Beauty Demands

  We are interested in ageing in material objects and in people. Norms of beauty are relevant here; beauty is persistently associated with youth and newness and this has affected our relationship with our own ageing (particularly in the West) and also with objects. These associations are important because aesthetic obsolescence of objects leads to dissatisfaction, detachment, and early disposal which has significant environmental and societal impacts. Whilst entrenched Western norms, which perpetuate unattainable youthful perfection, reinforce ‘skin deep’ attitudes to ageing resulting in poor self-esteem and an increasingly ‘invisible’ older population. In this article, we start to tease out and connect strands of thought, drawing on transdisciplinary constructs of ageing within the contexts of people and objects. Although the relationship between people’s attitudes to the appearance of their own physical ageing and their possessions has yet to be extensively explored (Scarre, 2016...

As lockdown eases in the UK, we are returning to the hairdresser and beauty salon in droves. In our visual and virtual culture, beauty matters. So desperate were we to cover our roots or change our styles that some hair salons opened at midnight on July 4 th ! Doing beauty again is a pleasure for many and provides a sense that we are getting our normal lives back. [1] Some of us rethought our beauty regimes in lockdown. Felt it didn’t matter, given the magnitude of the pandemic. Others felt less pressure – wearing less makeup, taking less time on hair-styling, and wearing pyjama bottoms all day. Take Lily Allen and Una Healy embracing their grey hair on Instagram . But, as we’ve discussed previously , the pressure to be perfect didn’t go away, and for some it intensified.  By the third week of March, video conferencing apps had been downloaded 62 million times . Video conferencing has transformed our work and social lives, and their effect on body image was almost instant. Looking...

Whole-body scanning has been used by those involved in fashion and clothing design for some time (Istook, 2000; Loker, Ashdown, & Carnrite, 2008), and many large-scale surveys have been conducted using whole-body scanning technology to acquire body measurement for clothing sizing systems (Fan et al., 2004).   A recent Verdict report (Kokoszka, 2018) lists Selfridges, Bloomingdales, New Look and Levi as retailers that have used whole-body scanning to measure customers in store. The report also predicts that advancements in technology will soon enable mobile devices to scan the body accurately, which would enable people to access 3D images of their bodies through their phones. In addition to this, some UK supermarkets now offer whole-body scanning facilities, so customers can access whole-body scanning and associated 3D printing where they buy their groceries (Griffiths, 2014; McCrum, 2015). Clothing specialists at Manchester Metropolitan University and University of M...

Beauty standards have always been important in society, but it was not until the widespread introduction of television, magazines and more recently, the internet, that a standardised male and female beauty ideal became a widespread marketing strategy (Dion et al.,1972). Recently, there has been an increasing awareness that personalised beauty is a powerful tool for conveying a message or promoting products. This has been recognised by the advertising industry, a prominent example being Dove’s campaign “See the Beauty in Yourself” (Dove Real Beauty Sketches, 2016) that moves away from a standardised beauty ideal to a personalised campaign strategy where the value of women’s own appearance is used as a marketing tool (Grogan, 2016). It is only relatively recently that the importance of appearance has been recognised by health researchers as a possible tool for behaviour change, particularly with harmful behaviours stemming from a desire to improve appearance, e.g. the use of indoor ...