Beauty Demands

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 o...

The enforced move to online work and social interactions over the last year have increased appearance pressures for many, so it seems a good time to revisit Heather Widdows' 2018 post on New Year's resolutions and self-improvement.  Shutterstock. Heather Widdows , University of Birmingham After the feasting of Christmas, January is a time of detox and self-denial. It’s when people start new diets, begin new exercise regimes and make new year’s resolutions. We promise ourselves that we will do better – that we will better ourselves. But all too often – at least in the West – this means improving our bodies. While losing weight or gaining fitness can be a good thing, these types of resolutions – “I will lose five kilograms”, “I will join a gym”, “I will stop eating sweets” – mark a significant change from previous generations. Traditionally, new year’s resolutions were about improving one’s character – the inner self, not the outer self . For example, an extract of an...

By Marsha Wichers , cosmetic doctor and designer. Medical technology will bring us more ways to perfect our appearance. Over the past decades, the use of Botox has increased enormously.  What started as a drug against muscle spasms and strabismus is now a widespread way of preventing and treating wrinkles in the face, and is becoming part of the beauty ritual of more and more women in the Western world. In my medical cosmetic practice in the Netherlands I see (mostly) women who come to me for advice. They want to look good for their age, or want to get rid of a tired look. But almost all of them say very explicitly ‘please make sure I will stay looking like me’, or 'I don't want to look overtreated and unnatural'. But what exactly are they referring to? We all have a feeling and an idea what this is about. But to precisely describe what makes a look unnatural, is quite difficult. That is why I decided to research and visualize this phenomenon during my master stu...

You may have read the recent Observer article about how " the 'tweaked' look is becoming the new normal " - Heather Widdows was writing about this back in 2017 with a post that has only become more relevant with time. A booming beauty industry is changing the way we see our bodies. ( Shutterstock) Heather Widdows , University of Birmingham This article was originally published on  The Conversation . Read the  original article . From the daily application of high-tech lotions and potions to non-surgical procedures such as botox, fillers and peels, the beauty industry is booming like never before.With more products and treatments available there is also a growing pressure around how people feel they “should” or “shouldn’t” look. So whether it’s fake eyelashes, tattooed eyebrows, manicured nails, body waxing or lip fillers, the chances are we all know someone who has these – and often we view these types of treatments as “normal”. The s...

Major influences on children’s development of self-concept include communication from others about the self, comparisons they make with others in their immediate environment and the role assigned to them by the community 1 . The face is a key component of many adults’ self-identity and to the developing child, the face provides an early and continuing source of information about a persons’ personal identity 2 . If the face is so important, should we let children have cosmetic surgery? The Nuffield Council on Bioethics defines cosmetic surgery as surgery which will alter a person’s appearance, and which has a primarily aesthetic rather than functional aim. Their 2017 report identified specific ethical concerns for teenagers in particular as sensitive to peer pressures, and at a vulnerable stage of development with respect to their sense of their own identity. A survey by the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons found 55% of surgeons said patients now seek...

I research gender representation in children’s books and its change over time. The huge imbalance of representation in favour of male characters has been discussed extensively but for me personally, one of the most fascinating, though not so surprising, findings was the overwhelming frequency of occurrence of the word ‘mother’ and ‘Mum’ in children’s books. A mother is the most frequent female character type in the 19 th century books and remains to be also in contemporary texts for children. While in the 19 th century ‘mother’ occurs with similar frequency as ‘father’ and when they are mentioned together the order ‘father and mother’ is the established norm, in books published after the year 2000 it is ‘Mum’ that is more frequent than ‘Dad’ and ‘Mum and Dad’ has become the norm. However, mothers or mums are hardly ever the story protagonists. Sometimes we don’t even learn their names. Their defining feature, linguistically and otherwise, is that they are somebody’s mother. ...

Along with ‘Dry January’, ‘RED (run every day) January’ and ‘Veganuary’, ‘Januhairy’ is one of the challenges which comes with the ‘New Year, New You!’ onslaught of how to become a better person. In my last Beauty Demands blog   I commented on the dramatic change which has happened as we see ourselves not as ‘inner’ thinking and doing beings, but as ‘outer’, to-be-looked-at beings. Indeed we have gone so far on this trajectory that a better self now means a better body. In a visual and virtual culture, our bodies are ourselves. Januhairy is a month long challenge which aims to get women to ‘love and accept’ their body hair while raising money for charity. It was launched by students from Exeter University, and has received lots of press, taking off around the world. Photo: istolethetv  (CC Attributions 2.0 license ) In Perfect Me ,   I write a lot about body hair. I call body hair ‘the canary in the mine’. It is a very clear example of the normalisation and natur...

Last New Year, I wrote a short piece for The Conversation on how we believe – and often unreflectively – that we are, or will be, better if our bodies are better. That our bodies have become our very selves in a visual and virtual culture is one of the main arguments of Perfect Me . This is so widely believed that we often don’t recognise either that it is true (until someone points it out) or how surprising and transformative this is. To think that our selves are our bodies is new. New Year’s Resolutions show us very clearly what we value and what matters to us. These are the goals we set for ourselves. We think these things are valuable and having them is important to us. The top New Year’s Resolutions for 2019 again show this focus, with the top three all being aimed at transforming the body: 1. Diet or eat healthier (71%) 2. Exercise more (65%) 3. Lose weight (54%) The next two are not body related: 4. Save more and spend less (32%) 5. Learn a new ski...

“The beauty ideal is not an evil taskmaster, but it is an ethical ideal and powerful and only when we recognise it can we begin to address it. What we need is beauty without the beast” Friday 1 st June 2018 saw the official launch of Professor Widdows' new book ‘ Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Idea l’, published by Princeton University Press, at the University of Birmingham.   Perfect Me is the culmination of nearly ten years of research in the philosophy of body and beauty for Professor Widdows. The book explores the changing and ethical nature of the beauty ideal, where the pressure to achieve the ‘perfect’ body has become increasingly more dominant, more demanding, and more global than ever before. Guest speakers for the launch included Dr Clare Chambers (University of Cambridge), and Professor Alison Jagger (University of Colorado at Boulder and University of Birmingham) who each summarised the arguments in Perfect Me before highlighting its most significant ...