Beauty Demands

At this time of year, magazines urge us to dress in “perfect party dresses to hit the dance floor in” (Marie Claire), and to buy “Christmas makeup sets ALL beauty lovers will want” (Cosmopolitan), not forgetting “the best fake tans for surviving the winter washout” (Glamour). It all sounds somewhat exhausting! Why not instead look back at our blog and see what our contributors have said and done about beauty in 2018?  We began the year, appropriately, with Heather Widdows musing on how New Year’s resolutions had changed over time to focus on appearance rather than character improvement, and the potential harms of this; an idea also explored by Ajmal Mubarik . Throughout 2018, various other themes have emerged:          Social Media As a primarily visual environment, social media is impossible to ignore in relation to appearance. Knowing that social media images are idealised does not make us less susceptible to their effect, according to Jasmine Fardouly . However

When I was about twelve years old, a schoolfriend said I had beautiful eyes. “You should outline them in black!” she said. Encouraged by the compliment, the next morning I attempted to follow her advice. I didn’t own any black eyeliner, so I tried to create the recommended effect by layering blue and brown eyeliner on top of each other. On the school bus, my friend smiled and gave me the thumbs up. I had succeeded! The pleasure was short-lived. Over the course of the day the liners separated and smudged, leaving me with multi-coloured panda eyes. A boy with whom I was usually friendly passed me a note on which he’d written a humorous poem mocking my makeup skills. I was not a figure of beauty. I was a figure of fun. Decades later, most days I still don’t wear makeup. Occasionally, though, I do apply it. Sometimes I regret it instantly: my skills aren’t necessarily up to the job, and I end up wiping it all off. Other times, knowing my limitations and working within them, I ach

My PhD research centred on beauty vloggers, namely, young women who regularly produce beauty content on YouTube for a living – it’s their jobs. In my work I demonstrate how although the beauty vlogger appears solo in front of a camera, they rarely work alone. The UK (and many other countries) has a sizable beauty vlogging industry, which (in addition to YouTube and brands) also features a proliferating number of intermediaries, managers and ‘i ndustry experts’. A significant element of the beauty vlogging ecology is the ‘ networking event ’. These events are highly feminised and ostensibly centred on leisure: they often featuring a ‘tea party’ or ‘cocktail’ theme, but are branded through post-feminist logics of girl-boss empowerment. In highly decorated rooms, often around a high-end centrepiece cake, stakeholders give lectures, and successful vloggers and influencers speak on panels. Beauty and lifestyle brands horseshoe around the peripheries of event locations, giving out products

Colourism, skin shade prejudice involving the preferential treatment of people with light skin within and between ethnic groups , affects the life chances of people of colour around the world and fuels the multi-billion dollar global skin lightening industry. Evelyn Glenn (2008, 289) argues that in India there is an “almost universal” preference for light skin and “ in terms of sheer numbers, India and Indian diasporic communities around the world constitute the largest market for skin lighteners.” Focusing on the USA, Margaret Hunter (2007) argues that people with light skin earn more, stay in school longer, live in better areas, and marry people of a higher status than those with darker skin from the same ethnicity or racialised group. Photo by Adam Jones, Ph.D./Global Photo Archive/Flickr According to the World Health Organization (n.d.), 77 percent of women in Nigeria, 35 percent of women in South Africa and 59 percent in Togo are reported regularly to use skin lightening p

In a recent study, researchers Bruch and Newman (2018: 1-6) investigated the ‘desirability’ of both male and female online dating users. Bruch and Newman determined, through analysing over 200,000 messages between online dating users, that women’s sexual desirability is at its highest at age 18 whilst men’s sexual desirability peaks at age 50. After these two ages, desirability declines for both groups. Why is this the case? One explanation offered by Bruch and Newman is that desirability varies with educational level (Bruch and Newman 2018: 2). For instance, highly educated men are perceived by women to be highly desirable. However, the same is not true of women. According to the study, women are most attractive to men when they are educated to undergraduate level, but their desirability decreases as they reach postgraduate levels of study (Bruch and Newman 2018: 2). This research has sparked a considerable amount of debate, all seeking to answer why average desirability varies w

This post discusses beauty as an ethical ideal as defined by Heather Widdows in her book Perfect Me: Beauty As An Ethical Ideal, particularly focusing on the actions required to meet that ideal, and what happens when you are prevented from doing them. Before going into my argument, I want to clarify that this post does not wish to criticise people with disabilities or chronic illnesses who engage in beautifying behaviours; none of us are really free from beauty as an ethical ideal, including the author, so it would be wrong to condemn anyone who takes part in it. Part of the complexity of beauty is that these practices can genuinely be tools for bonding, self-expression and empowerment; to totally denounce them would be nonsensical. The aim instead is to consider how some of these behaviours support the concept of beauty as an ethical ideal.  Beauty as an ethical ideal involves actions – meaningful pursuits towards a goal. These can include: ‘maintenance’ or routine behaviours to ens