Dear Reader,
I’ve been chasing around some related-unrelated thoughts around beauty culture and, like, performative beauty, and the cultural dialogues around those things.
And before I wade in, it’s probably worth noting that this is all a foreign fucking land to me. I find it fascinating in the same way that I find other foreign cultures fascinating, but I did not grow up immersed in beauty culture.
I mean, it was around. I wasn’t raised in a convent, or a naked forest child running with wolves. I had access to television; for a while as a teenager I had a subscription to Seventeen magazine. When I was little, my youngest aunt would sometimes let me play dress-up with her wardrobe and makeup, and another aunt gave me a treasure trove of hand-me-downs that I remember mostly as an assortment of flowing rayon tops, plus one extremely chic strapless white-with-black-polka-dots party dress.
But women in my family didn’t talk about dieting. Nobody “put their face on” in the morning. My grandma Dorothy had two tongue-in-cheek rules of fashion: (1) make sure the back seam of your pants lines up with your butt crack and (2) check that your nipples are lined up, not pointing off in different directions. And that about sums up fashion-consciousness in the home where I grew up.
I was aware that there was an unspoken language around makeup and clothes going on around me. But I couldn’t ever quite catch it, or figure out how to translate it. I knew that getting it wrong invited ridicule, but I had no clue how to get it right. And I mostly didn’t care. If I had no hope of being able to Do Fashion, then I was just going to Be Myself, and that worked out pretty well.
By the end of high school, I’d settled into a wardrobe of loose sweaters and men’s button-downs and baggy jeans, and I was extremely comfortable with that. In my 20s, I figured out cute t-shirts and pants that fit and the whole realm of business casual. And that pretty much remains the extent of my fashion range.
Likewise, I was never especially fixated on my weight or my body shape. I was a bit on the heavier side in high school and college, but I don’t ever remember feeling unhappy about it. I lost a ton of weight when I started law school (a combination of stress and then figuring out how to work out to help with stress), something I’d never expected would happen but kind of enjoyed the results of; gained some back by the time I graduated; then lost it all again and then some when I was practicing law (mostly stress again, and too much subsisting on Tootsie Rolls at the office rather than taking a break to eat actual food).
Having inhabited a decent range of clothing sizes in my adult life, I can pretty confidently say that at any given time how I’ve felt about my body, or what I think my body looks like, only loosely correlates with the number on the scale or the size on a clothing label. And for that matter, the number on the scale and the size on the clothing label seem to have a pretty loose relationship with each other as well.
But makeup and hair are still mostly a mystery to me. So last year, I thought I’d have a little adventure and treat myself to a cheesecake/boudoir photo shoot, complete with professionally styled hair and makeup, in celebration of my upcoming 40th birthday and in defiance of the weird apocalypse we’ve been living through. Like, let me commemorate this cleavage for history, basically.
And very unexpectedly, it opened up a whole weird can of identity crisis and gender dysphoria. I was not at all prepared for that.
Like, this is me, but this is really NOT me:
I can’t imagine it’s likely that I’d even be recognized from this photo because it is just so many thousands of miles away from how I actually show up in the world, in real life.
The photographer did a nice job from the perspective of fulfilling the expectations laid out for this kind of photo shoot. It just turns out that instead of thinking, “Wow, I look cute in these,” I actually feel much more, “egad, what is this eldritch horror before me,” like I uncanny-valleyed myself right into pod person territory. And again, I think that’s very much my own reaction. Objectively, they’re perfectly good photos.
But it’s made me wonder if my reaction was also me getting walloped by same the Beauty Culture Stick that is beating other people over the head all the time. Like, as a foreign traveler in Beautylandia, my reaction felt extreme because it was my first time eating the spicy beauty noodles, but it turns out that other people are eating these spicy noodles all the time, and sure it makes your mouth burn and your nose run but the pain is nothing when you love the noodles.
Only I don’t love the noodles. Keep your stupid spicy beauty noodles.
But you know what I do love? The artistry of Courtney Act, the drag persona of Shane Jenek and one of the most stupidly gorgeous women in the world:
Likewise, Jameela Jamil is a phenomenally talented human being, and among her talents is the genuine artistry she cultivates around being bloody gorgeous:
So I have huge respect for the art that goes into a look like that. And there’s a part of me that thinks, shit, maybe I should try the photoshoot again, but with like a 4-hour drag makeup booking first, and just create a whole different madcap adventure persona. Maybe the problem wasn’t too much makeup but not enough, because I should’ve been aiming for straight-up unrealism instead of augmented reality.
And actually, I think this is sort of the whole unrealistic-beauty-standards problem in a nutshell. The point of highly augmented beauty is that it’s largely unattainable. It’s beautiful because it’s unreal. If you fall into the trap of thinking it’s supposed to be real, or that it’s a sustainable state of being, or that it’s a requirement of the social sphere in which you operate, then you’re in for a world of hurt.
So, bit of a quick tangent: you’re about to lose the game.
If you’re not familiar, the game is quite simple. If you think about the game, then you lose the game. Now that you know about the game, you too are playing the game. And you’ll be playing it unthinkingly for all the time that goes by until something reminds you of the game, at which point you’ll think about the game, thus losing the game. So, you can really only play the game by losing. And the more you think about or care about playing the game, the more time you’ll spending losing it.
But this is also kinda how beauty culture works.
That is, you can only really engage with beauty culture—that is, with getting fit and being fashionable and having great skin and on-trend hair and makeup—by paying attention to what I’m going to call “areas of improvement” as the most non-judgmental term I can think of. If you have a really healthy self-image and good attitude, maybe you can do this from a strong growth-mindset orientation, giving yourself credit for everything good you’ve got going on, and gently, or with a sense of humor, giving yourself notes on what you want to do differently or improve on.
Of course, most of us are not that kind to ourselves. Rather, most people’s notes on self-improvement tend to involve a lot of internal flagellation and name-calling.
And beauty culture isn’t for me, but I can see why it’s alluring. There are a number of non-trivial ways in which it’s a material advantage to be an attractive person. It’s just that I think once you pass some hard-to-quantify threshold of attractiveness, you hit a long tail of rapidly diminishing returns. Where that threshold falls is going to be context specific. But the long tail will always be there. So, since you can only play this game by losing, it’s a question of where you decide “enough” falls, or where to balance caring and fuck-it, so that you don’t continue to invest endless energy into playing and losing the beauty game.
On to the book review, taking a sharp left turn into murder and mayhem: I just finished binge-reading the full Snow & Winter series by C.S. Poe, starting with The Mystery of Nevermore. Sebastian Snow is a snarky know-it-all antique dealer in New York who gets pulled into amateur sleuthing when a telltale smell leads to discovery of a telltale heart beneath the floorboards of his shop. Calvin Winter is one of the detectives who gets involved with the case, and as more Edgar Allen Poe-related clues surface, he reluctantly leverages Snow’s encyclopedic knowledge of all things 19th-century. Of course, sparks fly.
Snow has total color blindness, achromatopsia, and is functionally blind in brightly-lit conditions. I think I found that aspect of his character and how it fits into the story to be particularly interesting because of my own experience of visual snow, even though it’s really not at all the same thing. There are a couple of instances in the story where someone throws on the bright overhead lights, or where Snow walks out into bright daylight, that gave me a surprisingly visceral jolt of recognition. I also envy his red-tinted contact lenses.
These are cleverly constructed mysteries, loaded with all kinds of interesting historical trivia. I found the characters very endearing, especially in the ways they continue to grow and develop over the course of the series. The books are in first person, from Snow’s perspective, and he makes some maddening ding-dong choices along the way; but he also shows some self-awareness about it, that basically he’s compulsively scratching an itch even when he knows he should stop, which awareness helped with suspension of disbelief for some of the ding-ier-dong-ier decisions.
Altogether clever and fun reads (I mean, in a murdery way) that really made me want to go poke around quirky antique stores in New York (in a non-murdery way).
That’s all my news. It has been a cold spring these past few weeks, but hoping for some warmer weather soon.
Love,
Beas
