It’s impossible to walk past a display of women’s magazines without being hit in the face at full force with the semen facial of their beautiful lies: the covers alone will tell you most of what you need to know. ‘Get Bigger Eyes! Redder Lips! The Perfect Skin Tone! Whiter Teeth!’ they whisper in shrill, insidious Voldemort style, as you march through WH Smith en route to a discount Chocolate Orange. ‘612 Beauty Myths That Turned Out to Be True!’ cries the latest edition of the first glossy you fully focus your eyes on – and that’s it, you have to know. Undeniably intrigued, you pull it cautiously off the rack, hoping that one of the resurrected myths isn’t the Victorian belief in puppy urine’s anti-ageing qualities. Flick through the pages to the feature in question, and it might as well be, for all the sense it makes, recommending as it does everything from seaweed hair wraps to eyelash perms to vajacials, oxygen facials (because going outside just isn’t enough), and placenta-based hand cream. Welcome to the everyday world of beauty journalism, where everyone has something to sell and, as you’re about to see, is willing to try everything from bribery to manipulation to emotional blackmail in order to get you to buy into it. Whether it’s getting you to sign up to some ‘amazing’ new procedure you never thought you needed, like waxing your eyebrows off before having them tattooed back on again, or making you obsess over your nonexistent moustache, the beauty section’s on to it. This is a place where the sheer quantity of products being marketed as ‘everyday solutions’ or ‘necessities’ outweighs the number of hot dinners you could ever be expected to consume, ten times over. Tread carefully, because the carpet is made of 100% hand-woven self-loathing (and it’s been dyed to match the drapes).
No wonder we keep complaining about the culture of ‘having it all’ – it seems a pretty tall order to ask the average woman to actually live her life in between ‘priming up that beach bod’ and ‘fighting the winter flab’, moisturising and exfoliating and polishing and trimming and powdering until there’s nothing left but a small, generic lump of regulation girl-flubber. Every few weeks, a new ‘must-have’ product comes on the market to remind you that last week’s perfection wasn’t quite perfect enough. Surprise – it costs an even higher percentage of your pay cheque than the last one did, and the pressure to have it at hand will reach fever pitch within weeks. Soon, you’ll be the only one lacking a tube of the gunk in your purse; by next year, you’ll feel naked without it.
The cosy relationship between beauty PRs and the journalists writing ‘content’ for the beauty sections of magazines is well known throughout the industry: the free spa breaks and the free backhanders of Crème de la Mer and ‘real diamond’ nail polishes hundreds of pounds out of any reader’s price range, and the unspoken threat that if you don’t lavish glowing recommendations on their providers that cushy lifestyle might be taken away. This essentially means that at the consumer end, all we hear about is the ‘must-have’ pair of fake nails which make you feel ‘simply gorgeous’. The writer is hardly going to mention that they make her feel a bit like Cruella De Vil and she can’t open the boot of her car (and if her boyfriend wants his prostate massaged then he can just forget it), not when next week’s promise of a free bikini wax is dangling in front of her. She’s embroiled in a world where beauty therapists on commission are reminding her that waxing away her pubes is ‘clean’ and ‘normal’, but she hasn’t got any money left because she’s underpaid and over-criticised. She just spent her last pay cheque on a ‘treatment’ made of whale spunk. Do you really trust what she has to say about moisturiser?
Beauty editors face an ever-increasing mountain of beauty products to coo over, ‘test’ and add to the wish list, and the range is staggering. When you’ve complemented your full face of slap with a caffeine roll-on under the eyes, added in a can of hairspray, invested in the latest perfume, slathered your thighs with anti-cellulite complex, painted on some cuticle treatment and cleaned the overnight whitening gel off your teeth, all before you’ve run a comb through your hair, it seems downright bizarre that you’re still only just keeping up with what you ‘must, must, must’ do as a bare minimum for respect as a human being. The magazine article that advises on how to get the ‘natural look’ (clue: go out without any make-up) and yet recommends over thirty different products is well known. Vogue Australia even ran a feature in October 2013 called ‘Experts on how to do the new natural make-up’, where catwalk directors and make-up experts collaborated on seven detailed steps (‘From the skin, to the cheeks, eyes and lips’) on how to look like you’re not wearing any make-up at all. How much more can you physically layer on to your skin or into your pores before you start vomming retinol A-complex over your cornflakes and excreting anti-ageing serum? We’re not entirely sure – and we’re not going to test it – but we’ve definitely wasted a large enough proportion of our brains on contemplating whether ‘extract of bull testicle’ will make our eyelashes more voluminous or not. Maybe it’s time to reclaim the tiny lump of duck-egg grey matter in our ‘silly’ female brains – you know, the organ that’s currently dedicating itself to articles with titles such as ‘100% hotness’ (Glamour) or ‘Get pretty now’ (Teen Vogue) – once and for all. Despite what the industry may tell you, it’s still the most important thing about you.
Whether it’s a study on the age-defying properties of semen or an advert promising you a peachy posterior, the message that we need to, that we must, be beautiful is all around us. Can it just be coincidence that, as women have been increasingly liberated and emancipated, these beauty ideals have become all the more tyrannical? While once there was one kind of mascara to fit all, there are now umpteen promising you different, sometimes physically impossible, results (can you imagine if your lashes really did go on ‘for ever’, like physics-defying, man-catching tentacles?). The adverts, the products, the stores are everywhere, and it’s not until you sit down and really think about it that you start wondering why beauty is consistently used as a stick with which to beat women, but almost never men.
As little girls, we were told to scrub our dirty faces. So far, so normal (a snot-and-jam face mask is never attractive, or hygienic), but that simple existence didn’t last long before we were being told fairy tales about gorgeous princesses who were effortlessly beautiful and in constant flight from older stepmothers, who were evil, ugly and vain. At around the age of six you’re given (or your friend is given) a disembodied blonde woman’s head made of plastic, which you’re supposed to ‘style’ using hair bobbles and ‘kiddy make-up’. (Where the hell did this decapitated monster come from?) A quick scan of the Argos catalogue reveals a multitude of resolutely pink and purple products for toddlers and above, ranging from nail transfers (made by Crayola, of all people!) to a Minnie Mouse vanity set, to dummy hairdryers and straighteners. We’re encouraged to play hairdressers in the same way that boys are encouraged to play pirates, despite the fact that having strands of your hair wrenched through a swimming cap with holes in it while your stylist wanks on about her holiday in Tenerife is nowhere near as fun as hunting for lost treasure.
Meanwhile, parents have told us of their daughters’ first trainers coming with a ‘play’ sparkly lip gloss attached. In November 2013, the free gift in bright pink girlie mag Animal Friends (aimed at girls aged 3–10) was a ‘Sparkle Set’ of ‘funky bracelets’, ‘cool tattoos’ and ‘lush lipshine’, despite the fact that the magazine’s content revolves around a love of animals (as the name suggests), and the Christmas issue of Angel Princess ran with thirty-six free gifts including ‘lipshine’ and plastic jewellery. That little girls under ten years old are already being sent the message that beauty and grooming should be high on their priority list, that they should be sitting in front of a plastic illuminated mini dressing table when they could be running around scraping their knees and climbing trees without worrying about the impact on their hair, makes us want to set fire to the ‘princess’ section of Toys ‘Я’ Us, stat.
From an early age, girls are taught that they’re supposed to follow a very specific beauty blueprint. This was highlighted expertly in 2013 by deviantART user Oceanstarlet, who created a Disney Girls Tutorial breaking down the various components of a Disney princess, and comparing it to the average female form in real life. According to her guide, the Disney princess invariably has an enlarged, childlike head sitting on an extremely slender neck, ginormous eyes with permanently dilated pupils, impossibly small feet, but no muscles or hips. With Brave in 2012, Disney created a princess who didn’t fit this stereotype for the very first time – a feisty Scottish tomboy called Merida, who refused marriage and excelled in archery, complete with uncontrollable ginger hair. Despite the fact that Merida had been hailed as a progressive step by a company famed for its saccharine depictions of femininity, Disney sadly redrew her for her initiation into the Magic Kingdom’s Princess Hall of Fame. She was given make-up and a cleavage while they were at it. Criticism was vocal, but perhaps we shouldn’t have been so surprised; after all, these were the people who had stretched out Minnie Mouse to a super-skinny frame at Barneys in New York for a cartoon catwalk sequence because, as Barneys creative director Dennis Freedman put it, ‘The standard Minnie Mouse would not look so good in a Lanvin dress.’
By the time we were teenagers in the 1990s, we’d read enough articles in Mizz magazine called things like ‘Make-up to make you happy’ to know that we should be covering ourselves in roll-on neon body glitter and bindis if we ever wanted to get down to ‘Brimful of Asha’ with that ‘luscious lad’. At around this time, Rhiannon devoted an inordinate amount of energy to bleaching out her freckles using ‘fade out’ cream. ‘You’ll end up like Michael Jackson,’ her mum warned, to no avail. Both of us also begged our mums to iron our hair, and by our twenties we were fully paid up beauty consumers, spending much of our hard-earned lady cash (and let’s remember, that’s still significantly less than man cash) on identical products differing only in their jazzy packaging and pseudo-sciencey claims that promised the world.
This is cradle-to-grave marketing. Despite the fact that women over 50 tend to disappear from our television screens the minute they stop conforming to our fresh-beauty paradigm, they’re expected to do everything in their power to return to their former youthful appearance, despite the fact that this is, well, BIOLOGICALLY IMPOSSIBLE. (Admittedly, this is not something that seems to trouble publications for this age bracket. Red ran a piece called ‘Can you anti-age your eggs?’ Short answer: no.) When they’re not creating new insecurities for a whole generation of older women (yes, your ‘post-pregnancy tummy’ or your ‘flabby upper arms’ are now supposed to be your ‘main weakness’, and you may as well follow Red magazine’s genuine hashtag #WhatToEat if you don’t want to let that ‘newly slowed metabolism’ get the better of you), magazines such as Easy Living and Good Housekeeping tirelessly flog anti-ageing creams and moisturisers, dropping in impressive-sounding phrases such as ‘penetrating micro-particles’ and ‘multi-level moisture’. ‘I’ve seen evidence in the mirror that anti-ageing creams can make a huge difference,’ bleats a feature in Easy Living’s beauty section, ‘particularly as I haven’t gone down the road of having Botox, fillers or lasers (yet!) From your 30s upwards, it’s genuinely worth the effort to set up a proper routine, and you need to stick to it every day for at least 4–6 weeks to get results.’ Just long enough to need to buy the biggest bottle of the freebie product they gave you in exchange for editorial, then? Gotcha. But since when did ‘a proper routine’ morph from learning the choreography in the music video for Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies’ into a toe-curlingly mundane application of various lotions, night after night, in front of your bathroom mirror? That beauty has become akin to a full-time job seems to us like nothing more than a conspiracy to make women’s lives chronically boring.
As anyone who’s tried to wash their Afro using own-brand shower gel will tell you, certain lotions and potions do actually work better than others. But as Dr Ben Goldacre points out in his myth-busting Bad Science, most moisturisers are essentially the same when it comes to, erm, adding moisture to your skin. These companies stun you with sciencebabble about the ‘pro-retinol complex’ or ‘biopeptide’ in the creams, which, despite sounding only a little more convincing than Danone’s ‘bifidus digestivum’, will apparently deliver unto you the gift of eternal youth and hotness. The thing is, although these ingredients always claim to have miracle properties, they are most often present in over-the-counter face creams in such minuscule quantities that the only thing they’ll do is sweet sod-all to your skin. All that will happen is that you’ll end up thirty quid poorer and looking exactly the same as you would had you smeared a three-quid tub of Vaseline on to your chops. As a case in point, a couple of years ago there was a rush on Aldi’s £3.49 anti-ageing serum after a BBC Horizon programme found it outperformed all of its bankruptcy-provoking rivals.
One of the many things that is so disturbing about the beauty industry is how the faces smiling out from cosmetic surgery adverts all send the same message: changing your appearance can change your life. Beauty, more than anything else – including personal or psychological wellbeing – has become the goal towards which women are told to aspire, and what’s alarming is that we rarely question it; it’s just taken as a given.
Why are we willing to put ourselves through increasingly painful and bizarre procedures in an apparent quest for perfection? If you’re anything like us, you probably check your reflection at least several times over the course of a day, and you may have even perfected the ‘subtle shop-window check’, where a thorough inspection of your flyaway fringe is disguised as a nonchalant perusal of the mannequins. On average, the self-checking window gaze is much more prevalent amongst women (Holly once checked herself out in the back of a serving spoon during a roast dinner), but it’s not because there is a special female gene that makes you care more about your appearance. We care more about our appearance because we’ve been told throughout our lives that that’s where our priorities should lie.
You’ve probably heard the phrase ‘beauty is pain’ at one point or another. Although often said flippantly, it reveals a fundamental truth about the things women put themselves through in the pursuit of physical perfection. And it’s nothing new – just look at the corsets and lethal lead make-up of yesteryear and pity poor old Elizabeth I, who spent most of her time in a corset made of whale bones. However, with the number of women undergoing cosmetic surgery currently increasing year by year, the masochistic aspects of the beauty industry and its followers are definitely in competitive hyperdrive. ‘I went through hell to look this good,’ the magazine articles scream. The ‘hell’ that is described will often involve unregulated procedures, surgical mutilation, enormous health risks (sunbeds, extreme dieting, faulty implants, etc. etc.), and months and months of self-imposed misery. While the end result may be appealing, the means for getting there are extreme. Is going to such lengths really all that worthy of admiration? When we hear that Celebrity X works out for five hours a day before going to bed encased in a cling-film mud wrap, it makes us wonder where she finds the time – and how we’re ever supposed to emulate that, unless we’re replacing sleep with butt crunches.
Being beautiful doesn’t just involve pain, the media remind us: it also takes time and money. Think about all the time you’ve spent worrying because of the beauty police – it probably amounts to at least the length of a language course. You could be fluent in Italian, living la dolce vita in Rome, stuffing your face with pizza and partying with men called Antonio who comb their pubes over the waistband of their diamanté-studded trousers, had it not been for all those hours you spent fretting about your blackheads.
Not to mention the dollah it deprives you of, which in Britain amounts to an average of £18,000 on face products alone in a lifetime, according to one 2013 survey by Superdrug (whose head of cosmetics was quoted in the Daily Mail as saying that ‘we’re sure most women would agree it’s money well spent’). In 2011, TV shopping channel QVC’s more comprehensive research found that when you combine all the products for face, hair and body maintenance, the average British woman will end up forking out £133,000 in her lifetime. That’s quite a few luxury holidays spent on a white-sand beach with a toned waiter serving you cocktails; or, you know, a deposit on a house. When you consider that women are still paid on average 14.9% less than men, it really hits home how being a woman can put you at an economic disadvantage. There have been times when both of us have been on the dole, and yet have felt it necessary to spend our paltry Jobseeker’s Allowance on new foundation rather than food – and not because we’re especially vain, but because as women we’re made to feel that we need to look a certain way in order to be considered acceptable. It’s perverse that we should crave a smooth, dewy complexion over a filling, nutritious meal, and will happily live off teabags on toast if it means that we are able to achieve it (plus we might lose a few pounds in the process). But this is the way we live now.
When we see a baby girl looking at herself in the mirror and smiling, we already know that this is probably the happiest that she is ever going to feel about the way she looks. From then on it’s all downhill, so she’d better get used to the implication that, unless she loses 10 lb, she’ll die fat and alone in a pool of her own chocolate-flavoured SlimFast. Although she will grow up in a supposedly modern society where she’s told that she can achieve anything – be a doctor, or a politician, or an academic, just like a man – there remains a double standard at work. Women are still repeatedly told that physical attraction is the most they should aspire to – or, that if they do intend to pursue an important career path, they should attend to their looks or be prepared to be judged for them first. This can have an effect on both self-esteem and a person’s own level of ambition: what’s the use in being Prime Minister if all people notice is your hair? Just look at the way female politicians are treated by the media. When MP Clare Short complained about Page Three being sexist, The Sun branded her ‘fat’ and ‘jealous’, while Angela Merkel was allegedly called an ‘unfuckable lard-arse’ by fellow politician Berlusconi, the thought of whose company is enough to put anyone off sex forever. And if you thought it was bad for politicians, it’s even worse for feminists. The efforts of the Suffragettes were once referred to as ‘plain talk for plain women’. To an extent, that stereotype persists.
The cover pages of publications like Marie Claire and InStyle can easily give the impression that being ‘beautiful’ is a full-time job. The sheer number of tasks on the to-do list alone makes you wonder if there are just enough hours in the day to take ‘292 tips and tricks’ and ‘50 beauty secrets’ on board. These rags have done away with the idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and joined in with some completely different – and highly marketable – mantra. You can count on the latest lacquered publication to serve up pages of products you need to ‘tame’ your hair, ‘correct’ your flaws, and ‘identify’ the ways in which ‘he’ thinks you’re lacking so that you can ‘GET SEXY NOW!’ (that’s an order). When they get sick of peddling the same old foundation reviews, a new product comes along that we’re suddenly ugly without, from ‘beauty balm’ to ‘miraculous’ bust-firming gel (FYI, no cream can make your tits bigger – we’ve tried), and yet we didn’t even know we needed it until somebody told us.
Now, don’t get us wrong. We’ve all invested in a bottle of blue hair mascara or five (well, it was cool very briefly in the nineties. In the north), and we’ve all frightened flatmates and/or lovers with a ‘homemade’ face mask straight out of the pages of Glamour (you gotta love that drowning feeling of getting pulverised banana up your nose). We’ve all briefly fallen for the idea that ‘body brushing’ will get rid of your cellulite and ‘drain out impurities’ that were stuck to your hips, just waiting for a bristling motion across your epidermis to make a break for freedom. But when you have a breakdown on a Sunday evening because you’ve tripped over your steaming bowl of organic aloe vera wax while trying to pull on your ‘instant tan’ leggings during a ‘bust-enhancing’ yoga ritual and accidentally waxed your perfectly threaded left eyebrow off, you know there’s got to be something wrong.
The reasoning behind the idea that you need this stuff is, of course, that you’re unacceptably imperfect and you need to look better, lest you offend the pot-bellied builder who locks eyes with you over his egg sandwich as you order yourself a hangover breakfast in the local caff. ‘Your mascara might have lengthened those lashes, love, but it’s clear you’ve neglected to give them a curl!’ he might leer, as an unexpectedly runny yolk oozes down his overalls and you cover your peepers in shame. Sounds, well, fucking stupid, doesn’t it? But someone out there has to persuade you that you need a good fixing, lest you realise the total unlikelihood of eyelash critiques in the real world you inhabit – so they need some good hard stats to back them up. And that’s when the measuring tape comes out.
More often than not, there’s a great big dollop of pseudo-science backing up a publication’s assertions about your bum-to-cheekbone ratio being seriously out of kilter. ‘The perfect female face’ is something that crops up again and again in the media, mostly from the tabloids (usually in the ‘women’s section’ – talk about having a target audience for anxiety-mongering), but also in magazines. Whether it’s ‘Using the golden ratio to discover the perfect human face’ (Elle, April 2008), ‘Perfect face dimensions measured’ (BBC News, December 2009), or ‘Beauty summed up: to tell if a woman’s attractive, it’s all in the figures’ (Mail Online, August 2010), once you start noticing these articles you see them everywhere. And all of them are, of course, illustrated solely with pictures of women.
Say it with us: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS THE PERFECT FACE. This doesn’t stop scientists with far too much time on their hands dedicating a quite frankly insane number of hours to measuring the distance between our eyes (they obviously don’t have a bathroom ceiling to de-mould), often in ways that smack disturbingly of eugenics, and are just as racist (the ‘perfect female face’ is always, always white). Once the results of the study are in, journalists either skim-read and recycle them, or just slap a press release thick with marketing speak up on their websites. Every month or so, these truly Nobel-worthy scientists will emerge from their musty hidey-holes, blinking like badgers in the sunlight, and announce that, after years of research, they have finally hit upon the elusive and complex formula that denotes female beauty. Of course, they often conveniently work for someone who makes face plumper or eye cream or skin lasering technology.
And it’s not just our faces but our bodies, too. You’ll probably have seen them, these ‘perfect female’ composites. They pop up with terrifying regularity everywhere from Men’s Health to the New York Post (‘Here’s the perfect woman!’) to women’s titles such as Grazia. All these publications naturally tout different qualities (Men’s Health said small feet and narrow hips, the Telegraph stipulated ‘women with hourglass figures and perfect waists’) and they almost always illustrate the piece with a ‘fantasy’ woman cobbled together using photographs of various female celebrities. There are even composites dating from the early twentieth century, such as one from 1930 that gave exact measurements, so that you could aspire to Greta Garbo’s 33 in. chest and silent-film actress Aileen Pringle’s 18 in. thighs. Yet female composites have been around even longer than that – they’ve been doing the rounds since Ancient Greece, when artist Zeuxius made a picture of Helen of Troy using five different models in order to create a pinnacle of ideal buffness, much like a pervy Photoshop retoucher on the staff of a pre-biblical version of Nuts magazine. Plato spoke of ‘ideal proportions’, while Da Vinci tried for years to paint such a woman, which is how, they think, he ended up with the Mona Lisa (although nearly as many people think she is Da Vinci dressed up as a woman, so go figure). These ideal female types can still be seen today in the pages of newspapers and magazines, with features that scientists deem a mathematically perfect distance from one another. We’re constantly told that in order to attract a male we need to have small eyes, or big eyes, or a babyish mouth, or rosy cheeks, for what are nearly always given as evolutionary reasons. A May 2012 article in Grazia entitled ‘Is this the sexiest ever face?’ perfectly sums up this kind of thinking. It essentially tries to use science to get you to buy more make-up and pluck your eyebrows by telling you that ‘there’s nothing feminine about a strong brow, which in scientific terms is a mark of testosterone’, while your eyes should be ‘small, and positioned halfway down your face, like a baby’s’. We anticipate the all-new eye-repositioner with bated breath.
While no one who writes these articles is outright saying that the women who don’t resemble the ‘perfect female face’ should be sent to an Ugly Home and prevented from mating, there’s a suggestion that those who do not conform are less likely to be chosen by a male because they do not possess the range of features that men are supposedly pre-programmed to go after (and yes, the implication that men are mindless sex robots incapable of overriding their penises to make their own decisions is pretty patronising in itself). The suggestion is that the more symmetrical a woman’s face, the more likely she is to attract a mate on the basis that she is ‘healthy’ and free from hidden genetic defects. Plus, your face is more likely to be symmetrical when it is not sagging, so symmetry also equals youth, which equals fertility, which equals BONER CENTRAL. And yet the fantasy woman pictured doesn’t exist, because her face has been created using a thousand others. These symmetrical masks, with their emotionless look of the automaton, are essentially the faces of biological determinism. It’s the same school of thought as that pronouncing the omnipresent ideal waist-to-hip ratio, which is that, if you are lucky enough to possess it, it’s enough to make you bang tidy in the eyes of the opposite sex. No room for environmental and social factors here, folks: according to these guys, attraction is all down to biology. We like to call this ‘sexist bullshit’, but more sympathetic people tend to call it ‘evolutionary psychology’. Strangely, you never see a diagram of ‘the perfect man’.
Even scientific studies which don’t necessarily result in a ‘sexist bullshit’ outcome will end up with one once they reach the pages of a newspaper. Journalists will also cherry-pick the studies that suit their own agenda. Thus if they are working on an article about ‘differences between the sexes’, when a ‘women are shit at parking’ study comes their way, they might ignore any studies that say otherwise in order to meet their deadline and give their editor the headline he or she wants. This works similarly in book publishing, where the determination to ‘get in on the zeitgeist, quick’ results in book titles such as Allan and Barbara Pease’s Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps. Cultural ideas about gender, including the aforementioned myth that women’s role as decorative, beautiful objects has some kind of evolutionary function or fits into an undisputed Darwinian truth, therefore end up going unchallenged.
This theory that men are typically drawn to certain evolved traits was something even Darwin found a bit sketchy, believing as he did that there were few universal ideals of beauty because there is so much variety in appearance and preferences across human groups. In other words, we live in a diverse world, a world in which there exist many different, equally diverse kinds of beauty, and yet, so often, we only ever see one type. Not only is she almost always young, slim and white, but, apparently, ‘objectively’ beautiful, more likely to be selected by men to procreate because hey, it’s only natural.
Next time someone tells you that your lady-brain is wired a certain way because of what cavepeople were up to thousands of years ago, you should call their bluff. Scientists actually know very little about the lives of our ancestors and why we are the way we are. And even if they did know how cavepeople behaved, we are intelligently evolved enough to choose not to emulate much of it (hence we no longer shit on the floor). Even the supposedly definitive December 2013 study by the University of Pennsylvania that found male brains had far fewer connections between the left and right hemispheres than female brains essentially told us very little about the real world.7 According to the BBC report on the research, experts argued, on seeing the results – which had already been hailed as world-changing by hundreds of publications – that ‘it is a huge leap to extrapolate from anatomical differences to try to explain behavioural variation between the sexes’ (‘Men and women’s brains are “wired differently”’, BBC News, 3 December 2013). Of course, this didn’t stop a deluge of headlines suggesting that the key to gender had finally been found.
Needless to say, an offshoot of this is that scientists are also obsessed with trying to find a biological payoff for the existence of the female orgasm (with absolutely no success), and with the apparently different characteristics that men and women desire in a mate. (Wait until your stomach is feeling quite settled and then google the term ‘uterine upsuck’.) The old cliché that men are attracted to youth and physical attractiveness while women crave wealth and status appears again and again in the media, and, sadly, is perpetuated by women almost as much as men. Take the Marie Claire article (yes, they’re repeat offenders) in which a woman recounts an affair with her boss, who is then fired. ‘Stripped of his former title, his influence, and his company credit card, he suddenly seemed emasculated,’ the journalist wrote, before unceremoniously dumping him. Nice. This completely unsound hypothesis is endlessly promoted in a world that has always been run by and for men, and in which women have had very little power of their own (and thus needed rich men in order to gain it). No one is born a gold-digger, but, as usual, nature garners more media attention than nurture. It’s just so much more convenient to believe that we’re all pre-programmed to choose our sexual partners according to the same set of assets or values, rather than because of power imbalances in the culture – or even because of criteria which vary from person to person, such as, just for example, liking Simon and Garfunkel (or not), delivering excellent head, and knowing how to make a grade-A falafel wrap.
If you’re in the market for a man and your baby eyes or perfect cleavage have yet to evolve, not to worry. Magazines inform us that there is some hope, in the form of ‘experts’ who can teach you the best ways to attract a man, one of which is to make yourself look as though you’re having sex all the time. The least you can do to please society is to pull off the tousle-haired look of the recently post-coital. As a Grazia article informed us, a ‘pink cheek mimics the natural flushing which occurs during sexual arousal’. Never mind if the wheelbarrow position is the last thing on your mind when you’re standing in line at McDonald’s for a caramel McFlurry, you need to look like you’re about to grip the skinny shoulders of the bespectacled teenager behind the counter and furiously shag the acne right off his adolescent face beside the deep fat fryer. According to these ‘experts’, the list of how you can look like sex is pretty much endless, so beware if you’ve stuck on some red lipstick only because you thought it looked edgy with your outfit. Red lipstick is, according to newspapers, magazines and journals alike, the prime way to look instantly shagtastic. Why? Because decorating your upper lips signals to the outside world that you’ve got a vagina ON YOUR FACE. Of course!
One study, ‘Does red lipstick really attract men? An evaluation in a bar’, managed to waste valuable space in the International Journal of Psychology in June 2012.8 And according to research published in Medical Daily and Live Science, waitresses who wear red lipstick get more tips, due to its association with ‘heightened sexual arousal’. Then again, as Rosie Cowling, editor of ohdearism.com pointed out on the Vagenda blog at the time, ‘it’s surprising that those clever science boffs couldn’t work out that there’s nothing that makes an overworked, underpaid waitress any less moist than being forced to smile coyly as a sweaty overweight businessman who smells like a Lynx factory pulls you on to his lap by your skirt (happened)’.
The idea that you should look as if you’re ready to take the commuter next to you, right here, right now, underlies a few of the more unusual pieces of advice we’ve come across in women’s magazines – and some have even taken it that little bit further. One ‘top tip’ that’s trotted out surprisingly regularly (it’s definitely popped up in the hallowed pages of Cosmo a few times in our collective reading experience) is that if you’re looking for a man to bed, your ‘natural secretions’ can take the place of your usual perfume. Yes, Cosmopolitan has seriously advised you to rub vagina juice on your neck (because, like, hormones), and it wasn’t an April fool. The pheromones in your daily discharge will ‘drive him wild’, according to a resident sexpert we can’t remember due to subsequent traumatic blackouts. He totes won’t know how to resist you when it smells like you’ve got a fanny on your face, so why not go all out and get a bottle-full to smear all over your Sunday best? Or you could take the easy route and buy Vulva Original, an honest-to-God real-life perfume that could, maybe, help you ‘catch that man’. Your new musk might attribute a whole new meaning to the term ‘flapper dress’, but hey, it’s tough being single.
Despite what scientists-for-hire might tell you, there’s only so much that having a face that smells like a day-old pair of underwear can do when it comes to your pulling technique. Unless you go for a serious overhaul, you’re always going to look the way you were genetically programmed to. We’re talking DNA, but not in the ‘perfect composite’ way. It’s your mother and father you can blame for being an hourglass or a brick, a cello or a goblet (all genuine, bona fide ‘body types’ posited by beauty gurus Trinny and Susannah in their Body Shape Bible back in the dark ages of 2007). Holly once brought herself and her mother to tears as a young teenager, by accusing said mother of passing on an unjustly oversized arse through the evils of defective DNA. Needless to say, her mum hadn’t even entertained the idea that her bum was big until that moment. You can spend all the time you want yelling at your paternal grandmother for the boobs that just won’t stop sagging, or the great-great grandad that hailed from Scotland for the skin that just won’t tan, and you still won’t get anywhere fast. When you realise that the anger you feel can’t be immediately translated into results through yelling at the root cause, it turns into action to deal with the effects: you need that spray tan now, and you need it before anyone else realises that your cheekbones are misaligned and your natural shape is an ‘apple’ (as if we hadn’t realised that ‘apple’ is just a bitchy way of saying ‘round’). ‘The essentials’ might mean food and shelter to your male counterparts, but you know very well that to survive as the female of the species it’s vital to make sure the bags under your eyes don’t detract from the credibility of your keynote speech. After all, the magazine in your handbag whines like incessant noise: the two are inextricably linked.
Whether or not you’ve hit the ‘genetic jackpot’ looks-wise, however, really depends on what era you’re living in as much as it does where you live. Just look at the chubby nude beauties hanging in art galleries: mere decades ago, they were the ideal. The Jazz Age saw women bandaging down their breasts to achieve a masculine look, while in the 1950s it was the Pin-Up girls, with their tiny waists but buxom breasts, that ruled the roost. So, while to you and us it may seem as though the current beauty ideals of extreme thinness or porno plastic bodies have been in place for ever, they’re actually relatively new (which is curious, considering how they’re supposedly ‘pre-programmed’ into the male brain, isn’t it?). As for this idea that women should aspire to be beautiful because, well, they’re more likely to get laid that way and therefore ensure the continuation of the human race: it doesn’t even really make sense. Aside from the fact that you could use the ‘it’s just natural’ logic to justify a plethora of unacceptable behaviour including rape and murder (and, sadly, some do), the insistence that the female of the species is always decorative is little more than an excuse to silence an entire sex. In the animal kingdom, it’s often the males of the species that tend to pretty themselves up in order to attract a mate – hence the lion’s mane and the peacock’s vibrant feathers, a lads’ competition in action. In other words, if we really were to base our assessments of human behaviour on the shitty premise of what the animals were up to, then it would just as likely be the men, as the ladies, who’d be forced to compete in a visual hierarchy of hotness. Not that it matters, because, goddammit, there’s no objectively unified definition of hotness in the first place.
So why exactly do we wear make-up? OK, so it may give you confidence and make you feel good – we’re not saying that beauty routines can never be pleasurable – but we’ve seen enough features on ‘brave’ celebs without make-up to start to feel that going out unaltered is positively radical. As long as we’re told that beauty is a static quality that exists objectively, rather than a concept which differs from person to person, and decade to decade – as well as the only thing that women are really good for – then most of the female population are likely to be suffering from feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem. We’re told that beauty just ‘is’, men are hard-wired to want that and only that specific quality, and women are hard-wired to please men. (Pipe down, lesbians and assorted others who dare to deviate from the sexual norm.) From this evolutionary perspective, women are meant to aspire to beauty, while men are only meant to respond to it – and that, quite frankly, is a scientifically shaky falsehood.
Despite knowing this at some level, increasing numbers of us are inflicting painful and expensive procedures on our bodies in pursuit of the ideal form. The only-slightly-creepy toy beloved of so many young children, Barbie, has literally impossible proportions: various studies that have attempted to recreate her in the real world (scientists with tape measures again) have claimed variously that she would topple over from the weight of her humongous breasts on an otherwise unusually petite form, or that her torso would be unable to hold her internal organs. Truly, there’s nothing like a visible small intestine to make you appreciate a hulking pair of tits. In ‘What would a real-life Barbie look like?’, BBC Magazine estimated that a 5 ft 6 in. Barbie would have a 20 in. waist, 27 in. bust and 29 in. hips: not entirely impossible, but certainly unusual. And Barbie wasn’t a one-woman pioneer; chances are that the dolls you played with in your youth enjoyed very little facial or body diversity, much like the photoshopped images we see in magazines today.
One thing that being a regular reader of women’s magazines teaches you is that the jump from modelling your looks on impossible types to nodding along with the ‘special reports’ in your woman’s weekly on plastic surgery and where to get your Botox done is not as great as you might think. Magazines are always cautious when it comes to encouraging plastic surgery. ‘Not that we’re telling you to fix your face, girl,’ they trill. ‘We’re just saying: plastic surgery could be the best thing you ever did. Or not. Whatever. Here’s a number for a local surgeon, and further details in our advertising section in the back. No pressure.’ A prime example of this kind of searing hypocrisy can be found in an April 2011 Glamour article entitled ‘Plastic fantastic?’ that details surgical procedures and emphasises their ‘positive outcomes’ but then tells you that it’s fine if you like the way you are as well. Perhaps because the back pages feature no less than five advertisements for plastic surgery practices, we see the writer treading a somewhat disingenuous line between condemnation and endorsement.
If they don’t get you with the subtle hints, though, they’ll start to ask you questions. And with every so-called question, the writers of the magazines we know and love (read: have complicated, abusive relationships with) give you less and less choice over your own definition of beauty. Instead of ‘Do you want curly hair?’ followed by a recommendation of products or techniques, it’s become ‘Do you want gorgeous eyes?’ or ‘Do you want beautiful lips?’ or ‘Do you want flawless skin?’ Rather than whether you want curly hair today, these are questions that posit only one reasonable answer. You’re hardly going to sit back and mentally reply, ‘No, actually, I’d rather be a puffy, bloodshot, frizzy-haired harridan with a visible skin disease’ – so you more or less have to engage with their so-called suggestions. No more do you make choices about the look you might want to create, you just have to agree to ‘be flawless’ or ‘be gorgeous’ or – probably the most sly of all – ‘be even more beautiful’. If it feels like a backhanded compliment, there’s a reason, and part of the reason is that the advice and features pages are rubbing shoulders with advertising executives whose slogans say things like ‘your skin, only better’. We might all have started to accept this sort of advertising as if it’s really just kindly advice, but if you imagine walking out of your sixth form on results day, happily clutching your A Levels in an excited hand before your best mate with six A*s describes her achievements as ‘your grades, only better’, you can see where we’re coming from.
All of this brings us back to the products that we never knew we needed. The media can’t go on convincing you to sign up to pore minimiser for ever.
Beauty is an industry, indeed one of the fastest-growing industries in the world, pervading every page of every magazine you read, from celeb news to fashion to reviews to the holiday section (‘have a cellulite-free summer!’). It was one of only a handful of sectors to grow during the most recent recession in the UK and US – referred to as ‘booming’ by the New York Times and ‘recession-proof’ by UK-based Businesses for Sale – and the people who work in it invest thousands in knowing what your life is like. In 2012, when other businesses were still routinely going into administration following the most recent financial disaster, Cosmetic Executive Women UK found that the UK beauty industry was ‘in better shape than it has ever been’, with a workforce of almost a million and a value of over £15 billion.9
Of course, none of this could change the fact that most young people were out of work and scraping pennies from behind the sofa; so, having clocked this disparity between their own bubble and the rest of the world, the savvy PRs behind Debenham’s Beauty Hall decided to create yet more insecurity in their target market by selling a story to the Daily Mail (‘The REAL REASON you aren’t getting that job’) about exactly why their target demographic remained jobless (chipped nails, split ends, the wrong colour lipstick) and how to ensure that you no longer commit these heinous errors (home manicure, professional haircut, new products). An actual quote from someone in the beauty department stated that ‘your beauty regime holds the key to that dream job’, as though you could suddenly be made Secretary-General of the United Nations provided you sorted out your wiry man-brows and that persistent kink in the back of your hair. The Daily Mail advised that split ends – which your interviewer will of course be ogling while attempting to throw you off by asking a completely unnecessary question about your expertise in oncological medicine – imply you’re ‘lazy’; overdone make-up says you’re ‘power crazy’; and a lack of slap says you’re an emotional wreck who doesn’t even bother with the mascara wand any more because it will be ‘inevitably cried off within hours’. This may be one of the most sinister marketing ploys to have come out of the economic downturn.
Magazines tend to make you doubt that little inner voice which says, ‘My lipstick is less important than my A Levels’ or, ‘A pear shape can damn well rock a pair of wet-look leggings’ or even, ‘I know what I really want.’ That last one is key: magazines have a tendency to make you feel like a useless oik, a pig in knickers who’s in desperate need of their help, and that they’re the only people who can transform you from a frumpy fatty into a fabulous filly. You might think the Groupon deal you got for a weekend of zorbing followed by Monkey World sounds ace, but your weekly mag reckons you’d be much more suited to a spa vacation – and you’re supposed to go along with it. You might think that a ‘girlie spa week’ where you steam out your ‘impurities’ over a bucket of lavender oil is totally eclipsed by the much more preferable idea of a ‘girlie Spar week’, with its two-for-a-fiver deal on sparkling rosé, bargain bin DVD of Beaches, and three tubs of full-fat houmous only a few minutes past their sell-by date, followed by the dusting off of an old Blink 182 album with a few friends who’d never tell. You might think that you don’t need a lymphatic drainage machine in your bathroom, or that microdermabrasion sounds more like something you’d rather avoid like the plague than expose yourself to willingly on a seasonal basis, but people’s wages now depend on convincing you that an arse-draining massage and one less layer of skin is just what you really wanted when you reached for that Snickers bar and the remote control. Women’s magazines pride themselves on convincing their readership that they don’t really know what they want any more. And, like really creepy shepherds, they lead their flock down to the colonic irrigation clinic faster than you can say ‘Why doesn’t this gown have a rear?’
The media have spent a long time convincing women that they have to be beautiful and that most of them are not. So long, in fact, that everything’s become a bit weird out there – especially the substances they tout as solutions to your hideousness. And since you might have lost sight of how the culture of beauty has become downright bizarre, after the deluge of marketing and editorial material that backs it up, we’ve put together our favourite examples of beauty industry idiocy from the last decade for your expert perusal.
Holly tried on some lip balm purporting to be made of snake venom one evening and choked on her JD and Coke in front of a very attractive man, so we had to do some digging. Turns out that most lip products purporting to be ‘venomous’ in some way actually just contain irritants like cloves, cinnamon and peppermint oil to cause a low-level reaction in your lips. It’s the slightly more advanced version of pinching your cheeks to make them red, but more along the lines of all-out bitch slap. Meanwhile, face masks to ‘tighten’ your skin are being developed with the use of bee venom.
Yep, these ones are real – and they exist in legging form as well. The best-known suppliers of coffee derivatives in hosiery are SkinKiss, a company who reckon they’ve seen ‘unprecedented demand’ for tights with ‘cellulite busting’ microcapsules inside that are activated by the heat of your body. So while you’re busting a move on the dance floor at the student club, or hawking a pram down the street, there’s an espresso on your thighs giving the fat cells a cheeky little workout.
Perhaps you remember Gillian McKeith, the controversial nutritionist who did a brief stint in the I’m a Celebrity … Get me Out of Here! jungle and, over a particularly illustrious career, earned herself the title of ‘the awful poo lady’ (a moniker that every woman surely envied). Essentially, this was all because of her belief that you need to get up close and personal with someone’s excrement to really know what they’re like inside, and she got a lot of stick for it. But the truth is, the beauty media have been excited about poo for way too long (let’s never forget that ‘Poo: the last taboo’ was a genuine feature in the aristocratic pages of none other than British Vogue. As Rhiannon’s mother pointed out at the time, if they were really in the market for taboo-busting, they would have called it ‘shit’). ‘Colonic irrigation’ has taken the spotlight for a number of years now, having become a staple option in many a respectable spa, and literally every national publication has had something to say on the matter. Even The Guardian sent a journalist off to a Thai resort where you could clean out your bum and bond with new friends while you were at it, proving that while holidaying with your mates from school in Magaluf might well feel like enduring tens of enemas and hundreds of laxatives, someone out there has already packaged up that precious feeling and turned it into a separate commodity. Just in case you’re wondering, it costs upwards of a grand.
Garra rufa fish eat dead skin (usually off other fish), and they had their heyday between 2010 and 2011. Fish salons popped up everywhere and people paid £20 an hour to have their calluses nibbled off by aquatic creatures. But it seems the days of the fish pedicure are numbered. Due to the risk of infection, getting your mani-pedi done by a Garra rufa is on the way out.
The nose shaper is big in Japan. It’s a plastic contraption that clips your innocent nostrils into place with the aim of producing something altogether slimmer and perkier. Some digging has proven that there’s a variety of brands to choose from, but our personal favourite is a ‘bestselling nose clip’ called Nose Up. The science behind it sounds a little over-optimistic – like believing a push-up bra might one day induce a spontaneous boob job – but the clips remain wildly popular amongst their target demographic.
Similarly, there are plastic contraptions out there that claim to ‘widen eyes’ to make South-East Asian women look more Caucasian – and these aren’t only sold in the salon. They’ve made an appearance in the little girls’ toy sections of children’s stores in the last few years.
Finally, we’d just like to take a moment to debunk the popular myth (CONSPIRACY) that semen is the ultimate beauty tool. In an interesting turn that has seriously made us wonder whether women’s mags are being secretly controlled by mac-wearing, greasy-haired perverts, semen has made a cumback. Facial, fertility aid, toothbrush substitute, a healthy and low-cal mid-afternoon snack: all of this and more has been promised of the lowly sperm by media moguls. Let’s clarify right now that it’s way less nutritious than a superfood salad, will never do for your face what a flannel and some warm water will, and hasn’t yet been upheld by the NHS as a cure for depression (although we have it on good authority that if a man is diabetic then it can taste like watermelon). Magazine hacks: letting a man spaff in your face is not the key to eternal youth. It’s nothing more than penis propaganda. Swallow that.
The funny thing is, the media and the advertisers behind these products and reviews know themselves that there’s a problem with their tactics, but, given who they are and what they’re aiming for (profit), it’s nigh on impossible for them to address the issue seriously. Whether you’re telling ladies euphemistically that they need to ‘enhance’ their ‘true selves’, like Dove, or taking the other tack, it’s all lotions and potions. Tellingly, Dove’s parent company Unilever was criticised for hypocrisy after it emerged that they also own the skin-lightening brand Fair & Lovely. In case you’re not familiar with Fair & Lovely, they market lightening products to darker-skinned women in several countries across the world. But if you’re whiter than an anaemic ghost then you won’t get away with ditching your optimistic can of St Tropez yet. Because there’s a perfect shade to aim for out there, and you haven’t quite achieved it yet.
In fact, skin colour has been marketed to us as if we don’t all have a natural skin tone, and it could be seen as the apotheosis of everything that’s wrong with the beauty-pushers. ‘Look healthy with a spray tan!’ commands the shopfront of every salon, as if most redheads are luminously white because they share a stubbornly unhealthy lifestyle. Meanwhile, a ‘winter glow’ of ‘soft fairness’ is sold in countries such as India, for girls who have turned the wrong colour during the warmer months because of a petulant and unnatural habit of walking around in the sunshine. All the big brands are in on it – Vaseline’s Healthy White is just one example of a skin-lightening product that has been marketed in Asia of late. ‘Boost your complexion’ is a common phrase used to convince light-skinned women that they should be darker and dark-skinned women that they should be lighter, which is a bit like someone marketing you stilettos to ‘boost your tallness’, a quality that you’ve been hiding for too long by secretly refusing to let your legs grow longer.
In today’s society, one of the worst things you can say to a woman is that she is ugly (and the other is that she is fat). But a world in which only 5% of teenage girls say that they wouldn’t change a thing about their appearance (Girlguiding UK research, 2012) and the percentage of young girls reporting unhappiness with how they look increases year on year (Girls’ Attitudes Survey, 2013) is not a world that we’re keen to live in.10 It’s a world in which standards of beauty are becoming increasingly homogenised and Westernised. It is a world where nobody is perfect, where toddlers think they’re fat, where black women are bleaching their skin with whitening creams and white women are risking cancer for the perfect tan, and women of all races are mutilating their facial features in the futile pursuit of perfection, and, by extension, happiness. Charities such as Media Smart, which helps children understand the distorting techniques used by the media and teaches them to differentiate between photoshopped and non-photoshopped images, are leading the way in helping children to dissect what they see around them, but it’s an uphill struggle which needs an enormous cavalry force. After all, the advertisers get ’em young, so it’s important we do too. The internet is awash with articles and videos showing the ‘before and afters’ of image production, such as Tim Piper’s Evolution for Dove in 2006, and it would be even better to see something like that being turned into a national campaign by a group of people who have no incentive to sell a product. How else can we work towards a world in which the next generation escapes the fate of its predecessors?
While we’d rather see something from Dove more along the lines of Debenham’s announcement that they’ll ditch airbrushing altogether, drawing attention to the beauty process which begins with a make-up brush and ends on a computer is a step in the right direction. Meanwhile, those who still insist on airbrushing invariably end up in tit-for-tat bitchfests: take the case of a Christian Dior mascara ad featuring Natalie Portman in 2012, which was reported to the UK’s Advertising Standards Agency by rival company L’Oréal because Portman’s eyelashes were airbrushed. The ASA agreed that Dior’s airbrushing meant that it ‘misleadingly exaggerated the likely effects of the product’ – but then again, L’Oréal’s own mascara ad using Penelope Cruz had been banned in 2007 for the very same reason. Businesses reporting each other for commercial advantage is all very well – but stricter standards should be set to avoid the widespread use of digital manipulation in beauty product adverts in the first place.
The internet, with its ubiquity and scope, has proved to be a powerful force in the campaign for beauty diversity: it gives a platform and a voice to the kinds of people, and lives, that remain practically invisible in the mainstream print media, and demands that we question why they aren’t represented elsewhere. It’s our belief that one of the most important things we can do is constantly challenge that status quo with the power of the consumer: wielding the power of social media when things don’t look right; calling out the sheer volume of plastic surgery pushers in a country where medical procedures are supposedly banned from advertising; demanding that photoshopped images come with warning labels, specifying what is real and what is not; and, when publications and other outlets cross the line, voting with our feet. Because when you really dig beneath the smooth, beautiful surface, the media’s underlying motive is revealed as the opposite of what they want you to be. That is: horribly, hideously ugly.