Simon & Schuster announced that it will be publishing Dangerous, a book by Milo Yiannopoulos, an editor at Breitbart and a white supremacist, in March 2017 under its Threshold imprint, which is devoted to conservatism. As a Simon & Schuster author, I'm horrified that a company I've been proud to be associated with is giving a platform to Yiannopoulos. To be clear, the book isn't about white supremacy. The book is about free speech, and indeed Yiannopoulos is well-situated to write about free speech. White supremacy has a history of making people rethink their commitment to free speech (I'm thinking here of Skokie, Illinois, a heavily Jewish town where Nazis were allowed to march and display the swastika in 1977, thanks in part to the ACLU's efforts to support the Nazis' First Amendment rights). I don't want to stop Yiannopoulos… Read More...

I have always believed that beauty is political. But when we are dealing with fascism sweeping our nation, the way for those of us who believe that is to use beauty in ways that support the work we have ahead of us. Put on your lipstick if it makes you fierce, then go out and yell. But right now I don’t have my usual intellectual luxury of examining beauty in the ways I usually do in this space. I got an enormous shock in one of my core beliefs with this election. I have always believed, with the wide-eyed earnesty of a white woman for whom inclusion is usually taken for granted, in the sisterhood. I am horrified at how wrong I was about that. I’m shocked at my naive assumption that women would do better by one another; I’m… Read More...

  People magazine tweeted today about the “bipartisan updo” Ivanka Trump sported at the second presidential debate. I guffawed, assuming it was a comment about the party affiliation of the hairstyle—it's an updo, so it's conservative! but it has tendrils, so it's liberal! It turns out neither tweet nor hairstyle had anything to do with ideology; the article the tweet linked to mentioned how Trump’s hairstylist for the night was a Democrat. But it did get me thinking: Is there any connection between political ideology and hairstyle? In fact, is there such a thing as a “bipartisan updo”? Oddly, I couldn’t find any studies that looked at hairstyle and political leanings. Most of the studies on appearance and ideology are more focused on faces—a continuance of our fascination with physiognomy.That said, there's some evidence showing that some politicians, particularly Republicans, may… Read More...

It's surprisingly hard to find music about personal appearance that isn't, like, gross (though never fear, there's plenty of objectification odes on here, see also Roy Orbison), but I did my best to create such a playlist for the Face Value launch party, and you never know when such a playlist might come in handy for others. All these songs are about appearance in some way—odes to beautiful people, admonitions to stay beautiful, paeans to the ways we prettify ourselves, an embrace of ugliness, a mantra of pride, you get the picture. (Apologies for the many covers of a few key songs, like "I Feel Pretty"—when a song was really perfect I didn't see a problem with playing its variations. Like this amazing punk version.) Two notes: 1) I do not necessarily endorse the messages in any of these songs—surprisingly, there were no songs titled… Read More...

My fascination with beauty product names began with Havana. It was the early 2000s, I was copy editing at a teen magazine, and as I read the beauty pages I saw that a blush had the absurdly long name of Lancôme Blush Subtil Shimmer Shimmer Mocha Havana, and I thought, This name can't be right, because A) "Shimmer" was in there twice, and B) Havana has café au lait, not mocha, and as a young copy editor I was extraordinarily literal. I went to the beauty editor, who, quite rightly, looked at me like I was being a pedant, and assured me that Lancôme Blush Subtil Shimmer Shimmer Mocha Havana was an entirely reasonable name for a blush. The thing is, she's right. Beauty companies come up with these intensely long names for their products; you've got to get the… Read More...