Teenage Makeup Heist may not be a movie you’ve heard of, but it’s showing nearby. I watched it play before my eyes a few months ago in a Mecca Cosmetica emporium within an upscale shopping mall. This Mecca is directly opposite Sephora, down from Aesop, Aveda, The Body Shop, Jurlique, Kiehls, L’Occitane en Provence and M.A.C. From there, your nose might lead you to the acres of department-store beauty counters overflowing with Clarins, Dior, Guerlain, Lancôme, SK-II and so, so many others. Working through my Christmas list, I happened to step into Mecca at the same time as a group of teenage girls, all around thirteen years old. I wouldn’t have noticed them were it not for their voluble excitement and the many branded shopping bags they had hooked over their adolescent arms, excessive enough to seem ridiculous. ‘Wow, those girls are really spending up,’ I thought. I was wrong.
Within minutes the security alarm sounded. They came, they stole, they fled. It’s possible that all those bags they carried were empty decoys. Perhaps an employee felt compelled to chase them, perhaps not. After this mini-drama, I dutifully lined up to pay for my purchases: Zincredible tinted moisturiser for my sister and a M.A.C lipstick, in the shade Syrup, for me. While I stood there, I eavesdropped on the store manager talking to a security guard, repeating lines from a no doubt oft-rehearsed script: ‘They were young – actually, really young. It’s hard to describe what they looked like. They were carrying lots of bags.’ The shoplifters were White, the best disguise possible. As I handed over my credit card at the register, I asked the assistant what she reckoned they stole. She shrugged. ‘Could have been anything,’ she said, gesturing to the thousands of products displayed around her. ‘Whatever they can grab.’
We might say they were like kids in a candy store. But only if said candy store were a flagship of its industry, like this shop. The beauty industry itself lies within the wellness–industrial complex. Throughout thousands of enormous retail centres like the one I was in, and across the world of online shopping, the beauty and wellness industries manifest in products that promise to empower you to become the person you deserve to be, the best version of yourself. Let you live your best life. Realise your desires. Ensure your skin is properly hydrated, at last. Achieve your skin goals. Give you that dewy glow. Brands that share your commitment to stopping the march of time. Formulations that offer full coverage. Luminescence. Confidence. Youth.
Beauty and wellness have what you need to help you with all your skin needs. Eight-hour cream. Skin food. Retinol, or organic retinol alternatives. Sleeping masks. Clarifying lotion. Retro moisturiser (not cold cream slopped out of a vintage barrel, but state-of-the-art, clinically tested skin hydration recommended by dermatologists, presented in an Instagrammable retro tub). But wait, there’s more! Super-nutrient face oil. Lactic acid treatment. Ceramide capsules. Cell energy creme. Multi-corrective cream. Beauty flash balm. Moisture surge hydrating lotion. Renew and reset serum. Youth-activating concentrate. Foaming cleanser. Satin milk cleanser. Dual-action cleanser. Deep hydrating moisturiser. Stem-cell superfood. White lucent brightening cream. Glow peel pads. Korean sheet masks. Cracked heel souffle. Blue orchid face treatment. CBD eye cream. Lip balm with acai. Retexturing activator. Blue light defence hydro-mist. Antioxidant lip repair. Pore refining scrub. How could you live without all this?
These skincare products, all real, are but a pipette drop in an ocean of lotion. The variety of different makeup products could easily run for another fifty pages before eyeliner and mascara were ticked off so we could move on to lipstick. Skincare products are not new, but they are a long way from your grandmother’s single tub of Ponds cold cream. Is it all expensive bullshit in a bottle? Is the main active ingredient hope? On the one hand, yes, maybe, but there must be exceptions. It can’t all be a giant scam. Would I buy these products? I do. I have quite the selection in my bathroom cabinet and drawers, a few in my handbag, some next to my bed. Have they made a difference? Who could say.
I see this obsessive beauty culture for what it is. It coopted me before I was born. It identifies my subjectivities, inadequacies and vulnerabilities, and makes me pay to make them go away, while simultaneously consolidating and augmenting them. Pure genius. But my scepticism doesn’t erase my concerns about puffy eyes and uneven skin tone. Can I mock the beauty–wellness–industrial complex, decry its existence and embrace it all at once?
I may not be an Instagram regular, but I live in the world. I am bombarded by nonstop images of beautiful people telling me their whole lives were remade by a certain product. Sultry billboard images, the miracle promises and scientific advances proclaimed in print advertising and advertorials, gorgeous faces popping up in my social media feed, blatant product placement in every form of moving picture. There are more brand ambassadors in the world than there are diplomatic missions, and they’re all trying to get in my face, on my face. A celebrity becoming the new face of a perfume, mascara or lipstick, and thus becoming the product themselves, is reported as news. YouTube makeup tutorials, watched by millions, are proof that it’s possible to be fascinated and bored in equal measure. (AOC excepted.) The word ‘influencer’ used to refer to someone such as former US Secretary of State and national security adviser Henry Kissinger. Now, influencers look much better as they rake in the cash. The hordes scrambling to reach the summit of Mount Influencer are directing their messages our way, all trying to sell something.
I picked up a glossy book called Skin Deep – great title – by Bee Shapiro, a beauty columnist who also has her own eco-cosmetics line. On its cover, the gothic type of the New York Times masthead runs across patches of colour made of smashed eyeshadow, because the book emerged from Shapiro’s writing in the paper’s style pages. The book is an artefact of the visual language and celebrity and beauty culture of our time. In her preface Shapiro writes, ‘Though often thought of as aspirational, beauty – or rather the process of doing something to make oneself look, and therefore feel better – is something everyone can achieve.’ It is supposed to be fun, she says. Democratic and generous as it may be for the book’s actors, celebrities, musicians, athletes and social-media stars – all women – to share absolutely every detail of their hair, skincare and makeup routines, as well as their diet and nutrition programs, it could also be about self-promotion and contractual obligations. Or maybe it’s an elaborate in-joke. ‘I wake up and brush my teeth,’ said one subject. Nonplussed, I became more interested when I learnt her toothpaste is from Russia, it’s called Splat Professional and is burgundy in colour!
Skin Deep is a list of products embedded in first-person accounts. The products are photographed to look as glamorous as the skin of the people who lionise them. Banal but strangely compelling details of process and routine are interspersed with tips – how to create alluring smoky eyes, or new methods to achieve celebrity skin. ‘Now you have to look perfect, from every pore and every angle, from head to toe,’ says Manhattan dermatologist Dendy Engelman MD, talking about actresses forced to rely on fillers, the neurotoxin Botox, and lasers. ‘All these women are worried about aging themselves out of jobs. They are up against people twenty years younger than them, and they’re being shot in Hi-Def. Some people might fault them for being vain, but this is part of their careers.’2
I relished the minutiae participants shared, occasionally thoughtful and spanning the spectrum from normal to bonkers. Someone had to win the prize for saying ‘Beauty comes from the inside’; it went to Elle Macpherson, who loves Creme de la Mer and gives a shout-out to good old Lucas’ Papaw Ointment. The prize for sharing the maxim that imbibing water is the key to great skin went to Gabrielle Union-Wade, who tries to drink a gallon (around four and a half litres) a day. She also, shock horror in this sea of brand names, makes her own lip exfoliator from brown sugar and olive oil. One less plastic container polluting the Earth. I liked learning that fashion consultant Shala Monroque, who moved back to the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia from NYC, enjoys her mother’s cooking and buys whelks from a man who collects them on the beach in front of her house. My favourite account was from Alek Wek, not just because she is a trailblazing model with skin of colour, but because she was one of the few who mentioned regular, affordable products such as Dove soap, Nivea sunscreen and Johnson & Johnson baby oil and shampoo. The musicians seemed less constrained, too, referring to renowned products such as ‘the one in the blue bottle’ and reassuring us, as St. Vincent does, that ‘any dewiness you see is just the product of sweating’. She also has the book’s best line, about hair: ‘I’m just going to go into the salon and say I want the “Nick Cave” minus the receding hairline.’3
I asked long-time beauty editor Stephanie Darling how she navigates the intensity of this image-driven hyperbolic world and the millions of products that underpin it. Darling writes a popular Sunday supplement column called ‘Road Test’, where she fearlessly submits to treatments of all kinds, however crazy, restorative or invasive. She tells me that if she has a relaxing manicure one week, the following week her readers want her to go through something excruciating. If there is a product or treatment out there, she not only knows about it, she’s probably tried it. Darling looks how you would want to when you’re sixty, and is so warm and lovely that we hugged at the end of our conversation.
Here is Stephanie Darling’s number one piece of advice, transcribed straight from the source: ‘You can just be happy in your own skin and do nothing as long as you wear SPF50+ every day. That’s my only message. That’s what I’ve learnt. From not getting cancer to anti-ageing, that’s the only product. If you could only have one product on a desert island, SPF would be it. Women the same age as me who missed the SPF message, the sun worshippers, their skin is like an old tyre. Sure, you can have a facelift but with texture like that, there’s little you can do.’
Darling receives around sixty packages a week from cosmetics and wellness companies. ‘I guess that’s where the “editor” in beauty editor comes in,’ I suggest, the task of weeding through a constant flow of new products. ‘I’m old-school,’ she says. ‘No one tries to twist my arm.’ Badmouthing others is not her style, so I take this as a reference to influencers who don’t disclose that they’re being paid. ‘Pretty much every skincare company has a hero, a product that is efficacious. So, it’s an easier spin for beauty writers.’
One feature of her column is ‘Luxe to Less’. There, she says, ‘I can go from a La Prairie two-thousand-dollar product to a L’Oréal thirty-five-dollar product. You can pick and choose.’ But is a two-thousand-dollar face cream ever worth the money? Darling says, ‘There’s a feel-good factor. It’s like buying luxury fashion, even though the high street might do a rip off. It’s about how you perceive yourself and how others perceive you.’ Her book, Secrets of a Beauty Queen, includes a list of her top 100 products.4 La Prairie doesn’t appear, but it’s irrelevant to most of her readers because of the price. Still, you’d rather have a diamond ring than one made of cubic zirconia if you could, right?
I imagined a hidden-camera psychology experiment conducted on the luxury ground floor of a department store. Beauty HQ. Researchers place a jar of La Prairie Switzerland White Caviar Crème Extraordinaire (retail price AU$1120 for 60 millilitres) in front of random shoppers like you or me. They tell us that taking it will have no criminal repercussions, but it is still technically shoplifting. Would you take it? I would. And then I’d run like I’d stolen something, slathering it on my face as I went. This cream has something called Lumidose, described by the manufacturer as ‘the extraordinary molecule of light’ that can, allegedly, combat dull skin and age spots. The researchers would have to abandon the experiment because the results would be too predictable. And expensive. Would I feel ashamed later? Probably, but not about taking it – about believing it could make a difference. But then I’d put more on, ever hopeful.
Most pots of moisturiser aren’t worth their weight in gold. But working out the value of the beauty industry is a challenge. Where does it begin and end? A 2020 McKinsey report stated that the global beauty industry was resilient, even though sales of cosmetics fell during the pandemic. In 2019 fragrances, colour cosmetics (makeup), skincare products and personal care products (bath, hair care, men’s shaving, oral care, sun protection products, deodorants and depilatories) were worth close to US$500 billion.5 Early in 2021, the New Yorker cited a report that adds wellness to the equation and puts the industry’s global value at US$4.5 trillion. (As you know, there are 1000 billions in a trillion, so that’s a big leap in value.) To evoke the scale of the wellness industry, the New Yorker cited HIIT workouts in gyms, juice cleansing, Himalayan salt and Transcendental Meditation. Including aromatherapy, sleep hygiene, nutrition, mindfulness, yoga, Pilates, barre, gyms and personal trainers, and the advertising and marketing support supplied to each, all adds up. Once you have taken into account life coaches, cosmetic dermatology, vitamins, hairdressing and nail salons, day spas, waxing and the cosmetic laser clinics that seem to spring up weekly, I find it easy to be persuaded of this enormous number.
In his history of the beauty industry, Harvard Business School academic Geoffrey Jones writes that ‘its transformation from moral nuisance to a global brand-driven powerhouse offering products essential to modern life is one of the more intriguing stories of modern business history’.6 (Reading this sober academic account was akin to sitting in a quiet room with a cup of tea after trying to eat a meal from a Michelin-starred restaurant in the middle of an Ibiza nightclub.) The beauty industry’s growth has been uninterrupted, hardly affected by recession or war. Its leading brands are still associated with Paris and New York. A decade ago, when Jones’s book was published, consumers in France and Japan spent more than US$230 per capita annually on beauty products. Figures suggest that today China and Korea are catching up to this figure; K-beauty might not have reached the export heights of Samsung, but Korea has become a major exporter of both skincare products and techniques. Korean women are renowned for having some of the most extensive skincare regimens in the world, ‘piling on between 10 and 18 products a day’.7 Yet the preferences of individual global markets remain consistent: skincare dominates in the Asia-Pacific, fragrance dominates in Europe, and colour cosmetics (makeup) dominates in North America.
Jones wrote in his book about the history of products aimed at darker skin, particularly Avon, prior to the launch of musician Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty in 2017. According to Marie Claire, Fenty ‘shook up the beauty industry’, which, in its disregard of the full spectrum of skin tones in its preparations, had often led to ‘a chalky, ashy mess for consumers’.8 How is it possible that the cosmetics industry was still following the antiquated ‘Fitzpatrick scale’ from the 1970s, which designated only six skin tones? In contrast, Fenty launched with forty shades of foundation, and it says a lot that the darkest sold out first.9 The shift to a more diverse palette of foundation and concealers will allow brands to increase their market share and also provides opportunities for entrepreneurs, such as British woman Farah Naz’s ‘disruptive’ beauty brand EX1, meaning ‘exact match’.10
At the same time, the global anti-racist movement is challenging cosmetic companies to shrink the market for a specific kind of product. Nikkei Asia reported that Asia’s skin-whitening cosmetics market was worth US$7.5 billion in 2020 but, under pressure, corporations such as Johnson & Johnson, Unilever and L’Oréal were pulling whitening products from shelves in Asia and the Middle East.11 The market for skin-whitening formulations remains strong in India and South-East Asia. In India, matchmaking ads presenting potential partners as ‘wheatish’ or fair-skinned are common, although in 2020 the marriage website Shaadi.com, responding to a petition to overturn blatant colourism, removed the option of searching for a match using a skin-tone filter.12
Jones makes an obvious but profound point about the price tag of all these products: consumers realise that the ingredients that make up the products represent a fraction of the cost. They know they’re paying for marketing. His book contains the most perfect, on-message typo I have ever seen. (And, having worked in publishing for thirty years, I’ve seen more typos than I could cuont.) ‘A pale and clear skin, blushing checks, and a natural appearance became the norms of female beauty in the West.’13 Of course it should be cheeks, but blushing checks – or blushing cheques if you’re British or Australian – gets to the heart of it. We may not know what the conglomerates L’Oréal, Unilever, Estée Lauder, Shiseido, Kao, Beiersdorf, Procter & Gamble and Coty spend on advertising their beauty products in our local markets, but we know the amount is huge. To take the biggest example, L’Oréal spent €8.65 billion worldwide on advertising in 2020.14 Influencers now take up 75 per cent of Estée Lauder’s advertising budget.15
So, we know we’re not paying for what’s in the jar so much as what’s on the jar. We know they target our insecurities and manipulate us. I roll my eyes as vigorously as the next person at the lies, exaggerations and false promises emanating from beautiful people as they stare into the camera, bejewelled, glistening, their hair blowing artfully. I chortle at the passive language used to promote a night cream – sorry, crème – on one cosmetic company’s website, imagining it narrated in Morgan Freeman’s baritone: ‘Overnight rejuvenation is empowered. Definition and elasticity are elevated.’ Really, by the cream in this tiny jar? Or by fairies sprinkling magic dust? I want to believe, but I have my limits.
In their podcast Poog (yes, it’s Goop backwards), hosts Kate Berlant and Jacqueline Novak paddle along their flowing river of rhetoric and conversation to ask, ‘Is beauty wellness?’ The truth of the answer they give is like that kick in the guts. ‘Unfortunately, in this society it goddamn is. Because if you don’t feel beautiful, you’re going to fucking kill yourself.’16 ‘The hags of Poog’, as they call themselves, are writers and comedians, and long-time friends. They chat about wellness in a self-aware way, funny and smart, sometimes existential, plugged into the structural oppressiveness of it all without harping on the point. Their wonderfully detailed conversations interrogating wellness and beauty never hide their consumerist desires: ‘How are there so many steps? Which brand did you use?’ Most of this book is about skin and the sun in one way or another, and I’m here to tell you I have never heard anyone in Australia talk as passionately and knowledgeably about SPF as Jacqueline Novak. (And our brightest stars are the pale-skinned Nicole Kidman and Cate Blanchett.) Novak, apparently, doesn’t have a single wrinkle, so hardcore is her commitment to protecting her skin from the sun. (The hags of Poog describe themselves as elder millennials.) Berlant and Novak recognise the artifice of wellness – although the cash is real – but they don’t mock it, or the people who engage in it. We may be suckers, but we’re willing suckers.
In an interview with Vogue, Berlant said that wellness ‘is probably mostly sinister, primarily because of social media and capitalism’s ability to cannibalize everything. You can point to the cult of individuality, the crisis of individuality, and the way that degrades society. I think . . . wellness is the search for God or something. We’re all trying to feel better, and unfortunately feeling better takes a lot of individual labor outside of purchasing things, but there’s also a pleasure and an eroticism to capitalist consumption that we partake in. It can be very dangerous because it seems to simplify the actual work or the actual pain it takes to feel better.’17 The podcast’s tagline is a reminder that, as eloquent as its critique of rampant narcissism and voracious capitalism can get, this is no earnest sociology lecture: ‘This is our hobby. This is our hell. This is our naked desire for free products.’
In the New Yorker, one journalist wrote, ‘What sets the show apart, and what makes it slightly uncanny, is that Novak and Berlant aren’t trying to sell anything; they’ve already bought it all. They’ve travelled far enough to know that wellness is less about a fix than about a state that recedes before you like a mirage.’18 Indeed, it’s about the dance between the function of beauty and its form. It is knowing that beauty, the lipstick I hold in my hand, cannot exist without meta-beauty, those forces of commerce, sexuality, desire, art – far removed from this small black tube of glamour – that prompt me to buy and wear it.
But to return to where we started, with petty theft, consider this conversation transcribed from the Poog podcast:
Novak: You famously say in your act that women should be allowed to steal from Sephora, right?
Berlant: Yes, I used to shoplift heavily from Sephora in my youth. I stand by it. I don’t stand by stealing from small businesses. But a corporation like Sephora that is pulling in money built on the weaponisation of women’s bodies against ourselves, I don’t think they deserve to turn a profit, and they do. They factor shoplifting into their annual budget, I’m sure. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me stealing a cream that I shouldn’t have to buy to erase lines that will make me more palatable to the men in charge to hire me.
I don’t condone shoplifting either, but I think Berlant is on the feminist money. Don’t think of beauty as ornament, as adornment, as being superficial; it is infrastructure and ideology, whether we know it or not. An academic article about plastic surgery in South Korea, written by a Korean American scholar grappling with American hysteria about Korean women’s practices, acknowledged that beauty can indeed show ‘how neoliberal self-management of the body is coded as necessity yet signified as choice’.19 So, with all this in mind, and after a lifetime cultivating an ambiguous position of resignation and acceptance, with occasional playful celebration of what is required to meet a universal but slippery standard of beauty, I decided to see a famous facialist. For research purposes. What could go wrong?
Because of my ignorance about celebrity facialists, my daughter directed me to Melanie Grant, who she follows on Instagram. Melanie Grant’s website revealed she has salons in Double Bay in Sydney, Armadale in Melbourne and West Hollywood in Los Angeles. Her email signature includes a Paris address, an à présent definition of taking coals to Newcastle. I made an appointment three months out from the date I called, the first available. Someone had just cancelled, so I could be with Melanie herself. The deposit alone was more than the total cost of any facial I’d had before. My initial shock gave way to bafflement. How could it cost so much? What were they going to do in my custom facial? But I’d committed and was more than a little intrigued. So, one bright and sunny Monday morning, in I went.
Two hours later, I walked out, my skin smoother and softer to the touch than I could recall, if a little red. The experience had been lovely, although the stakes too high for me to relax and let go. My mind’s running commentary didn’t help, a silly mix of sports-talk (she’s putting on the boob-tube towelling robe now) and David Attenborough (the female of the species values smooth skin for mating purposes), with occasional hillbilly-visits-the-bigsmoke wisecracks I never said out loud. Melanie Grant herself told me my skin texture was beautiful. (As if!) We bonded during our chat about the sun damage that affects Australian skin and how people who ought to know better go out unprotected. She and her assistant smeared niche, sought-after products over my face, ones I hadn’t heard of before I listened to the Poog podcast: Biologique Recherche, Augustinus Bader. If Melanie and her attentive team were surprised that I’d never before had microdermabrasion, or chemical peels, they didn’t show it. An assistant informed me the microdermabrasion machine had diamond tips, and I managed not to say, ‘In this economy?’
The decor was extravagantly luxe. Dark-wood shelves with artful sculptures lined the reception area. Perfect white roses in crystal vases sat on a beautiful table next to white designer couches. The linen sheets in the treatment room were not white, but taupe, maybe ecru. I found myself admiring the taps in the bathroom. Giant framed photos of Kate Moss adorned a few walls. I was tempted to comment that some of us remember when she debuted on a grungy cover of The Face, but stopped myself. When it was all over, I sipped on my Italian mineral water and was handed a card that outlined a customised skincare regimen and provided the opportunity to buy all the products to service it. Thousands of dollars’ worth of loot – cleansers, moisturisers, serums, exfoliants – were laid out before me. The serum took itself so seriously that it came packaged in a medical-looking phial, though it would be rare to see one in a hospital that was packed with ‘proteines marines’. I bought one thing, not the serum, breaking the resolute promise I’d made to myself to not buy any products. Professional and courteous, everyone did their job to perfection and bade me a beautiful day as I left. (They overcharged me, but we sorted that out later.)
I walked out with a sense of creeping despair. I felt unsettled, blue, and somehow furious. If I glowed, it was for the wrong reasons. My platitudinous language about beauty as empowerment and self-care tasted like dust on my tongue. ‘Women don’t stand a chance,’ I told my daughter when she called to ask what it was like. ‘All this time and the obscene, obscene, amounts of money we tell ourselves we need to be presentable, it’s a fucking joke.’ Settling onto my high horse, I asked, ‘How can we fight for rape law reform, stop violence against women, have better representation in parliament, when we’re staring in the mirror angsting about how we look? Spending thousands of dollars to look young and hot, whether we’re Real Housewives or university professors? There’s a gender pay gap and we’re spending what money we have on skin care? We get trolled on social media regardless of how we look. Why is everyone so scared of ageing – do they not realise what the alternative is?
‘But what will kill us,’ my tirade continued, ‘is the oceans and landfills full of empty unrecyclable pots, jars, bottles, brushes, dabbers, Q-tips, enough to fill the Mariana Trench.’ None of this outburst was Melanie Grant’s fault, I added, not wanting to turn her into a straw-woman, if one with insanely perfect skin. ‘It’s the system,’ I ranted. ‘It’s patriarchy. It’s capitalism.’ I felt defeated by my seven-hundred-dollar facial.
Boo-hoo. Bella pointed out, rightly, that I should be grateful I didn’t grow up with Instagram, as she had. I had a renewed sense of the oppressive hell of the visual, the way aesthetics saturate everything.
Over coffee – probably not great for the skin, but I was past caring – I finished the novel I was reading, If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha.20 That it is about young women in South Korea – the plastic surgery capital of the world – having endless surgeries to survive in a competitive society only made things worse. Other books I’d read over the past year about our obsessive, sometimes perverse notions of beauty flooded back. In her book about wellness, Wellmania, Brigid Delaney writes, ‘The collective has collapsed in favour of the individual . . . Obsessive ritualisation of self-care comes at the expense of collective engagement, collapsing every social problem into a personal quest for the good life.’21
In Clean, our favourite non-washer James Hamblin writes about Glossier, one of the world’s fastest-growing skincare companies, which he visits feeling like an imposter. Glossier’s slogan is ‘Skin First. Makeup Second.’ A tiny ‘Bingo!’ sounds in my head every time I read a celebrity profile that lionises the subject’s ‘surprisingly minimal makeup’, only a touch of mascara and lip gloss, so ‘natural and fresh’. Invariably the star has just woken up, the implication being this is how they really look. It’s genes! I admonish. And don’t ignore the long-term makeup that may be at work – facials, exclusive products, surgery, fillers, neurotoxins injected into the face, lash extensions, brow tattoos. Celebrities are surrounded by an entourage paid to help them look good. It’s all filtered, professionally lit, Photoshopped, Facetuned. And still, feature-writers describe celebrity beauty as a kind of heavenly miracle. As one writer in The Atlantic put it, the best skincare trick is being rich.22 If someone in a beauty magazine looks a million dollars, cash helped get them there.
I’d listened to Zadie Smith comment onstage at the Broadside feminist ideas festival, in Melbourne in 2019, that what is most valued in women is ‘stasis’. A depressing truism, but gravity always wins. I think of the ad another writer, Joan Didion, did for the French luxury goods brand Celine in 2015. In it she wore dark sunglasses so large they covered most of her face, as if to protect us from the shock of the eighty-year-old eyes that lay underneath instead of those of the 1960s icon we remember. Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, who is about the same age as me, stares out from the covers of his books, revealing impressive wrinkles in photographs taken between cigarettes. (He has now given up, apparently.) What woman of the same age would dare?
Looking at my bookshelves, the only women around his age who are brave enough to put their faces to their stories are those on the covers of political memoirs – Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Julia Gillard. (One exception is Helen Garner.) Novels about middle-aged women, bought by middle-aged women, read by middle-aged women, never have middle-aged women on the cover, even pictures that aren’t of the author herself. Elizabeth Strout’s ‘Olive Kitteridge’ books have line drawings of lighthouses, a dried-up leaf, an empty park bench. I can find no television tie-in edition with Frances McDormand on its cover. Zadie Smith has written about the terror of the desire to not age. ‘The idea of trying to make that light burn persistently at exactly the same wattage and intensity over decades seems to me a terrifying task to set oneself, not unlike lighting a candle and expecting no wax to ever melt. We melt, we melt, and finally we’re extinguished.’23
Perhaps the body itself should be scared of what we might do to it in our efforts to stop the saggy skin that time brings. In his eccentric, brilliant book Beauty and the Beast, Columbia University anthropologist Michael Taussig focuses, ostensibly at least, on the relationship between beauty and violence in Colombia. He writes about the exaggerated aestheticism, transgression and artifice of what he calls the ‘narcolook’. ‘What else,’ he asks, ‘can you call the current irruption of surgeries to produce bigger and better breasts and asses and calves, not to mention surgeries on the eyelids and labia, vaginal rejuvenation, face-lifting, and, of course, becoming thin with liposuction? And that is just the start. There are so many more interventions, inventions, and return visits, like the monthly Botox and “touch up”, the retoque.’24 Like all fairytales about transformation – think of The Little Mermaid – this one is inflected with horror, finding synergies between glamour and terror. I first laughed at Taussig’s phrase ‘cosmic surgery’, in lieu of cosmetic surgery. Now, I too see all kinds of transformative surgery as cosmic, such is the god-given power of rejuvenation we invest in it.
Similar to Zadie Smith observing women’s fingers seeking out the pause button, Taussig writes, ‘Cosmic surgery contests this eternal rhythm by trying to hold the female body in a continuous springtime, yet the connection and tension between death and beauty remains.’ Some scenes in his book are probably too gruesome to be screened on Botched, one of a genre of television that seems to exist for viewers who want to see a victim of failed surgical transformation get their comeuppance. What were they thinking? Cosmetic surgery distils our desire to change fate from the outside in, to change our selves by transforming our exteriors. Taussig writes:
The ancient arts of physiognomy (discerning insides from outsides, reading the soul in the face) may seem like hocuspocus today, but when you stop to think about it, you realize it is embedded in our everyday practice, such that you really have to wonder whether the fundamental reason for cosmic surgery is precisely to reverse this mechanism, to create a new inside by changing the outside. And once we have gotten a new inside, fate itself will change, making this cosmic tinkering akin to alchemy and related magical practices. This is why cosmetic surgery is best considered cosmic surgery. Physiognomic manipulation aspires to be not simply a facelift but a soul-lift.25
Taussig describes the eroticised excesses sought not only by women, but by drug lords and kingpins who transform their faces over and over to avoid arrest. Better to live in a grotesque bodily prison than one with steel bars?
My practised ambivalence about bodily interventions crashed a little further when I recalled an evening in a stylish Japanese restaurant not far from the post-facial cafe. As I glanced around the restaurant, checking out everyone dressed up for a big night, I noticed that quite a few of the women shared facial characteristics. Perhaps they had watched the same makeup tutorials, and their contouring and highlighting skills were all on display. Or perhaps some had gone to more invasive lengths to achieve their look.
As I looked over my sushi and around the room, I was reminded of the term ‘uncanny valley’. It was devised by a Japanese roboticist who sought to describe the unease we feel upon observing an entity that is nearly human but not quite. I am not suggesting that the people around us, some with pumped-up cheekbones and lips, and a few older men with super-smooth foreheads, were not fully human, quite the opposite. But Freud’s term unheimlich – where the familiar feels strange – seemed apt and was probably exacerbated by the fact that I was seeing faces of people I didn’t know for the first time since lockdown ended. Even with a touch of the uncanny, the overall effect was fabulous.
I saw but could not articulate a kind of racial ambiguity, amorphous but shared traits that I knew had something to do with ‘Instagram Face’. Jia Tolentino wrote about the ethnic aspect of ‘Instagram Face’ in a much-cited New Yorker article: ‘it was as if the algorithmic tendency to flatten everything into a composite of greatest hits had resulted in a beauty ideal that favored white women capable of manufacturing a look of rootless exoticism’. A celebrity makeup artist she interviewed for the piece breaks it down: ‘We’re talking an overly tan skin tone, a South Asian influence with the brows and eye shape, an African-American influence with the lips, a Caucasian influence with the nose, a cheek structure that is predominantly Native American and Middle Eastern.’ This makeup artist thought people were getting prettier. ‘The world is so visual right now, and it’s only getting more visual, and people want to upgrade the way they relate to it.’26
But that night, what looked good on screen was a little unsettling in real life, at least for those of us with unaltered faces. ‘Their faces are a bit frozen,’ my mum said, looking around. ‘And they’re so young’. A woman with a face made expressionless – whether by paralysing agents, exhaustion or disposition – came in, pushing her baby in a pram. I remembered her when I read an interview with Manhattan dermatologist Patricia Wexler MD about Botox. ‘You want a certain amount of movement because people relate to emotion. The joke around the office is that you don’t want all these children traumatized by their non-smiling mothers.’27
Months after this dinner, and only days before my special facial, I had coffee with plastic surgeon Anand Deva, this time to talk about aesthetics, not skin cancer. A good deal of Deva’s work is cosmetic, but he’s blunt about much of his specialty – along with cosmetic dermatology – being at the interface where medicine as a profession meets medicine as a business. He knows a lot about what happens when things go wrong in this surprisingly unregulated jungle of cosmetic treatments and procedures, because distressed patients are often referred to him for ‘revision’. ‘People choose to forget,’ he says, ‘or aren’t properly informed that surgical procedures have not-insignificant risks. A procedure that’s about lifestyle and comes with a vague promise to make you look and feel better, but one that could leave you potentially disfigured, hurt or damaged for the rest of your life – how do you weigh that up? Often the potential harm is minimised, and the promise of glamour and beauty is maximised. If it goes wrong, there’s guilt and shame – “I was just being vain, it serves me right.” How deep you want to go into that space . . . it’s bottomless, really.’
It’s not all bad. He adds, ‘It’s very easy to be judgemental or old-school, saying, “We never used to do this stuff, it’s all about sales and marketing.” But there’s no doubt in my mind that some of these cosmetic treatments and surgeries work very well. They deliver benefits. So, my point is not to rubbish the people – doctors and patients – doing it, but to ensure that they’re doing it for the right reasons, with the right motivations. And that it’s properly regulated, with informed, educated consent.’
He is concerned, however, about what is going into young bodies, nearly always women’s bodies. ‘That substance being injected into your face or your lips, what is it? It might have had some safety testing, it might be approved by the regulator, but my concern is that more and more product is going in, interacting with other product, possibly getting infected, and ultimately damaging the surrounding tissue. But this is not being properly studied, catalogued, articulated and fed back to the patient when they walk in.’ He has found that some patients don’t remember what has been injected into them or where it was done, quoting one woman with complications who said, ‘I think I got that filler when I was on holiday in Thailand.’ His attempt to introduce a cosmetic treatment ‘passport’ to help regulate this hasn’t yet succeeded.
How do you assess whether someone’s motivation is reasonable? Deva says he follows three principles in his practice: the first is to make sure a patient’s expectations are realistic and that he can match them. He says if someone walks in holding a photo of a celebrity they wish to resemble, or asks for exactly 3 millimetres off their nose, or arrives with drawings and angles marked out – all of which happen – alarm bells ring. He says he will often refer someone for a second opinion, or to a psychologist if he suspects body dysmorphia. Another warning signal is when someone asks for a discount. Not that he doesn’t help financially disadvantaged people grappling with bad surgical outcomes, but if people aren’t happy with the result, he says, they’ll claim that because he charged less he didn’t do a good job, ‘putting you on a hiding to nothing’.
I was a little surprised when Deva said that he has to like a patient if he is going to perform elective cosmetic surgery on them, but he explained his reasoning. ‘If you don’t like this person, or if they’re raising your blood pressure, don’t operate on them. It’s going to be a disaster. You’ve got to connect, especially for something as intimate as cosmetic surgery. You’ve got to look at the whole picture in context – I can understand why you’re depressed, you’ve lost confidence, you’re getting divorced.’ He says, ‘I use time as my ally to de-escalate the sense of urgency: have an initial consult, see them again in six or eight weeks to answer questions once they’ve thought about it. Then, all being well after this cooling-off period, I operate.’ Comparing this slower, considered approach with what he calls the ‘Let’s get ’em in, sign them up, operate next week, offer a discount, upsell another procedure’ approach, I agree that the latter is not a medical practice with integrity. It’s a business.
Deva doesn’t hesitate when I ask him what the most gratifying operations are for him: breast reductions and removal of excess or loose skin after bariatric surgery, not that he really sees either as cosmetic procedures. Formerly obese patients, he says, often need ‘multiple operations over two or three years. I love that progressive contact, because you live through it with them. You get to know them and their families, the ups and downs. It’s so rewarding – they’re very grateful patients. Not only have they lost weight, they’ve literally transformed and feel better.’
One of these happy surgical patients, though not Deva’s, is Michelle Rowland, federal member of parliament for the Sydney seat of Greenway. Rowland dropped four dress sizes thanks to a few years’ hard work with diet and exercise, but got to the point where running and gym workouts could not reduce her excess skin. The night before surgery for a breast reduction and to remove skin from her arms, she says, ‘I looked in the mirror and said goodbye. It was exactly what I wanted. They told me it would be life-changing and it has been. A physical journey, and a journey of identity, too. I don’t miss that skin. I love the scars. They have faded a lot, but no one sees them. And no one’s skin is perfect anyway.’
In our conversation, Deva becomes reflective, saying, ‘the big concern to me is if the dysmorphic face becomes normalised through society’. Later I learn that cosmetic surgeons are indeed publishing about the ‘uncanny valley’ effect in their line of work.28 Deva comments that we need to empower young women in ways that aren’t surgical. ‘If this lack of respect and objectification of women goes all the way to the top of the country, pervades every household, our schoolgrounds and workplaces, our nightclubs and our halls of power, what hope do we have? I see this push to cosmetics as another symptom of how broken this whole thing is.’
But the horse has bolted; these treatments are mainstream. An email conversation with another well-grounded doctor, cosmetic dermatologist Dr Michelle Hunt, who does laser and light treatments, muscle-relaxing injections (Botox) and dermal fillers (Juvéderm and Restylane), took the edge off my cynicism about some of these treatments. ‘For me,’ she wrote, ‘the most gratifying part of cosmetic dermatology is seeing how treatment can improve a patient’s self-esteem. Even treatments to stop frowning have been shown to improve depression scores in patients. In many cases the results are instant, but in others, such as acne scarring, treatment can be a gradual process over many months. I’ve seen patients with all kinds of scars walk in as shy, insecure people and leave far more confident when their scars are no longer obvious. Like it or not, people often judge others by the way they look.’
I asked her if she had experienced a rush of patients after the lifting of COVID lockdowns, so many of us having spent hours looking at ourselves on screens. ‘Absolutely!’ she replied. ‘We opted to close cosmetic services for a few months, so when we reopened not only did we have a backlog of existing patients, there were a number of new patients seeking cosmetic work.’ She lists the reasons why: ‘Patients didn’t like how they looked on Zoom; they were working from home, so downtime was not so much of an issue; they weren’t spending money on travel, and they could “hide” the evidence of cosmetic work under a mask.’ Her overall aims in her work are subtle: ‘I will say no to patients wanting artificial transformations, such as overfilled lips or cheeks. I believe that cosmetic treatments should be used to enhance and improve, rather than unnaturally alter a patient’s appearance.’ I found myself thinking that if I ever decided to have laser – one of the treatments Melanie Grant proposed on the forward-planning section of the card she gave me – I would visit Dr Hunt. I was slowly moving from anger back to more measured acceptance of what we do for beauty. Oil of Ulan helped me get there.
When my mother-in-law, Eleanor, was in hospital late in 2020 awaiting a diagnosis, my husband, Adam, asked her if there was anything she needed. Her request was simple: ‘Olay Complete’. On his way to the pharmacy to buy it, he asked me if I had heard of this mysterious product. I thought he must be joking, so pervasive was it through my – and, as I would discover, many other people’s – childhoods, and often their current skincare practice too. I associate Oil of Ulan, which later became Oil of Olay, or simply Olay, with my paternal grandmother, Mavis. I found it moving that, in sickness, a mundane yet familiar face cream could provide comfort and reassurance.
Facebook seemed as good a place as any to ask about Olay, and other beauty products that evoked childhood or coming of age. More than one hundred people responded. One friend said that for her, Olay’s effect was nothing short of ‘Proustian’. Someone else remembered fondly that it was ‘her first grown-up face cream’. Similarly, another saved up to buy it when she was a teenager to follow the example of her mother, who she saw as truly beautiful. A friend’s nanna still says when she applies her Olay, ‘Bits of powder and bits of paint, make a girl look just as she ain’t.’ Olay, in this creamy flood of nostalgia, was closely followed by Nivea and Ponds cold creams, which one friend described as ‘the smell of comfort’. Another friend said for her it was all about ‘Johnson’s Baby Lotion. That pink bottle was the salve for everything. It was an annual Christmas stocking filler at my house in Dublin in the 1960s and 70s, with five girls in the family!’ Few straight men responded. ‘Chapstick for lips,’ said one. Another said, ‘Heno de Pravia soap always reminds me of my mother, and therefore Spain,’ which made me want to cry.
At that point I could have shared what I had learnt about the racialised history of Pears soap advertising, or the fact that Nivea is from the Latin for ‘snow-white’, or revealed that the scientific rigour the Ponds Institute claimed may have been a false promise. I could have mentioned that Marcel Proust’s own skin was so sensitive he didn’t use soap. But it would have been beside the point, because all these responses were about love. People remembered these products, and the people who wore them, with love. They moisturised dry skin, removed makeup and smelt like home. Olay may be the world’s fourth largest beauty brand, to the delight of shareholders of Procter & Gamble, but it is also a link to people who are no longer with us. Had I asked, I’m sure every person would have said that these products made their grandmothers and mothers even more beautiful.
Beauty is fickle. There are days when we feel swept up in its orbit, other days when its ideals are impossibly limited and brutalising. There are days when we don’t feel beautiful ourselves but can enjoy beauty in others. I remember a moment standing at a M.A.C counter, decades ago, feeling a little vulnerable and exposed. A tall man wearing electric-blue eyeliner and glitter around his eyes smiled and walked over to serve me, and I felt immediately better. I hope I said to him, ‘You are magnificent,’ because that’s what I thought. We can look at another person standing before us, or in a painting or photo, and feel our pulse quicken, our awe rise as we struggle to breathe. Beauty isn’t only a product, but a real thing we see and feel in the world. Sometimes one enhances the other.
Writer Susan Johnson describes many of the efforts and rationalisations spelt out in this chapter: ‘There are so many ways to corral women into the holding pen called beauty that by the time a woman is old enough to look properly in the mirror, she does not always know who is looking back.’29 True. When I look in the mirror I look my age. But I feel something else. The beauty–industrial complex may have stolen my money and my time, but it hasn’t managed to steal my sense of self.
After all this, it may be pat for me to channel the beauty magazine approach, but based on all my research and thinking about this, I’ll tell you the three ways to achieve the skin you want:
- SPF
- Genes
- Money.
My real advice, the answer I really want to share, comes via John Berger’s classic book Ways of Seeing: ‘The relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled.’30 That, for better or worse, is what being alive is about.