometimes I do want to transform, out of sheer curiosity (which some, like Baum, may package as vanity). We dye our hair to see what it’s like to be a redhead; we cut our hair to see what life as a pixie-cut cutie might be like. Princess Langwidere, being fictional, and fictional in a magical land at that, just had advantages the rest of us don’t.

It’s also interesting that Langwidere is drawn as a Gibson girl, the “American girl to all the world,” according to her creator, Charles Gibson. The Oz illustrator was probably just going with the times—the Gibson girl was immensely popular when the book was written, so drawing an image of a beautiful woman meant to draw a Gibson girl. But the Gibson girl was a Langwidere-ish figure herself: Gibson used many models, creating no single, specific icon but rather a multitude of Gibson girls who were understood to be Gibson girls because they fit specific criteria. They were ladylike, young, and spirited, and of course they had that iconic hairstyle, which Princess Langwidere’s preferred head sports in all illustrations of her. They were specific but interchangeable—"logo girls," you might call them—making them perfect both for advertising purposes and for Baum’s mocking of women’s vanity. Is he saying we’re all Langwideres if we preen in front of the mirror and fall prey to new hairstyles? Is he saying ladies with real power—Ozma, for example, or the ever-plucky Dorothy—are above such nonsense? 

That's Ozma on the left, Dorothy in the middle, and
Princess Langwidere doing an early 20th-century lady gang signal on the right..

I’m not sure, and I don’t want to read too much into a minor character in a turn-of-the-century children’s book. But I don’t want to dismiss her either. In fictional characters—cartoons, icons, heroines, Muppets—we see women who are literally constructions, and when these characters catch on, it's an opportunity to see what constructions of femininity our culture responds to. What can we learn from the Langwideres, Dorothys, and Glindas about our ideas of femininity? What can we glean from the Betty Boops, the Miss Piggys, the Darias about what we see as ideal in any given era? What fictional characters—specifically characters who haven’t been portrayed by live-action actresses, thus leaving their construction fully in the minds of their creators—have you been fascinated with over time? Do you base your ideas of a character’s beauty on their actions, their words—or, to borrow from Jessica Rabbitt, are they just drawn that way?

Beauty Blogosphere 1.27.12

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

From Head...
Also, Gorilla Snot: The five weirdest things we put in our hair. Beer, yeah, yeah, tried it. But Monistat?

Pointy, round, or square?

...To Toe...
En pointe: Danielle at Final Fashion (which you should be reading if you aren't already, both for her insightful, informative prose and her beautiful illustrations) gives a rundown of classic toe shapes throughout history. I prefer almond, myself. (Actually, my favorite is open-toed; I'm in the "my feet need to breathe" camp, which is apparently very divisive?)

...And Everything In Between:
Breast man: Founder of faulty breast implant company PIP is arrested on charges of manslaughter and involuntary injuries. No specific defendant has been named, but as many as 3,000 complaints about him worldwide have been considered. Listen, whatever you may think about either breast implants or the usefulness of feminism looking at cosmetic issues, I think it's safe to say that without feminism this wouldn't be news, or he wouldn't be arrested, or we'd be seeing bias in news reports suggesting that somehow women were asking for it. I haven't seen a peep of that. We've got a ways to go, but this is one example of what the world looks like when we act as if women matter: Women who did something questionable and risky unknowingly entered a situation that was downright negligent, and the bad guy is being punished. It's horrible that women were put at risk because of this, but I'm just hoping justice is served.

Fraught intimacies: The wonderful Minh-Ha T. Pham of Threadbared gives what may as well be a manifesto for many of us feminists who are consciously looking at beauty and fashion. If you're reading this blog, chances are you already recognize that analyzing these issues needn't be mere fluff, but her piece is still a must-read. "If feminists ignore fashion, we are ceding our power to influence it. Fortunately, history has shown that feminists can, instead, harness fashion and use it for our own political purposes."

"Beauty" "pageant": Wince-inducing tale of a Canadian pageant operator who scammed entrants out of good sums of money. "After the Star contacted Cadieux, the glitzy pageant website was stripped to a single page with a statement accusing past winners of slander, defamation and demanding their winnings 'to fulfill their own pursuits, without undertaking philanthropic tasks which they have agreed to do and have wrecked havoc, ensuing in the bankruptcy of Miss Kohinoor International.'" O RLY?

Sichuan skin: Buried in this story about skin-care needs among women in different Asian countries is this tidbit: "Another skin study by L'Oreal on 2,000 Chinese women showed that 36 percent had sensitive skin, while in Sichuan Province, where residents favor spicy food, the figure was as high as 56 percent." Whaa? 

Is Estee Lauder's heir the Rupert Murdoch of Israel?: I don't quite understand the whole story, but last week Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the Israeli government to save Channel 10, one of just two independent TV stations in Israel. Channel 10 is co-owned by Ronald Lauder—heir to Estee, one of the richest men in the world, and someone unafraid to employ every tax evasion law in the books—and after Lauder forced the channel's executives to publicly apologize to a businessman for an unflattering profile, his role there is being looked at askance; he may stop funding the channel. If Netanyahu's efforts fail, Israelis will be deprived of crucial independent media like the Hebrew-language incarnations of Beauty and the Geek, Survivor, and The Real Housewives.

Cannot applaud this enough: "The Talmud tells the religious man, in effect: If you have a problem, you deal with it. It is the male gaze—the way men look at women—that needs to be desexualized, not women in public. The power to make sure men don’t see women as objects of sexual gratification lies within men’s—and only men’s—control." 

Little bit of service for you: People apply more sunscreen (i.e. closer to the correct amount) when using a pump dispenser instead of a squeeze bottle or roll-on. Don't say I never gave you anything.

D-cups are so 2009: Could small breasts make a comeback? asks Slate. Could we stop treating women's bodies like skirt hemlines? asks me.

Six theories on pinkification: "Pink is both the sign of soft, emotionally intelligent masculinity as much as it is aggressive femininity."

Stiletto boots currently under consideration by the IABA, as is mandated use of Love's Baby Soft.

Right jab: There's been plenty of good ink about the International Amateur Boxing Association suggesting its lady boxers wear skirts, but none has hit the issue as spot-on as Caitlin at Fit and Feminist: "I know that when I’m wearing a skirt, I become more aware of how I sit—if my legs are crossed, and if they aren’t, how far apart they are. It’s almost as if the skirt demands it. ...Athleticism requires the suspension of self-consciousness, requires almost a transcendence that supersedes mere categories of body and mind. Once self-consciousness seeps its way back inside your mind, the beautiful performance you have constructed of sweat and desire and focus comes crashing to the ground." Yes and yes.

Gender performance: Two related, but differing, perspectives on gender and the gaze. Shy Biker (a man experimenting with presenting as a woman) takes Simone de Beauvoir's statement about how "one is not born a woman, one becomes one" and applies it to his own experience of adopting femininity: "I am trying to learn a new language, one forbidden to me from birth." And CN Lester, a trans person, writes of how difficult it is to shake feminine beauty standards even when identifying as a man.

The gay beauty myth: Eager for Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?, a book examining the absorption of corporate values in what was once a thriving gay underground. There's much to say about this topic (is it a tradeoff for mainstream acceptance of gay men?) but of note here is the ways in which plenty of gay men have taken on the beauty myth and made it their own.

Bearded America: Wait, 40% of American men have facial hair? That seems high to me, but I'm not complaining about this. (Scruff fan here.)

Race stripped bare: From Tits and Sass, a review of Unequal Desires, a study of race and stripping. Black dancers are often essentially barred from high-end clubs, ghettoizing them into more heavily policed (and more dangerous) clubs. (Side note: I'm eager to read the book for what the reviewer didn't get into: erotic capital of black strippers. I'm guessing it'll be a different take than Catherine Hakim's, eh?)

How much do you weigh?: When time came for Erin Nieto, author of How Much Do You Weigh?—a photo book of women sharing their weight without shame—to share her own weight, she thought nothing of it. That is, until she stepped on the scale and realized she'd gained a few pounds. Here she writes of what it was like to come to terms with a new number after having made peace with the old one.

The big chop: Two hair-cutting pieces this week! Good illustrates the post-breakup haircut, which they get right until the last panel. I know some women regret cutting off their hair, but who regrets the post-breakup haircut?! And The Hairpin's Lindsay Miller writes about the first time she shaved her head. (Attn: Jaunty Dame.) 

"Obesity has come into its own": "Is it possible that the stout woman, poor dear, has at last become stylish?" asked The Atlantic—in 1919. Original article here; prelude, prompted by that bizarre photo shoot of a plus-size and straight-size model in a nude embrace, here.

Here's the scoop: Meet the "Beauty Spoon," a long, narrow shovel-type instrument designed to help you get every last bit out of the "shoulders" and bottom of containers. I have a tendency to keep around multiple bottles of the same product because one bottle is almost out but oh right now I don't have time to stand there and shake and squeeze so just for now I'll use this new bottle. Because during my free time there is nothing I like to do more than stand around and shake near-empty bottles of face serum. Anyway! The Beauty Spoon.

Elephant lipo: Awesome throw pillow from Dan Golden, designer and friend of The Beheld, as a part of his new housewares collection with CB2 (aka Crate & Barrel) that touches on the absurdity of the beauty myth. An elephant looks in the mirror and voices insecurities about its wrinkles and "too big" trunk, reminding us that some of the things we're insecure about aren't just natural but are in our nature. (I also love his humble pie/arrogant tiramisu platter, but now we're just going off-topic, aren't we?)

Running from objectification: I love it when Beauty Redefined looks at self-objectification, and I doubly love it when they offer concrete ways to ameliorate the tendency to self-objectify. In this case: running.

Blind faith: Congratulations to the team at new, insightful, and dynamic fashion site The Blind Hem on its recent launch! I'm happy to see familiar and trusted names like Elissa from Dress With Courage and Terri from Rags Against the Machine as contributors, and am eager to see where the site goes from here. Fiction, poetry, photography, essays, tutorials—it's all here, with an intelligent, feminist drum beat.

Figure flattery: I can't pull off the doesn't-fit-right look, but Angie at You Look Fab asks if there's something fascinating—and almost subversive—about intentionally ill-fitting clothes.

Like heroin chic, but with anhedonia: I laughed at this XOJane piece on "depression beauty" (because showering every day is for neurotypicals!) but truthfully, it's not really a laughing matter. I have bouts of clinical depression, and honestly? It's one of the reasons I'm sort of glad I got STEALTH SHAMPOOED last year, breaking my no-shampoo streak. Hygiene and mental health are connected, and though not shampooing doesn't have to be unhygienic by any means, when you're already inclined to not do much, it's a slippery slope.

"But the man ate the apple, didn't he?": Nahida takes a folk tale she heard about an exquisitely beautiful woman and uses it as the underpinning for her argument against the cultural suppression of pro-woman Islamic themes—and some mighty Muslim women too.

Illness and body image: Feminist-minded bloggers struggle with body image too, and one of the nice things about writing on these topics is that you get to explore your own relationship with your body in your work. But what happens when your body actively works against you? Virginia Sole-Smith of Beauty Schooled writes honestly, humbly, and eloquently on what it's like to live with chronic medical conditions in which you feel like your body is attempting to stage mutiny. "Proper migraine management centers on being nice to yourself—you have to get plenty of sleep, drink lots of water, be careful around alcohol, and exercise, but not too hard. ... But even when I’m doing everything 'right,' it’s no guarantee that I’ll escape that week’s migraine. ... When you’re sick, 'be nice to your body' takes on a different meaning."

The Privacy Settings of Pajamas

What, your mustard chinoiserie pajamas didn't come with a purple poodle?

I wore pajamas to class my freshman year of college. Well, specifically, I wore my pajama pants one time to one class my freshman year of college. I’d read in some YA book when I was, like, 12 that you could wear pajamas to class in college if you wanted, and in a collegiate fit of I am an adult now—not dissimilar to my collegiate fit of eating ice cream for dinner four days in a row when I realized nobody could tell me not to—I thought, You know, I’m here to learn, and I’ll learn best when I’m comfortable, and this “system” of “pants” is bogus, so I’m just going to show up to astronomy in my flannel bottoms, and so I did.

When I sat down, I could feel the wooden seat against me in a way that felt unexpectedly harsh, and I kept slipping and sliding around the seat, with the flannel providing no traction. More than that, though, I felt exposed. I hadn’t done anything that morning besides brush my teeth, and here I was, in public. Instead of feeling carefree and cozy, I felt trapped—trapped by my private self being on such public display, trapped by my human foibles (sleep-wrinkled pants, night-sweaty hair) being so visible. I wanted the physical and psychic membrane that jeans, a bra, and a sturdier top provided me. I ran home between class sessions and changed into my usual clothes.

So I don’t get the lure of pajamas in public. I know that some people prefer them for specific reasons, like chronic pain conditions, and I’ve got no problem padding about my neighborhood in my yoga pants and “fancy hoodie.” (You know, the one without the coffee stains and frayed cuffs.) But I admit to being quizzical about pajamas apparently becoming de rigueur among teenagers, as reported in the Wall Street Journal.

I wrote earlier this week about how part of the joys of some private clothing is the public ideas we attach to them—as with slips, which are somewhat glamorous despite being simple, demure, and inexpensive because of the very idea that we’re not supposed to see them. We see the inverse here: Wearing pajamas in public is taking a symbol of private life into the public sphere. Not actual private life, mind you, but the symbol of it. One teenager interviewed for the WSJ piece has school-only pajama pants (albeit at the insistence of her mother), and the article made it clear that the look, while casual, is still coordinated, with as many fashion rules as ever. Voluminous “banded boyfriend” sweatpants would call for a fitted cami; trim leggings would call for an oversized sweatshirt; all go best with Uggs or slipper-type shoes. "It's a complex system to master," writes Cassie Murdoch at Jezebel, and she's absolutely correct.

It’s hard to imagine the average teenager putting so much care into a wardrobe that’s kept truly private. (Of course, I’m writing this in my “house hoodie,” which was purchased in the year 2000, so perhaps my perspective is skewed.) And that’s what’s going on here: The pajama-pants look as a trend isn’t just about comfort, or even just about bringing our private lives outside. It’s about a careful calibration of public intimacy. It’s about what layers you’re going to show, and when, and to whom. Actually, it’s about Facebook.

The generation that’s donning loungewear in public in large numbers is also the generation that has grown up with different expectations of privacy and public living. They’re fluid in setting groups of friends on Facebook that determine who can see what; they’ve learned the difference between friends and “friends,” liking and “liking.” It only makes sense that a generation versed in managing privacy would gravitate toward clothing that advertises different layers of public and private personae. The default privacy setting might be that of pajama pants worn to class, communicating that, Hey, peeps, this is what I’m really like—I’m in my jammies, does it get any more real than that? But that default setting is carefully managed—wearing the “right” sweatpants with the “right” top to create the desired silhouette, taking care not to accidentally show up for algebra wearing the tattered, yellowed tee you actually slept in. Just as we calculate our online profiles to be just the right mix of casual, hip, and unassumingly nerdy (I once listed a Balkan folk group as one of my favorites on Facebook), the pajamas look is carefully calculated to give the impression of nonchalance despite the work that actually went into creating the look.

The teen years are always a time of experimenting with identity, and our wardrobes are an ongoing experiment in the same, so the social minefield of teenagers’ wardrobes has been filled with trip-wires since the invention of the teenager. In some ways it’s not that different from my junior-high years of the label-conscious '80s, when 12-year-olds on the cusp of developing their own identity were living out their parents’ yuppie dreams by wearing shirts emblazoned with the Guess and Esprit logos. But I’m guessing that hasn’t disappeared; it’s just been subsumed by the announcement of a cultivated identity. (As 16-year-old Alexa reports, some of her peers “feel the pressure not to conform, which I suppose is in itself a form of conforming.”) Teenagers may be liberated from the logo game (though not really, if those Victoria’s Secret sweatpants with PINK stamped across the rear are any indication), but they’re saddled with something bigger: the assumption that they’re happy to display their private lives in the most public of forums.

Part of what makes us us is what we keep to ourselves. Likewise, part of what creates intimacy is sharing private parts of ourselves with others. So when the expectations of what’s public and what’s private shift dramatically, so do our ideas of intimacy and how we can best create it. Today, apparently, sharing passwords is a way teenagers show intimacy among one another. It’s totally unfathomable to me, but it works for them, because their ideas of privacy are already radically different than mine. I wonder, then, what lies beneath the pajamas fad. If teens are creating privacy settings with their wardrobes, that means not that they don’t care about privacy but that they care very much. Much like I’ve taken the public meaning of slips to create a private delight for myself, the pajamas look could be a signal I don’t yet understand—and perhaps teens don’t yet understand it either. My instinct was to cluck at them, get them to see that they’re losing something sacred about themselves if they display their private lives so publicly—and worse yet if they’re not actually showing their private selves but rather a carefully cultivated idea of the private self. But I’m going to hold out hope here, hope that in some ways the inversion of public and private selves could ultimately serve to strengthen notions of what they really and truly want to keep private.

We’ve wrung our hands over what the share-all generation has in store, and in general I’m inclined to think that living so publicly is ultimately harmful. But seeing how some teens have subverted the very tools supposedly creating the problem—for example, deactivating Facebook profiles every time they go offline so that nobody can post on their wall without their immediate knowledge—I think they’re going to be savvier than adults can imagine about how to manage their private lives. I don’t think the slide toward pajama pants is a good thing (I'm with Sally on her "slippery slope" theory), and I’m thankful that I didn’t have to navigate that as a teenager. (I was one of those kids who secretly wished for a uniform so that I wouldn’t have to think about it.) But this generation is spending a lot of energy figuring out public and private personae. So let 'em wear the pajama pants while they’re figuring it out. They’re going to need to be comfortable.

Privately Speaking: My Love of Slips

I'd like to be able to neatly delineate beauty tasks I do because I "have" to from beauty tasks I do simply because they delight me. The obvious way to determine whether any particular bit of beauty work is done because it fulfills societal norms is to look at whether it's done without an audience—that is, at home, alone. Trouble with that, for me, is that there’s very little beauty labor I do unless prodded with the hot fire pokers we call “human contact.” On days when I’m at home alone I’ll stick to the barest rules of hygiene, meaning I brush my teeth and put on deodorant, and most likely I’ll splash my face with water and rub in some coconut oil. No makeup, hair in a bun—not even body lotion, because I only put on body lotion after a shower, and unless I’ve gone to the gym the chances of me showering on a no-human day are slim. I am lazy, folks.

No, my private beauty delights come to me through something I rarely write about and claim not to care much about: clothes. Specifically, slips. Given how little I care for shopping and for amassing a broad wardrobe, it may surprise you to learn that I have no fewer than 30 vintage slips. I never understand it when I read interviews with women who say they have clothes in their closet with tags still on it, but certainly I have slips I’ve never worn. There’s probably four of them that I wear on a heavy rotation—the mocha-colored '70s-style one, the early '60s baby-doll, the white one with the label that reads “Back Magic,” and a robin’s-egg blue one that’s too tight to sleep in comfortably but that peeks out from my favorite shirtdress every so often, and that makes me feel just a little bit like Elizabeth Taylor whenever I wear it.

I’ve loved slips ever since I was a kid, when my mother’s sisters allowed me to plunder through some unwanted clothes. By virtue of living in apartment complexes with swimming pools and wearing eyeliner, my aunts seemed terrifically glamorous to me, so I salivated at the chance to wear their old pieces. There wasn’t much for an eight-year-old to take—I’d aged out of princess dress-up but hadn’t graduated to, say, halter tops—but one item stood out: a short black nylon slip with plain scalloped trim on the bust. I treated it as a dress, and given that I was a rotund little kid it actually fit me reasonably well, despite looking utterly not how it was designed to look. I knew not to wear it out of the house (in fact, I knew not to wear it outside the confines of my bedroom), but I also couldn’t bring myself to treat the slip as straight-up play clothes either. The slip seemed to promise something more—it wasn’t a ridiculous item, it was a sexy item, an adult item, something like what women wore in those old movies, but not so racy as to be embarrassing for anyone involved, including an eight-year-old girl.

Fifteen years later, I moved to New York with a backpack and a cardboard dresser, and that slip was one of the few items that made it across the country with me. Good thing, too. Since I had nowhere to live in New York, I bounced around seedy SROs and sublets for several months. And just in case you ever wind up living in an SRO with an overhead light bulb that won’t turn off and a bathroom you share with a drag queen named Coco, here’s a tip: You want to look as chic as you possibly can whilst creeping from your overlit bedroom to your shared, roach-infested bathroom, because you’ll be damned if Coco’s chihuahua is more glamorous than you. My slip came in handy for these occasions, and in others: Going to the rooftop to escape the oppressive heat of one of my sublets during the hottest summer on record since 1869, serving as a well-isn’t-this-convenient coverup after entertaining in my boudoir, even, on the hottest of summer evenings, serving as a dress—always under a floppy overshirt, mind you!—for late-night ice cream runs.

Eventually I began to stop ever wearing slips in front of anybody except for roommates (or, ahem, bedmates), and eventually the hand-me-down began to fall apart. During my thankfully brief foray into drunk online shopping (I was ahead of my time), I discovered that slips were frequently sold in lots of 20 or more for insanely cheap prices. I soon had piles of slips lying around, to the point where I made curtains out of them. Peach chiffon baby-doll, severe navy with swiss dots, accordion-pleated bottoms: I had fun with these (especially the baby-doll ones, which I love wearing but which put me in a vaguely petulant mood because they seem like something Betty Draper would wear), but I’d always go back to the standard: the cheap mid-thigh nylon slips with adjustable straps. I’m not alone in my affection for this kind of slip; in 2006, the Times trumpeted the slip’s comeback with the headline “What’s Sexy Now.” Sexy they are, even if they weren’t originally meant to be (though I’d argue that few women wear them anymore for their original purpose—few of my dresses are sheer enough to require them, so if they’re ever worn out of the house it’s because I mean for them to peek out from whatever I’m wearing over it). But the reason for their sexiness is their first juxtaposition: As one of the story's interviewees says, “Slips are totally demure. At a time when nothing is shocking anymore, that's what makes them sexy."

Sexiness per se isn’t what makes me love the slip. Sex usually involves other people, and for me, the slip is private. Yet part of its private meaning stems from its public use: It’s informal, meant to be worn under the finery, but its simple lines and solid colors make it elegant in its simplicity. So when I wear a slip in solitude, I’m not wearing it because it’s comfortable or practical for padding about my apartment; I wear it because it makes me feel elegant yet simple, a little demure, a little sexy. I could get some of the same feelings from a peignoir, but the peignoir is designed to be worn in private. The public utility of the slip is what embues its private use so richly. It’s because the slip straddles the line of public and private that I take such delight in wearing them when nobody can see.

When I wrote last year about my mirror fast, one of the things I wanted to challenge myself on was seeing not myself, but an image of myself: “I’ll see my reflection in a darkened windowpane, hunched over my computer with a pencil twirled through my upswept hair, and I’ll think, My, don’t I look like a writer?” It’s an ongoing project for women, to learn how to see ourselves as people and not images, and it’s a worthy project. But there’s also power in seizing imagery for ourselves—and perhaps it’s a self-serving argument to make here, but there’s potentially even more power in seizing imagery that is solely for our own pleasure, to define ourselves in our private spaces. Women are nearly always in the danger of putting on a performance, something that’s prettily easily critiqued from a feminist perspective. But that critique often leaves out the very real joys of performance—the pleasure of transformation, the relief of slipping into a role. It’s difficult if not impossible to suss out how much “life performance” is actually helpful to us as women, but that task becomes easier when we’re talking about performance in our private spaces.

When I’m lounging about in a slip, I’m attempting to summon up the qualities I attach to slips, like casual glamour, sophistication, maturity. Some of those qualities are usually only detected through the eyes of others—glamour and sophistication in particular—but in summoning the qualities privately, I'm making a wish of possession that perhaps goes deeper than when I simply dress up to be in public. I’m saying to myself: This is who I truly am. Now, the fact that I’m conscious of this suggests that perhaps it’s not truly who I am after all. (Chances are I’m more of a frayed college hoodie. Go Ducks!) But if I can’t privately channel the part of myself that not only wants to wears slips but is comfortable in them for reasons that go beyond the practical, then I’m cutting off one small avenue for any sort of transformation. There’s much to be said for accepting our frayed-college-hoodie selves. There’s also much to be said for allowing ourselves the portal of performance, even if—rather, especially if—that performance is only for ourselves.

Slips are my way of accessing the aspects of the feminine performance that bring me pleasure, or at least of beginning to understand what I might find pleasurable about that performance. What about you? What private beauty or style play do you have in your life? Do you wear makeup when you’re alone? Do you ever dress up by yourself, just for fun? Do you bring public space into your private sphere—or are your delineations of what’s public and private looser than what I’m describing here?

Beauty Blogosphere 1.20.12

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

From Head...

Theodent: the chocoholic equivalent of using bourbon as mouthwash

Theodent and forget it: Startup dental care company Theodent replaces fluoride with chocolate, which apparently has antimicrobial properties? It's currently mint-flavored, but never fear: A chocolate-flavored version is in the works. ("I understand chocolate bacon, Bill, but this is ridiculous!")

...To Toe...
Mukluk: Artist-activist Louie Gong will be collaborating with Manitobah Mukluks to do some designer kicks. Manitobah Mukluks is a Native-themed company actually—yes, it's true!—owned by Native people! I've never worn them myself, but Beyond Buckskin's tipoff is enough for me.

...And Everything In Between:
Blonde battle: Starbucks is taking a firm line: No employee is to make "blonde jokes" in reference to the company's new Blonde Roast coffee. Which, you know, yay and all—no, seriously, I was worried they were going to try some gross blonde-chick marketing thing and it's good to know they're taking a firm line on not exploiting the flaxen-haired just to make a buck. But if they're so concerned about people making blonde jokes why didn't they, I don't know, name the coffee something else? (Edit: K raises some great points in the comments section: "What's more troubling than calling the coffee 'blonde' is the associations they're making with it: 'It is subtle, mellow, lighter-bodied, full of flavor, and delicious.' (from the Starbucks website). The implied message here is that the ideal blonde (coffee or woman), is subtle. She's mellow and easy to deal with, but interesting. She's lighter-bodied... which can be interpreted both as skin colour and as body type." Sing it, sister!)

A wrinkle in the plan: The National Advertising Division is asking Neutrogena to reword its claims about a certain anti-wrinkle cream the company says will reduce wrinkles in under a week. Criminy, they coulda talked to me first.

Iron lady: The makeover of Margaret Thatcher.

Pushing it: Feminist Philosophers looks at "Push Girls," a new reality show featuring, well, hot chicks in wheelchairs. I mean, it's great that the show isn't treating women with disabilities as desexed or unattractive, but when "four gorgeous ladies" is a part of the show's description, I've gotta wonder.

A bit of surgical history: The first breast implant patient in the U.S. didn't really want implants. In 1962, when Timmie Jean Lindsey went to a "charity hospital" to have a tattoo removed, "They asked me if I wanted implants, and I said, 'Well, I don't really know.'" !

Can't figure out whether this is the fashionista's Diet Coke or the romantic's. DECISIONS.

"Fashion can": Which aspect of this marketing scheme is more bad-awesome? The special edition Diet Cokes in "fashion cans" or the tie-in videos with Benefit that "show the rock chick, fashionista and romantic enjoying a Diet Coke while they are shown how to achieve their desired look using products from Benefit Cosmetics"? You decide.

More marketing: The co-opting of "confidence" in this endorsement is sort of hilarious. Proctor & Gamble is sponsoring the U.S. Olympics women's gymnastics team, so it makes sense to pluck Alicia Sacramone, who won a silver in Beijing, as a spokeswoman, but the spin here is downright hilarious. "When I'm competing, confidence is key and nothing boosts me like feeling beautiful inside and out. I turn to P&G beauty brands like COVERGIRL, Olay, Pantene and Secret on a daily basis to give me the confidence to take on anything." Yeah, we've come a long way, baby.

Shrimpface: Shrimp derivative shown to aid skin permeation of green tea catechins. I was just wondering how to get all those green tea catechins to sink in, and damn if I don't have all these shrimp...

On grieving our fantasies: Medicinal Marzipan's haunting post on grieving the loss of our "body fantasy" is a self-acceptance must-read, because behind every woman who's dissatisfied with her looks is a fantasy woman who gives us a lot more than we realize. "We talk about grief in regards to losing those that we love or having to give up possessions or places by necessity of circumstance. Less often, you will hear people talking openly about the grief that they experience at having to give up a notion of themselves that they clung to for dear life."

Mass hysteria: Not exactly beauty-related, but this outbreak of what appears to be "conversion disorder"—aka mass hysteria—of 12 girls in upstate New York makes me wonder about eating disorder as a social contagion. Conversion disorder seems to be a way that the body and mind funnel stress, resulting in anything from tics to verbal confusion to temporary blindness, and the fact that there's an actual outbreak of it despite no known environmental factors makes it clear that it's also a social disease. (Not that kind of social disease.) Eating disorders are partly biological in origin, but there's also enormous cultural factors at play here. Is this odd spate of twitchy girls a microcosm of how some eating disorders develop? (via Jessica Stanley)

The trans beauty myth: Fantastic post from Jane Fae, who prompts us to think about the beauty myth and trans women. "Some women really aren’t too fussed over looks: would never contemplate a boob job or, the latest fad, a labioplasty. Others would because they can.... Ironic, therefore, if trans women now find themselves suffering from the same pressure. When, as in some widely-reported recent cases, hormones leave you underdeveloped, breast-wise, is your despair genuinely your own? Or is it increasingly something imposed on you by a society that, as it begins to accept that transition and transgender are not mere eccentricity, but utterly bound up with individual identity, now begins to impose on trans women the same pressures it has been imposing on every woman that ever was?"

What's your makeup: Beyoncé's spot for L'Oréal caught the attention of Indian Country Today; the ads claim that L'Oréal is particularly well-suited for the "mosaic of all faces before" hers. There's hardly ever a public mention of Native women's makeup woes, so it's nice on that front, and it's also interesting from the perspective of self-branding. Is Beyoncé marketing her mixed-race background?

The living years: Love this photo project of different women, ages 1-101. (via Ruby Bastille)

"Can Dr. VaJayJay help it if this is what women ask for?"

Dr. VaJayJay, M.D.: Am I the only one who's thinking of Alec Baldwin's Jack Donaghy in this spoof video with "Dr. VaJayJay," whose goal is to "Privatize Tho$e Private$" with labial cosmetic surgery? Vaginoplasty has its place, in particular for trans women (I'm pretty sure this falls outside the realm of what Jane is talking about), but this video is spot-on in connecting it to the way we medicalize what doesn't need medicalizing, and how pornography has changed what's normal—something Beauty Redefined does great work on dissecting. (Thanks to reader Rebecca from the New View Campaign for the link!)

Classical jazz: Une Femme d'un Certain Age asks what makes a classic, classic. "What we (I?) often think of as 'classic' seems to work best on the more ectomorphic among us. Am I trying to work 'classic' too literally for my body type? (Is there such a thing as Voluptuous Classic?)"

Private pantser: Pajama pants are eroding the moral fiber of society. I'm actually anti-pajama-pants-in-public, though I understand that some people with chronic pain conditions may need the comfort they offer. Not because it's a moral issue, but because I feel like it's contributing to a dangerous erosion of the public vs. private self. Facebook is bad enough, now girls need to showcase their private wardrobe too?

Alpha Girl: Comics aren't usually my thing, but the premise of Alpha Girl is interesting: A cosmetics company develops a pheromone-based scent that turns women into "crazed man-eaters." Seems a tad too close to comfort to Anarchy, the new women's fragrance from Axe, which fragrance blog Mimi FrouFrou appraises this week from a marketing standpoint.

But nothing about "bicycle face"?: Gala Darling on "bicycle style": Helmet-hair, skirts and modesty, and keeping warm whilst staying stylin'. I tend to choose one or the other—chic or practical—but I applaud those who can try to do both!

"Punish whoever brought these mirrors!": I love Kjerstin Gruys's "Fun Fact Fridays" about mirrors, and this one is my favorite yet: Jewish couples in antiquity would use mirrors specifically to increase their levels of arousal.

Beauty, violence, and sensationalism: Elizabeth Greenwood for The Atlantic lays out two films that succeeds in depicting violence against attractive women without making it somehow seem alluring—and one that fails miserably. 

"Only people over 70 are fooled by Photoshop": I loved Bossypants so much that I didn't think to be critical of Tina Fey's bit on Photoshop, but Virginia Sole-Smith's second look at Fey's take on the matter makes me want to reread and reevaluate. 

"They must reap what they sow": Margaret Cho on the fury that escapes when her looks are attacked. "When someone says something negative about my face or body I will always and forever just completely lose my shit, because I have so much hatred in me, a violence that lies just beneath the surface of my delightfully illustrated skin. ... I’d like to say things that would haunt them for the rest of their days, because their hideous words stay with me eternally. Their insipid spouts of 'no fat chicks' are branded onto my soul, so they must reap what they sow." I'm generally of the "turn the other cheek" variety, but I understand the impulse, yes, I do.

For Janis Joplin, On Her Sixty-Ninth Birthday

The first time I heard Janis Joplin, it was by chance. I was at the home of an acquaintance, a bona fide Popular Girl who argued feminist positions along with me in our junior-year literature class, making her my favorite of the in-crowd. I’d been assigned a class project with her, and she had a small group of us over to her home to work on the task. We sat cross-legged on the floor, sipping sodas and plotting our work, when a quiet wail in the background caught my ear. I tuned out the conversation and tuned in to the wail: I couldn’t make out the words, but the sound itself was urgent, pained, and undeniably female. I interrupted the conversation to ask who we were listening to, and the popular girl smiled. “Janis Joplin,” she said. “Isn’t she great?”

I’d heard of Janis Joplin before, but somehow she had slipped through my musical upbringing in favor of The Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, and Bob Dylan. My parents owned Pearl—as I’d learn later that night when I’d ask my parents about Janis with the same sort of feigned-casual tone I might use to inquire about an it’s-no-big-deal-really crush—but she wasn’t a part of the household repertoire. After commandeering Pearl and realizing there had to be even more Janis out there, I went to the public library and found every bit of material on her that I could. I borrowed CDs to make illegal tapes of them; I read biographies; I watched Monterey Pop. I went barefoot for much of my senior year of high school because it seemed like something Janis would have done; I strolled the halls with my long hair, tie-dye T-shirts, long necklaces, and ripped jeans, and imagined myself to be channeling some part of her. Forget that as a classic good girl, any rebellious streak I had was forever turned inward, not outward; forget that I was 17 and had no idea what phrases like a woman left lonely, piece of my heart, and get it while you can could possibly mean (or rather, forget that I’m an adult critiquing my adolescent understanding of her work; at 17 I knew the meaning of those words as well as anyone).

I wouldn’t say I wanted to be Janis, or even that I considered her a role model. I’d quickly learn how she lived, I’d quickly learn how she’d died, and I didn’t want to shape my life in that way. But I admired her. I’d call it a “girl crush” if I didn’t usually apply that term to women who reminded me of a better version of myself, which Janis wasn’t. Janis Joplin was nothing like me. That’s part of why—I’ll use this phrase, and not lightly—I loved her.

It wasn’t until I had read multiple biographies of her that I began to recognize something that felt like a nonsensical gnat at first, but a gnat that appeared in every major work about her: Janis Joplin wasn’t pretty. I mean, yeah yeah, eye of the beholder and inner beauty and all that, but Janis Joplin was not considered to be pretty. She was an outcast growing up, teased for her looks—her acne-plagued skin, her tendency to gain weight—and she never carried the mantle of the pretty girl. Even when she became an icon of the late ‘60s, it wasn’t because she was a beauty. None of that mattered to me, though, because I had no idea she wasn’t supposed to be pretty.

There are plenty of reasons why I didn’t think about Janis Joplin’s beauty. The obvious would be that she was so extraordinarily talented that her voice took a backseat to her looks, or perhaps that her talent made her beautiful to me. Hell, maybe it was because Janis came to me through a Popular Girl, so I conferred the qualities of that girl onto Janis herself. And perhaps all of those are true, but that’s not what was really going on.

It was more this: Famous women are pretty, and Janis Joplin is famous, ergo Janis Joplin is pretty. That was it, that was the logic, and I didn’t question my faulty syllogism. Janis Joplin had to be beautiful, because known women are beautiful. I didn’t need to actually look at her to know it must be true. To be clear, it wasn’t that I had some special ability to see a female performer as beautiful because of her talent alone, or that I thought her looks were unimportant. It was quite the opposite: I thought looks were incredibly important. I was so stuck on connecting beauty with talent and “making it” that I superimposed a physical beauty onto anyone with talent. Rather, I superimposed the concept of a woman’s looks, to the point where the actual physical “truth” of it (if there is ever a “truth” about beauty) became beside the point. I’d like to think that Janis’s looks didn’t cross my mind because my attitude on the matter was so progressive, but in truth it was because my attitude was regressive, or at least adolescent. I prized beauty, so I tethered skill, talent, tenacity, boldness, attitude, charisma—the things I actually loved about Janis—to it.

I don’t remember what I thought the first time I saw a picture of Janis. I do, however, remember looking at pictures of other women from the era and wanting to be like them because they were pretty. Grace Slick’s tilted head and dark eyes on the cover of Surrealistic Pillow, Mary Travers looking pertly fabulous under her boa on Album 1700, even, as a child, the pretty smile of Marlo Thomas on the back of Free to Be You and Me: I loved all of these albums from childhood on, and probably would have even if Grace, Mary, and Marlo were less pretty than they were. But their looks were a part of the fantasy portal they created. Grace and Mary were beautiful women surrounded by men (who I saw as being of lesser talent, whether or not that’s true), and Marlo—well, she was That Girl, right? Was it any wonder a girl who longed to be both pretty and accomplished would look up to these women?

It was probably my experiences with Grace, Mary, and Marlo—and Peggy Lee, and Linda Ronstadt, and Lesley Gore, Julie Andrews, Stevie Nicks, Diana Ross, or any of the other female musicians who populated my childhood—that made me assume, sight unseen, that Janis Joplin must be pretty. Once I started reading biographies of her and saw that writers would occasionally mention that she was hardly Venusian, I dismissed such notions as being beside the point, but I still didn’t question the veracity of their claims. It was only after my fervor had died down a little bit—the poster taken down from my wall, my college boombox finally being relieved of Cheap Thrills—that I studied photographs of her, looking for something other than Janis Joplin, the legend. She made some arresting images, to be sure—sprawled in feathers on a leather settee for Pearl, behatted in furs leaving the Chelsea Hotel. There’s little question that Janis was attractive, in the sense that she attracted you, and for reasons that had nothing to do with her voice. But pretty? No, she wasn’t that.

Still, we loved to look at her. In fact, perhaps we loved to look at her because she wasn’t traditionally beautiful. As rock critic Ellen Willis writes in her 1976 essay on Janis, “Joplin’s metamorphosis from the ugly duckling of Port Arthur to the peacock of Haight-Ashbury meant, among other things, that a woman who was not conventionally pretty, who had acne and an intermittent weight problem and hair that stuck out, could not only invent her own beauty (just as she invented her wonderful sleazofreak costumes) out of sheer energy, soul, sweetness, arrogance, and a sense of humor, but have that beauty appreciated. Not that Janis merely took advantage of changes in our notions of attractiveness; she herself changed them.”

Isn’t it nice to think so? I don’t think it’s true, though, not exactly, or at least I don’t think Janis changed our notions of attractiveness. But I do think that not only is she a prime example of how someone’s raw talent can make a person so appealing as to actually transform one’s looks, she’s also a poster child for the ways beauty serves as a false protector. Janis Joplin, never having been considered pretty, also never had the security of banal prettiness. And as harsh as it probably was to not have that security, it may also have wound up giving her a certain protection against misdirected blame. In “Ball and Chain,” when Janis moans, “I don’t understand how come you’re gone” she has a near-childlike lack of understanding—how come you’re gone? how come? The only thing greater than her gaping incomprehension at why her man would leave a good thing is her pain. But at age 17, I’d have known how come he’d gone: I wasn’t his dream girl after all, I wasn’t pretty enough, I spat when I talked, I’d been too clingy, and my god was I really just fat after all? (I’d have been wrong, of course. We never understand how come they’re gone.) Janis skipped forward through the analysis of the good girl, the pretty-enough girl, the girl who desperately wishes not to repeat her mistakes—the me-girl—landing smack-dab in the searing, fertile garden of pain. We all wind up there eventually. I can’t say she spared herself any grief through her circumnavigation around nice-girl self-blame; Janis didn’t spare herself much of anything. But she grieved the right things. She never had the crutch of prettiness, so she learned to walk without it.

There’s only so far I can romanticize Janis in this respect, of course. She jumped from lover to lover, only rarely feeling satisfied. She sought approval more than her lasting reputation as an iconoclast reveals; one listen to the mediocre Kozmic Blues shows just that. She went to her high school reunion fully expecting the reception she’d longed for 10 years earlier, only to walk away with a tire, an award for having traveled the farthest to attend. (“What am I going to do with a fucking tire?” she reputedly said upon receiving the award.) And, of course, she died in a hotel room, alone, at age 27, of a self-administered heroin overdose. I can’t claim jack shit for Janis’s self-image or appraisal of her own appeal. I can only claim what she taught me.

I’m older now, more mature, and I’d like to think I’m no longer as eager to equate talent and physical beauty. In fact, I’ve come back to that place I was at age 17: Janis Joplin’s looks don’t matter to me, in the sense that they’re unimportant in the larger scope of who she is. I’m glad for that. Janis’s legacy isn’t that of beauty; it’s that of brutal vulnerability, searing talent, and the virtue of being totally unable to be anyone other than oneself. I write here of the importance her looks had for me because this is the place I have to honor her, and here I write of beauty. But when I listen to her—it doesn’t matter what album, it doesn’t matter what song—if I am thinking of beauty at all, I’m thinking of the kind of beauty that transcends. Whimsy, will, and revelation created Janis’s legacy, and they create her beauty too. And today, on what would have been her sixty-ninth birthday, I want to offer her memory a piece of my heart.

Pricing Beauty (Not That Other Book)

I have a comparative review of Catherine Hakim’s Erotic Capital and Ashley Mears’s Pricing Beauty up at The New Inquiry. (Image possibly unsafe for work; I didn't choose it.) Last time I piped up here about the concept of erotic capital, I was trying to find a way to value it. For there are parts of the theory I find enticing—that if our culture began to value traditionally feminine traits and skills instead of automatically denigrating them, we might begin to see progress in arenas where sexism still thrives. I also liked the idea that erotic capital was embodied by charisma and “people skills,” not merely the “womanly arts” of being seductive and walking successfully in high heels. I’m not exactly a believer in “if you’ve got it, flaunt it,” but I’m a believer in charm, and I was ready to read an argument that valorized it.

Unfortunately, as I point out in the review, these theories were in my head, not in Hakim’s book. When I wrote my earlier piece on erotic capital, I hadn’t yet read the book that inspired it; I now wish I’d made my point entirely separate from Erotic Capital, because Erotic Capital is tripe. Like, seriously, tripe, and not just because I disagree with most of its premises; it’s poorly written, repetitive, and defensive, and Hakim seems to have a willful misunderstanding of women's history. (Hakim isn’t the first person to attempt to discredit feminism’s most visible icon by referring to Gloria Steinem as a former Playboy bunny without acknowledging that she worked undercover for Playboy to expose their working conditions. But when it’s used to ask why more feminists haven’t embraced erotic capital—including a former Playboy bunny!—it’s particularly disingenuous.) Which is exactly why, though I’m pleased with the review and would happily write it again, I’m simultaneously chagrined with myself for taking Hakim’s bait. After reading the book, it became clear she wanted exactly the kind of argument I issued. It attacks feminism and uses the word erotic in its title; she meant for it to be a provocative argument, not a serious one. I suppose my mistake was in expecting a better argument. Lesson learned.

The real downside here, though, is that in gnawing away at Erotic Capital, I didn’t get a chance to showcase Pricing Beauty, which is excellent. I was eager to read it because it was an in-depth study of the modeling industry that didn’t immediately dismiss it as harmful to the population at large, which is what most feminist discourse regarding modeling focuses on. Mears doesn’t ignore those claims; instead, she deftly illustrates how the industry embodies the social and cultural constructs the power-holders have decided upon (even when they don’t exactly know that they’re deciding upon anything). That is: The modeling industry isn’t some weird otherworld; the modeling industry just lays bare the conditions many of us operate under every day.

A recurring theme in Pricing Beauty is how an industry can put a price tag on a product whose entire value lies in representation. How can the industry decide one 5’10” lithe, toothy brunette is worth $6,000 a day, while another 5’10” lithe, toothy brunette winds up in debt to her agency? In looking at the tastemakers who control the aesthetics of modeling—photographers, bookers, agents, and most of all clients, the people signing the bills at the end of the day—Mears shows us how even the power-holders make decisions according to what they each think the other wants, leading to an inflation among what each tastemaker anticipates will be the prized “look.” And there are plenty of ways to dissect any particular look and what those in power might gain from prizing that particular look—even when they genuinely don’t realize that they’re suddenly prizing a look that serves their cultural dictates. But we can’t do any of it unless we accept modeling A) as a legitimate industry worth studying, one with its own working conditions and peculiar rules that, along with the glamour, keep its participants hungry for its winner-take-all economic stakes, and B) as an industry that isn’t against the rest of us, but rather an embodiment of the social and cultural concerns that might get us riled up about the modeling industry in the first place.

For a sociological study that could easily have devolved into academic-ese in an effort to be taken seriously, the book is both lucid and economical; it’s a testament to the good faith in which Mears, who was working as a model while doing her research, approaches the industry, looking to be neither critical nor laudatory. Each anecdote surges toward the larger thesis, even the quotes from outliers, making the entire read seamless. I’d read Mears’ work on Jezebel before; I don’t know her background other than what’s in her bio, but the ease with which she writes over there shines through in Pricing Beauty. (Few things will turn me off quicker than writing designed to appear scholarly; this book is one of those studies that shows such style is a compensation for unclear thinking.)

It’s always tempting to treat modeling as either a terrifically glamorous world, or as the opposite—a Valley of the Dolls-type world built for disappointment and tragedy, but only after years spent in blistering high heels. Mears refuses to sensationalize modeling in either direction, acknowledging its perks (you’re a model! who gets to work in Europe sometimes!) and pitfalls (you’re a model! who may well exit the industry in debt to your agency for all the work they’ve poured into your never-launched career!) but always keeping an eye on the larger questions: What do the peculiar economics of the modeling industry say about cultural values, about gender, about privilege? In essence, what does modeling say about us? We know there's a connection; that's part of why there's such an enormous amount of attention paid to the industry, or rather, to models themselves. (Why do any of us know who Claudia Schiffer is?) That's part of why some of us internalize the messages of the modeling industry so readily. We might not need Pricing Beauty to tell us that there's a connection between the cultural production of modeling and the cultural production of ourselves, but we just might need it to help us understand why.

Say Cheese: On Smiling, Comfort, and Surrender

In the summer of 1986, a small item ran in the biweekly newspaper of Guymon, Oklahoma, that I am guessing went unremembered by all but one of the town’s 15,000 residents. The item in question was a column about how to look good in photographs, and I will paraphrase the part that stuck with me: If you want your face to look slimmer, tip your chin down when being photographed so that you are looking at the camera from a lowered gaze. And if you want to look seductive, smile faintly, without teeth.

I was both chubby and boy-crazy, giving this advice combination a compelling allure. As a result, nearly every single posed photograph of me between the ages of 9 and 34 shows some variation upon that look. Face slightly tipped down, eyes gazing up, smiling, no teeth.

Wholly Unnatural Photo Face: Exhibit A. 

This gaze works for me as an adult, to a degree, even if I question the "seductive" part of the equation. It certainly didn’t work for me at age 9; I looked as though I were attempting to seduce Pee-Wee Herman. But never mind that: I had a goal (slim, seductive) and a fool-proof way to achieve it (the advice column of my local biweekly newspaper), and it didn’t occur to me to question its efficacy. I practiced the look, goal in mind, and had a blind faith that it would make me appear slim and seductive. I stuck with it for 25 years.

Something else happened over those 25 years: I realized I preferred videos and candid photographs of myself over posed ones. Even if a candid shot caught me unkempt or making a weird face, I was able to laugh it off; I didn’t take it as any sort of statement about how I “actually” looked. But a bad posed photograph seemed an indictment. I resigned myself to not ever having a good posed photograph of myself, and in fact made my preference for candid photographs sort of a semi-feigned quirk about myself, semi-feigned quirks being the saving grace for many an analytical lady.

But early last year, in an online space far less kind than The Beheld, a stranger commented that I looked like I was “sucking on a lemon.” The more I looked at the photograph in question—a photograph I’d selected because I found it to be an artful arranging of my features—the more I realized the commenter was right, if unkind. I couldn’t very well avoid posed photographs all my life, and it was clear my 25-year-old trick wasn’t working for me anymore. I tried a handful of new tips, culled from fashion magazines instead of Dust Bowl newspapers, to become a little more photogenic. I tried gazing at the camera as though it were someone I loved; I tried blinking before the flash went off; I even tried saying prune, advice I picked up from none other than the Olsen twins. None of it worked.

No, but really, I like lemons.

A total stranger could tell my “photo face” wasn’t me, but it took a professional to tell me why. Around the time I started trying to shed my photo face, I interviewed photographer Sophie Elgort. I’d reached out to her for her thoughts on fashion—which were insightful—but it was her thoughts on being photogenic that resonated. “If somebody’s not comfortable—in person or in a photo—it’s pretty obvious,” she told me (while I, of course, was arranging my face so as not to let on that she was talking directly about me). “The difference between somebody who’s photogenic and somebody who’s not is that people who aren’t photogenic are sometimes nervous in front of a camera. They make weird twitches, or they’ll sort of crane their neck or purse their lips or do something that’s obviously not them, because they’re nervous. If you keep shooting, you can get them more into their natural element and you can get a good photo from people who say, ‘Oh, I’m not photogenic.’ You’re not unphotogenic; it’s that you’re usually posing, putting on this ridiculous face that’s not you. How can you expect to look like your best self in a photo if you’re putting on a ridiculous face?”

No wonder I liked candid photographs so much more than posed ones. I was so uncomfortable with how I appeared—face too full, lips too uneven—that I was doing everything I could to control my looks, for we try to control what we find uncomfortable. The result was not only tortured but inaccurate: Like the mirror face, the photo face is an exercise in manipulation, in falsehood. We cannot look like ourselves when we are attempting to manipulate the camera. And, as Sophie says, we cannot look our best when we don’t look like ourselves. In trying to manipulate myself into looking my best, I manipulated my way right out of it.

With every photograph taken of me, I was attempting to control something uncontrollable — my very face. And the thing is, I wasn’t fooling anyone, not even myself. Whenever I’d cringe at a photo, I was cringing not at how I looked, but at my failed manipulation. For the small, constant acts of management were revealing not only a physical truth (that I do have a full face, that my eyes aren’t as Bambi-like as I’d prefer) but a deeper truth that I wanted to keep hidden—that I wasn’t comfortable with how I looked. There was a reason I preferred videos and candid photographs of myself to posed shots—in those images, I’d surrendered control. I wasn’t attempting to slim my face or appear alluring; I wasn’t attempting to do anything other than be myself. And in being my candid, full-cheeked, pointy-toothed self, whatever charm I have was able to shine. As Sophie put it, “There’s no way you can show your charisma if you’re not acting like yourself.”

Of course, it’s hard to “be yourself” on command. And becoming comfortable with oneself is a lifelong process; I wanted to start looking normal in photos now. The solution came when I asked a highly photogenic friend how she did it. She said a few things I’d heard, tried, and discarded, and I started filing away her advice along with other well-meaning words from people to whom certain things come so naturally as to be inexpressible. Then she shrugged. “Or, you know, I heard this once—just give the camera your biggest, toothiest, cheesiest smile, even if you don’t mean it.” I flashed her the cheesy smile she was referring to, thinking she would get that I was poking fun at the idea. She just said, “Yes, like that.”

So I started to smile. Yellowed teeth, uneven lips, wide face be damned, I smile now, in nearly every photograph. I smile big and broad and with teeth. I try to laugh sometimes too, but if nothing genuinely funny comes to mind I skip the laugh and just smile. I don’t tip my head down; I don’t throw my head back; I don’t think about where my head is at all. I just fucking smile.

And as it turns out, there is a reason smiling is the #1 classic photo advice: It works. It works better than tipping your head down and keeping your lips closed; it works better than looking a hair above the photographer to keep the impression of a lofty gaze; it works better than whatever the Olsen twins might tell you.

Thanks to the lovely Paige S. and Beth Mann for the photos;
certainly my smile experiment is helped along by good company

But wait! you say. How is a fake smile any less of a manipulation than tilting your head and lowering your gaze and doing all that jazz you’ve been doing for 25 years that you just told us was some “manipulation of the self”? The answer: It isn’t. But the control of a smile versus other small manipulations takes a different tone. A smile is a signal of openness; it’s an invitation. We smile when we’re nervous or unsure (particularly women), but one reason we reach for a smile in those moments is that it soothes both the person smiling and the person being smiled at. In other words, a smile makes us comfortable. It can be a manipulated comfort, but posing for a photograph is a manipulated situation to begin with. The implied acquiescence of a smile is what can make it troublesome from a feminist perspective (“Hey baby, where’s your smile?”), and it’s also what makes some non-smiling portraits so arresting—it’s a display of resistance. But in the average, run-of-the-mill photo where I just want to look good—or rather, where I just want to look like myself—I’ll call upon the big, fake, cheesy photo smile.

I’m happy to let a photographed smile do its immediate work of making me appear more comfortable with myself. And perhaps seizing the control of a smile is just another roadblock to the goal of actually being comfortable; after all, I’m still not thrilled with my full cheeks and my small, uneven teeth. But here’s the key: The control I’m seizing no longer makes me uncomfortable. Instead of attempting to adjust my face—my face! the face I’ll have all my life!—I’m adjusting the sentiment it wears. I’m controlling my looks by adjusting the emotions I’m telegraphing, not by adjusting my actual features, which I was never able to truly control anyway. Call it something as simple as an attitude adjustment. I suppose, quite literally, that’s exactly what it is.

I try not to overidentify with photographs of myself; I try to see them as the snapshots they are, not as a representation of how I exist in this world. I probably don’t succeed. But if I’m going to fail in that regard, I may as well be overidentifying with someone smiling back at me, someone extending a temporary reprieve from self-consciousness. Someone offering, for a brief yet semi-permanent moment, comfort.

Beauty Blogosphere 1.13.12

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

From Head...
New year's resolution: Could you go a year without buying new makeup? (Actually, I have so much stockpiled I could, easily, even if it means some weird blush colors down the line. I will be mascaraed until the apocalypse, rest assured.) 

...To Toe...
MAC the knife: Illinois high school sophomore suspended for bringing (what he claims is) a pedicure tool to school. Sorry, buddy, looks like a knife to me.

...And Everything In Between:

Why yes, Unilever, every anarchist I've known smells like "sparkling fruity notes with
soft florals at the heart and a light finish of sandalwood, amber, and vanilla"!

The sweet smell of anarchy: Natasha Lennard in Salon looks at the selling of Anarchy. You know, Anarchy, the body spray for women!

Leave it to the ladies: Which cosmetics company posted a whopping 15% increase in sales for 2011? Mary Kay. It even makes up their godawful week—an employee embezzling tens of thousands of dollars, and a thief breaking into a representative's home to loot $2,000 worth of products.

Do brands matter?: According to a new report, 66% of women are brand-aware when they shop for beauty products. I can't decide if the other 34% of us aren't brand-aware or just don't know that we're brand-aware. I mean, it's not like it's a small market—how do you know where to begin unless you're beginning with a product you've heard of?

Bad news boobs: French breast implant manufacturer PIP has been using industrial-grade silicone, not medical-grade silicone, in its products.  

Grinding: Slightly off-topic but I do think it's relevant: Max Fox's piece in The New Inquiry about the implications of cruising app Grindr on the gay community. Raising questions about visibility, activism, affective labor, and the way that technology automates desire and the gaze, this piece is relevant. "Grindr, which relieves you of most of the affective labor of cruising, with its risks and inefficiencies—mastering the elaborate signals, locating potential recipients but not eyeing the wrong guy, walking a body vulnerable to attack or arrest on the street—makes sense only once the old world that labor produced no longer exists. This is well within the familiar neoliberal practice of revolutionizing production processes by externalizing risk onto more precarious workers elsewhere."

Writer, editor, and founder of literary journal TriQuarterly Charles Newman.
Possibly too good-looking for his own good, per Boyers.

"Life is worth living only in the contemplation of beauty": Intriguing, poetic essay from Robert Boyers about the physical beauty of writer Charles Newman, and how that intersected with the morality of Newman and those who surrounded him. "He was not, to be sure, what typically passes for a beautiful character, not if that epithet is intended to identify an exalted moral stature. At times I felt that Charlie’s beauty got in the way of any reasonable estimation I might make of him as a person, and I wondered—only a little—at my own ability to be moved, consoled, by a beauty that could seem, at such moments, mainly skin-deep."

Blast from the past: Why did it take a "retro beauty" slideshow for me to realize that Salon Selectives was a relic of the '90s?

Web of beauty: I'm loving Beautiful in Theory's "Web of Beauty," which ties together philosophy, cosmetics, media, myth, and gender to look at how we construct and appreciate beauty. Eager to read more from Carina, who is writing her dissertation on images of beauty in post-1980s fiction, which I certainly hope includes Sweet Valley High.

"Is that a weave?": Great piece at Clutch for people who question the humor of "Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls." "When a college friend told me that I was 'cute for a black girl,' her statement had weight. It was spoken to a black woman on a campus with a 2 percent black population, in a state where black people were equally scarce, in a country where race bias is still pervasive. She was speaking in a culture where her own white features were prized and considered beautiful and mine were not.... She was speaking in a town where there was not one salon that did African American hair and no drug store that carried beauty products geared toward black women. Had I offered that she was 'cute for a white girl,' it would have been plenty offensive, but would have different context and far less weight. She had racial privilege; I did not." 

"Look at Me": Writer and former party model Amy Rose on the glamour and exploitation of the socialite modeling scene. "I came to suspect that while [the photographer] really did have a way of making women feel special and beautiful, he probably recognized my social discomfort the first night he met me and seized on it. He would often tell me how 'weird' I was before immediately switching gears and saying that I was gorgeous, toying with my insecurity before making me feel valuable again with the click of his camera. It worked." This piece exemplifies what I love so much about Rookie: It points out pitfalls many a girl has fallen into, without ever shaming them or implying that there's some moral plane they should instead be aiming for. Self-respect is at the core of what they do, and it shows. (Thanks to Emily Keeler at the excellent Bookside Table for the link.)

"It's you, perfected": Have you tried the lastest beauty product? It's Fotoshop, by Adobé, and this cosmetics ad spoof by filmmaker Jesse Rosten nails it. Who said feminist work couldn't be funny?
 
Gravitas: Tempted to see Gravity (I'm meh on Sandra Bullock but am a sucker for George Clooney*) if for no other reason than nobody is wearing makeup on the set. Seems like a bad idea, given that film does weird things to people's skin tones and features, but we'll see.

Girlcycle: A list of Don'ts for women on bicycles, circa 1895. "Don't cultivate a bicycle face." Is this like mirror face?

Class, aging, and dollar stores: Terri at Rags Against the Machine uses Susan Sontag's essay on aging as a springboard for her own examination of aging and class, prompting her yearlong experiment in retail shopping at various points of price and class connotations. (She's known for her thrifting, so this is a departure.) Eager to see where this goes!

Perfect: In recovery from an eating disorder, even supportive comments can be derailing, and Elissa at Dress With Courage paints a picture of how hearing "It's your perfect weight" two years into recovery can still bring confusion.

Confess: Sally opens up the fashion confessional. Mine: I will wear the same bra for days on end. I call it loyalty.

Real bodies: Miriam takes a critical look at the oft-dispensed advice for poor body image about "just look at the real bodies around you." Sometimes it work—and sometimes that's the last thing you want to do. (And off-topic but definitely worth reading, she also nails it about why "Shit Girls Say" makes me uneasy. Why does everyone like this so much?)

How much do we want body diversity?: The Black Girl's Guide to Weight Loss asks a question that makes me, for one, feel a bit like a hypocrite: We say we want body diversity, but are we supporting places that actually show body diversity? It's not like I'm rushing out to get Brigitte (a German magazine that doesn't use professional models) air-delivered to my door. I've never been a body snarker (which is really more what this piece is about) but I'd like to put my money where my mouth is. Suggestions? (Thanks to Parisian Feline for the link.)


*Yeah, yeah, the George Clooney hype is overblown. Except it's totally not. Exhibit A) He looks like George Clooney. Exhibit B) This telling anecdote (bottom of the page) from Roseanne Barr's amazing piece in New York mag. Read it and then just try to tell me you don't get the George Clooney thing. I dare you.

Mirror Mirror or Your Wall

I’ve written a bit before on here about how I tend to prefer videos of myself to photos, and this TV segment on self-esteem follows that pattern, so I’m particularly pleased to share it with readers. Broadcast journalists Debra Pangestu and Malgorzata Wojtunik, graduate students from CUNY’s channel 75, produced this five-minute segment on women and self-esteem, using my month-long mirror fast from last May as one of the anchors of the piece.

Courtesy Malgorzara Wojtunik and Debra Pangestu;
if this doesn't load, you can watch it at Malgorzara's website. 

So! This is what I sound like! (You should watch the whole video, but if you're just dying to hear my voice, I come in around 0:55.) I do not have vocal fry! And I apparently wear far more bright colors than I had realized! And I laugh when I’m talking, that is when I’m not looking very very earnest! This is actually the first time I’ve been on video with this caliber of filming (when I say I prefer myself on video, I’m referring to goofy vacation clips of me singing “Allentown” while IN ALLENTOWN), and it's neat to see what a difference good lighting makes. (I tried to hire Debra and Malgorzata to follow me around with their lighting kit, but they had "work" to "do.") In any case, here I am.

But the segment has a greater message beyond just proving to you that I’m not actually a middle-aged monk named Brother Frankie who's just posing as a ladyblogger for kicks. It gets into questions of how we determine our self-esteem, and how much control we actually have over our own image. Setting up a contrast between our self-image as determined by the mirror and our self-image as determined by social media, the reporters talk to Amy Gonzales, a researcher whose work indicates that social media may have the potential to increase our self-esteem. (Yes, this runs somewhat contrary to that study last year that got everyone talking, about how the more photos you had on your profile, the lower your self-esteem, which just seemed like bollocks to me and other like minds.) Study participants were put in a room and asked to fill out a questionnaire designed to measure self-esteem. Some participants had access to their Facebook profile while filling out the survey, others had access to a mirror, and the control group had access to neither.

The TV segment reports that the mirror group scored lowest on the self-esteem survey and the Facebook group scored highest, which is true, but that’s not what grabs me the most. (The mirror group’s score was lower by a negligible amount.) What grabs me is how the ways people used Facebook affected their scores: People who viewed only their own profiles scored higher than those who looked at profiles of other people, and those who made changes to their profiles during the study had the highest self-esteem of all. Which is to say: It’s not affirmation from others on Facebook that leads to a self-esteem boost; it’s the ability to gaze at and manipulate your own image. A little like...mirror-gazing and applying makeup, you might say.

I’m pleased with the segment and think the reporters should be too—they reported on a widely done topic (self-esteem) with a fresh spin, and they did it with professional panache. But there’s one sentiment I somewhat disagree with: “We cannot control what we see in the mirror, but we can control what others see on social media networks like Facebook.” One of the biggest things I learned during my mirror fast was exactly how much I do control what I see in the mirror: My “mirror face,” for starters, which ensures I’ll always be seeing a wider-eyed, poutier-lipped version of myself than what you might see when you look at me. Then there’s makeup, hairstyles, lighting, angles—not for our Facebook photos, but for the mirror. (I’ll spend more time looking at my reflection in a fitting room that’s softly lit, with mirrors hung in a way that captures me at my best, as opposed to a harshly lit dressing room that makes me look dumpier than I probably am...I hope.) And then there’s mood, moment, preexisting conditions, daily events, chance comments—we take in all of these, and they shape what we see in the mirror. It may not be conscious, but we absolutely control what we see in the mirror.

One of the main differences might be that with the mirror, we control what we see; with social media, we control what others see. But even with this, the differences are blurred. It wasn’t until my mirror fast that I had to accept—really accept—that my mirror face isn’t the face any of you would see when talking with me. I thought I could control my appearance because I could control my visual image of myself, but in fact I can do nothing of the sort. After the mirror fast, I realized there's a reason I prefer videos and candid photos of myself: I'm not posing. In trying to control my appearance whenever I knew I was being photographed, I was robbing myself of the very thing that makes me appealing (besides my ever-present scent of daffodils)—my warmth. How warm can one be when arranging one's face into a series of manipulations designed to avoid all points of insecurity? I needed to divorce myself from that image entirely before I could understand that there was something to divorce myself from. The only person I'm fooling with my mirror face is myself. There's much to say about Facebook and authentic representations of the self—but in this particular way, social media might be a more accurate reflection of ourselves than what we see in the mirror.