Happy Beauty Christmas


We hope you are all enjoying the countdown to the holiday season. If the magazines are to be believed, this means sparkles and metallic when it comes to clothes, make-up, and the increasingly ubiquitous semi-permanent manis (glitter of course!). Glamour’s front cover says “Sparkle: Tons of It”, while Red’s cover advice is for “Berry Lips and Grown-up Glitter”. Preparation is more than surface, and if you follow Cosmo’s advice you start with a pre-party routine – “The Party Prepper Workout” – “to help you nail that dress”.[1] This involves a 14 minute fat-burning circuit of lunges, push-ups and burpees, after which you might be forgiven for feeling that partying on top is a bit much to ask!



An interesting development in beauty at Christmas is the advent of the beauty advent calendar. While beauty calendars have been available for a number of years, until recently they have largely been fairly niche. This year they have exploded – who wants to face chocolate in the morning when you could have a bit of face-pampering instead? They are available to suit all pockets. At the top of the range is Jo Malone, for £280, while Liberty offers, for £165, the “ultimate in Beauty Advent Calendars”.[2] And so popular is this calendar that it sold out early and can be found for up to double its price on Ebay. Alternatively you can, for £150, take up Charlotte Tilbury’s offer to “treat yourself, or a loved-one, to my award-winning treats, throughout the holiday season”.[3] Boots No.7, also sold out, invites you to “indulge yourself this Christmas with a daily dose of beauty”, for just £39.[4] At the cheapest end of the scale there is the ‘Technic Advent Calendar Cube’ which went on sale for £19.99 and is currently available at the reduced price of £12.99.[5]




This proliferation of beauty calendars has not gone unnoticed, and has been commented on in many places; for example, in Cosmo, The Independent, and The Sun. These calendars are clearly beautiful objects, and don’t get us wrong we totally get the attraction (next year, yes please – if you’re reading!). But on a more serious note they remind us that beauty is ubiquitous, and if there are 24 beauty essentials for each calendar, that’s an awful lot of must-haves. The sheer number of beauty products which we think are necessary and we cannot live without is ever increasing. For example, apparently in 2006 our average make-up routine was eight steps and took 17 minutes; it’s now 27 steps and takes 40 mins.[6] Forty minutes a day – from age 15 to 75 – adds up to 14,600 hours which is 608 days over a lifetime. That’s a lot more pamper time than you might think!



Wishing you a luxurious and beautiful Christmas. Thanks to all those who’ve contributed to our blog conversation this year and looking forward to more in 2017. The next post will be in January, when no doubt we’ll be beginning new fitness regimes and detoxing.

With thanks and good wishes
Fiona MacCallum and Heather Widdows

Fiona MacCallum is an Associate Professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Warwick.

 Heather Widdows is Professor of Global Ethics, Department of Philosophy, University of Birmingham.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Ew, your legs are so hairy": #everydaylookism and the normalisation of the hairless body

Image
The changing norms of body hair removal are dramatic and illustrative. I have written previously about the rise in body hair removal as the ‘ canary in the mine’ . We now remove nearly all body and facial hair.  A survey of 7580 US residents aged between 18 and 65 found that “74% reported grooming their pubic hair, 66% of men and 84% of women” (Osterberg, Gaither, Awad, Truesdale, Allen, Sutclifee & Breyer, 2016, p.162) . A generation ago this didn’t happen; few women removed pubic hair and there was a time in 60s and 70s when underarm hair could be considered sexy. (Although there are arguments about how extensive the acceptance of body hair really was. Some think it was limited to the fairly small, fairly affluent, hippy culture.) The change from then to now is dramatic. As Rebecca Herzig argues “within a single generation, female pubic hair had been rendered superfluous” (2015, p.137).  It’s not just body hair we are obsessively removing, facial hair has also b...
Read more

“You might not notice it … but I do”: Shame and Cosmetic Surgery

Image
Augmenting the Body: Disability, Care and the Posthuman is an interdisciplinary research project that explores practices of bodily augmentation, from caring robots to prosthetic limbs, across the fields of English, Engineering, Healthcare, Philosophy, and Robotics. The project, led by Professor Stuart Murray and funded by a Wellcome Trust Seed Award, involves collaborators from the University of Leeds, the University of Exeter, and Sheffield Robotics. In this post, one of the collaborators working on the project—Dr Luna Dolezal (University of Exeter)—offers a snapshot of her work on the relationship between bodily augmentation through cosmetic surgery and beauty demands. It is only very recently that elective cosmetic surgery has entered the mainstream as a routine and socially acceptable way to alter appearance. In the 1950s, for example, aesthetic plastic surgery was a largely marginal and unknown medical practice. Just a few decades later, it is a recognized medical spe...
Read more

The pure erotics of Brazilian Waxing

Image
One of the questions I often get asked when I talk about my research is how much longer I think the trend for full pubic hair removal will last. I’m hesitant to give an exact expiry date if I’m honest. But I think this question opens up into broader discussions about what impact social, political and economic change has upon our bodily surfaces, and how embodied ideals of womanhood and femininity can both shift and remain constant over time. More revealing than any answer I might be able to give about the potential longevity of the Brazilian wax, is the asking of the question itself.  It demonstrates an understanding of pubic hairlessness as ‘current’, constructed, transitory, and it encourages conversation about where the norm has originated from, and why women in particular feel pressured to conform to it.  My Google Alerts notified me recently of an online survey examining men and women’s pubic hair grooming preferences, undertaken by Cosmopolitan.com , and suggesti...
Read more