Beauty Demands

Putting on your face is something that very many of us do on a daily basis. On average, women will spend “ 29 minutes putting on make-up to achieve a 'natural look'”, and a third of us “ never go out without make-up ”. And, over a lifetime women on average spend 136 days (3276 hours) “getting ready for a night out”.   Once upon a time respectable women didn’t wear make-up. Only ‘painted ladies’, sex workers, wore make-up; made-up eyes, lips and cheeks were how they advertised their trade. Gradually make-up became OK, so much so that in the Second World War, lipstick was believed to be vital to morale - it was not rationed and was imported across blockades with other ‘necessary’ supplies (Dyhouse, 2011, p.82). Wearing make-up is now routine; required for work, special occasions, or to ‘face the day’. Make-up is such a part of who we are that we can raise money by not wearing it! The 2015 ‘bare faced’ selfie campaign raised £8,000,000 in six days for cancer research. The n...

With hair salons closed in many countries under lockdown, reports say there is a boom in " bootleg home-visit haircuts ". We revisit this lovely post from Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra in 2018, exploring the significance of hair. ‘ Will you please put a comb through your hair? You look like a madwoman’. This admonition from my mother, which echoed through my teen age years with troubling regularity, was delivered in a tone filled with exasperation and incredulity. That an otherwise seemingly reasonable young girl would want to pass as insane, was beyond her understanding.   But I get ahead of myself. When my respectable, middle-class Bengali parents left India for Europe in the early 70’s, they packed a few essentials otherwise not found across the seven seas. These included some mundane items, such as a terrifying screaming pressure cooker and carefully folded silk saris guarded by moth-balls. But more importantly, they brought with them the norms, standards and traditio...

Fat shaming is the most prevalent type of body shaming – so common that some argue it’s OK, ‘it’s for your own good’, or suggest that it should make a comeback (like it has gone anywhere). In a visual culture where our bodies are ourselves, a claim I make in Perfect Me , body shaming is people shaming. Body size and shape is something we worry about to the point of obsession. Many of us struggle to be thin, with most of us (84.1% in a study of 9,667 Western women) “wanting to be thinner” according to the YouBeauty survey (Swami, Tran, Stieger, Voracek & The YouBeauty.com Team, 2014, p.705) . So dominant is the ‘thin ideal’ that 59% of girls between 17-21 feel they should lose weight (Girls Attitudes Survey, 2016) . And this figure is higher according to some studies, with the Body Image Center , reporting that “89% of girls have dieted by age 17”. That we feel shame of our size is clear, so ashamed that we admit to lying about it; 8% of UK women admit to having “lied to [thei...

With millions of adolescents across the world currently in lockdown and more reliant on social media for interactions than ever, we revisit this post from Victoria Goodyear in 2018 on how social media plays into young people's self-perceptions, and the importance of adults understanding this. Social media is often referred to as a ‘toxic’ or ‘dangerous’ environment for young people, particularly in the case of body image . Celebrity and/or advertising cultures, and increased exposure to vast amounts of unregulated content are commonly identified as ‘risky’ online practices (see Fardouly and Vartanian, 2016). Yet, the extent to which social media impacts on young people’s perceptions of their bodies is relatively unknown. There is little understanding of the types of content young people engage with, and how and why their knowledge and behaviours are influenced.  To better understand how to support young people’s body image-related knowledge and behaviours, we need to learn...