Beauty Demands

When I was diagnosed with Stage 2 Breast Cancer two days before my 28th birthday, the first question I asked was “Am I going to lose my hair?” “Probably,” the nurse answered, as I felt the ground fall away from under my feet. My hair wasn’t the best hair in the world (it had recently recovered from a horrendous, self-imposed quarantine fringe), but it was still mine. Well-meaning comments of “it will grow back” and “it is only temporary,” whilst being true, delegitimised the very real sense of grief I felt. Every time I touched it in the lead up to my first chemotherapy session, I imagined it not being there and felt a lurch in my stomach. I couldn’t imagine my face without eyebrows or eyelashes, and in my obsessive reading about side-effects, I convinced myself that my nails were going to fall off. Of course, being bald temporarily was preferable to dying, but classic media images of cancer patients haunted me. It felt like my identity was being stripped away, leaving me with nothing

With War Paint for Men opening a 'world-first' store selling make-up for men in London last month, we revisit this great post on make-up and masculinity from early 2019:  I’ve become more and more interested in the advertisements that appear on my Facebook feed and what this seems to indicate about who Facebook think I am, what my interests and aspirations are. This has shifted recently from amusement at the back shavers, ear-hair clippers and baldness cures that it might be imagined would appeal to a bald middle aged man to (as the ads have become more specialized and targeted) a more critical thinking about the gendered and sexualized subject that the ad algorithm constructs and presents back to me, anchored very much around ideas of male beauty. Photo by  Jaysen Scott  from  Pexels  (edited) I’m discussing this in this blog because my targeted ads are currently overwhelmingly about male grooming and beauty products. This includes a number of advertisements for