Beauty Demands

Body positive campaigns have their hearts in the right place. Their messages are good and – you guessed it – positive: Be resilient. Be confident. Love your body. You are beautiful. All bodies are beautiful. These campaigns work for some. Some respond well and do feel more confident. If they work for you, go for it, fantastic and I’m all for it. I am not suggesting we shouldn’t teach resilience, we should. But we should not see it as the answer, we should recognise it is limited. Resilience can be counter-productive. If resilience is something you should do then you feel bad if you can’t quite manage it. What if you are not body confident, what if you don’t feel positive about your body? It is hard to be resilient in the face of a dominant and powerful beauty ideal. In a visual and virtual culture, our bodies are ourselves. Feeling ashamed of our bodies really is being ashamed of our selves. If we are feeling shame, telling us we shouldn’t feel like we do can make it wor...

This month’s blog is a provocation. It is an invitation to, perhaps, imagine a different narrative about appearance and beauty…….not one that emphasizes consumerism or declares that everyone is beautiful or that attention to, or a focus on, appearance is trivial and beauty work is oppressive – an aspect of a patriarchal society. Of course, beauty work exists within the norms of a patriarchal society that, along with a consumerist edict, negatively impact notions of appearance and beauty, but that is only a partial telling of the story of human appearance. I am certainly not the first person to put forth this narrative – there are notable exceptions – Ribeiro,Hollows, Brand, Cahill, Craig, Gibson, Peiss. What follows, this blog, is based on research, interviews conducted with a diverse group of women and men from both the UK and the US. Coordinated Management of Meaning or CMM informed the interview process and grounded theory was used to analyse the data. The focus of the interviews w...

Why risk cosmetic surgery? Why risk infection, pain, possibility of life-long complications, just to look prettier? All surgery is dangerous but facelifts aren’t the same as (say) knee replacements that enhance our lives in obvious ways; with knee replacements we weigh up the risks versus the benefits and decide the risks are worth it. And choosing to have cosmetic surgery abroad, adding a foreign country into the mix, that’s just madness! Contrary to popular opinion, ‘unnecessary’ cosmetic surgery may improve life as much as a ‘necessary’ knee replacement. Of the 100+ recipients of cosmetic surgery tourism that Ruth Holliday, David Bell and I interviewed, observed, and travelled with for our forthcoming book Beautyscapes: mapping cosmetic surgery tourism (MUP, 2019) ,  all had carefully weighed risk against benefit. They told us that they hoped cosmetic surgery would give them better opportunities at work, in romance, in day to day living. Further, they sought cosmetic surge...

Shampoo labels are really, really frustrating. The label of a shampoo or conditioner tends to have the following structure: the label will list a desired effect for the product, or a problem with hair that the product aims to remedy, and then may also provide a special ingredient that causes the desired effect. Take a look at the below labels: Each label follows the above structure. Respectively, each product claims to smooth hair, repair split ends, or protect hair colour, and then mentions an ingredient. The wording of the label is very interesting here. Each label presents the desired effect of the product, and presents the special ingredient right next to this. But what the label doesn’t do is use a construction such as ‘with argan oil FOR long-lasting colour’, or ‘with marula oil FOR smoother hair’. This unusual wording persists across manufacturers. In each case, the product manufacturer is being very careful about making specific claims about the efficacy of these speci...

‘I wanna look like I’m made of plastic’. So instructed my beautiful 40-year-old friend to a make-up artist in a well-known department store recently. Another 40-something friend tells me with pride that she spends £220 every month on painful laser facials. Yet another 40-something friend details her Botox and fillers regime to me. For myself, also in my 40s, I spend way too much on overpriced skincare creams and while I’m partial to a facial, I draw the line at needles and scalpels. The media and academia abound with stories and reports about how susceptible young women are to the lure of beauty treatments and the negative effect social media are having on their self-confidence.  In my own research I have listened to a beautiful young 20-year-old woman share with me her desire for fat transfer using the more ‘holistic’ process of taking fat from the arse to use in the face (cosmetic surgery goes woke?). But by focusing almost exclusively on young women’s participation in beauty...

I had a down-to-earth feminist professor in college who was childless and when I asked her if she wanted children she replied, “not really, but it would be great to raise a girl the way girls should be raised.” That line set a kind of ideal benchmark for me as a young woman who earnestly believed that my feminism and my motherhood would get along like peanut butter and jelly. Unlike my professor, I’d always wanted children – daughters, in fact – and years after I finished college, that’s exactly what I got.   At first, feminist mothering came naturally. I walked into children’s clothing stores and gasped self-righteously at the shamelessly polarized layout: on one side, frilly mini-skirts and sparkly t-shirts with suggestive slogans; on the other side, practical, comfortable clothing adorned with trucks and dinosaurs.   I glared pointedly at anyone who sought to draw logical conclusions about the colour of the walls in the baby’s room from my answer to the “Boy or Gir...

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...