What 36 Looks Like

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Is there a Platonic Form for what a thirtysomething is supposed to look like?
Thirty-six! I had a birthday over the weekend, and it’s the first birthday I’ve had where I’ve been remotely tempted to be coy about my age. I’d never understood why anyone, particularly a woman, would lie about their age. I’d heard the classic story about Gloria Steinem quipping to a reporter upon being complimented for looking good for her age, “This is what 40 looks like. We’ve been lying for so long, who would know?” While I loved the story, her reasoning made such innate sense to me that I actually had a hard time grasping its actual importance. Why wouldn’t you claim your age, especially if you’d taken care of your health and pride in your appearance? Why would you say you were younger and risk looking “okay” for, say, 35 but fantastic for 40? It’s not like lying about your age actually makes you… Read More...

Beauty Blogosphere 5.25.12

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Beauty and the singularity, bad girls, literary makeovers, and butt-shaped nail polish.
What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between. From Head... Chinese beauty: This piece on buying habits in China gives beauty products only a passing mention, but it's worth reading if you're interested in international consumerism. Particularly of note here is the Chinese emphasis on conspicuous consumption—goods seen in public are far likelier to be luxury brands than goods consumed privately, which puts beauty products (consumed privately but seen publicly) in a sort of odd zone. The article makes note of how beauty products must help a woman "move forward"; coupled with the Chinese preference for natural-looking beauty products, Chinese women may be in even more of a product paradox than Americans. Next up: Shampoo and cuticle-cutting video games. ...To Toe... Pedigame: Team Beheld, I'll be honest and let you know that sometimes it's hard to find… Read More...

A Partial List of Male Celebrities Who Have Given Or Received Pedicures

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The opposite of news.
Will Arnett, actor Howard Stern, radio personality Charles Barkley, former basketball player and sports analyst Ptahhotep, vizier during reign of Djedkare Isesi Brendan Fraser, star of Encino Man Nick Gonzalez, kickboxer Dave Navarro, musician, goat Len Wiseman, director Mel Gibson, actor Shaquille O'Neal, rapper, Shaq Diesel (1993) Anthony "The Man" Mundine, boxer Cristiano Ronaldo, soccer player Larry Malitzsky, urban hero Roger Huerta, MMA fighter Jack Black, actor Dwayne Wade, basketballer Maddox and Pax, citizens Dean McDermott, actor Ndamukong Suh, football player 50 Cent, musician Tim Tebow, Tim Tebow The good soldiers of Forward Operating Base Marez Twiggy Ramirez, musician Mitch Daniels, governor of Indiana Conrad Murray, physician to the stars JC, lower primate Bob Saget, comic Newsworthy. Read More...

The Sweet Smell of Sexcess

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Chocolate, "naughty virginity," and beauty products: The biggest thing that changed from the 14-year-old me dragging magazine samples of Red Door across my wrists and the 15-year-old me dabbing vanilla onto my neck was firsthand knowledge of what an orgasm was.
Nefarious may seem a strong word to apply to cake-scented perfume, but bear with me for a minute, okay? Years ago, I was copy editing at a women’s magazine, and one of the beauty pages was all about food-scented products—lemon cookie body souffles, cotton candy lip gloss, caramel body polish. Something about it just nagged at me, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. The promotion of these products felt somewhere between belittling, infantalizing, and placating—even as I admitted they smelled nice—and though I’d never really thought much about the products on an individual, something about seeing all of them grouped together on the page vaguely unsettled me. I tried articulating this to a friend, who then got worked up because she was a fan of (the pretty awesome) Lush, which liberally uses food scents in its collection, and before I knew it… Read More...

Beauty Blogosphere 5.18.12

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Pedicure Senate bills, the Avon-Coty saga, the myth of women's razors, and what is surely the stupidest invention of the decade.
What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between. From Head... Seeing red: Red lipstick increases waitresses' tips? Headlines say yes (of course! anything to add to the idea that there's a right way to be a lay-dee), but a closer look at the study shows that the research was conducted in a region where voluntary tipping is unusual, as a service charge is added to bills. So men (not women) were indeed likelier to tip waitresses in red lipstick, but we're talking about throwing in some extra change, not 30% of the bill. I'd be curious to know how this research would go in areas where there's no service charge. ...To Toe... Pedicure subcommittee: Senator Kay Hagan (D-NC) introduces a bill to temporarily suspend the duty on pedicure (and manicure) sets. I'll admit this isn't exactly what I had in… Read More...

"She Was 25 and Curvaceous": The Death of Lorena Xtravaganza

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If the New York Times can get away with describing a trans woman as "25 and curvaceous" in the first line of the piece covering her death, that means it only stopped describing all women in those terms because they “had” to.
I am stinkin' mad, which is why I'm double posting today. I just found out about the death of Lorena Xtravaganza, a performer with the drag family House of Xtravagazna. (Coincidentally, I just watched the "ball culture" documentary Paris Is Burning for the first time this weekend, and the House of Xtravaganza is heavily featured in it.) Lorena, who was killed in a fire in Brooklyn that was deemed "suspicious" by investigators, was transgender. More to the point of this post, I just found out about the way the New York Times covered her death. The first sentence of the story reads as follows: "She was 25 and curvaceous, and she often drew admiring glances in the gritty Brooklyn neighborhood where she was known to invite men for visits to her apartment, her neighbors and the authorities said." That is, the very first line of the article… Read More...

My Own Private Beauty Myth

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A number of things I once believed to be true about my appearance: I have strong features, I am big-boned, my skin is both very…
A number of things I once believed to be true about my appearance: I have strong features, I am big-boned, my skin is both very pink and very pale, I am pear-shaped with a small waist, I have oily skin, and I am hirsute. Here’s the truth, or at least as much of the “truth” as I’m able to come up with today, after 35 years in this skin: My features are neither strong nor delicate, I am medium-framed, I have a yellow tint to my skin and tan easily, I am neither pear-shaped nor hourglassy nor apple-shaped and certainly a small waist isn’t in the equation, I have normal skin, and I’ve got about as much body hair as you’d expect on an Irish-English-Native American woman, which is to say that it’s dark but there’s not tons of it.… Read More...

Beauty Blogosphere 5.11.12

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The legacy of Vidal Sassoon, pore-zapping superheroes, and Oliver Cromwell's body lotion collection.
What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between. Vidal Sassoon, 1928–2012 From Head... "If you don't look good, we don't look good": Legendary hairstylist Vidal Sassoon died on Wednesday of natural causes. Famous for pioneering the "wash and wear" look of the London mod scene, Sassoon's style allowed women to look fashionable but not spend as much time on their hair as the hot-rollers-and-hairspray look of years past. By using his keen eye and industry clout to quietly emphasize that hair needn't detract from women's lives—and by developing a line of low-cost hair care products—Sassoon, in his way, played a role in helping women navigate shifting social roles of the '60s and '70s. (Also, the best haircut of my life was given to me by a student at the Vidal Sassoon school in London, so there's… Read More...

Strike a Pose: Vogue, Eating Disorders, and Desire

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In an industry predicated upon acquisitional desire, it's hard to believe that Vogue's recent announcement about banning models with eating disorders will make them "ambassadors for the message of healthy body image."
Vogue stopped using bird models in 1921. Several years ago, after a long day at the magazine I was freelancing for at the time, I hailed a cab and cried the whole way home. The chief cause of the crying was the last task I’d had to do at the office before departing for the night: Communicating to the art department that a top editor wanted to digitally slim a celebrity whose former battles with anorexia were well-documented in the press. Transcribing her request onto the circulating page proof, every stroke of every letter felt like it was being scratched upon my skin. I hated that anyone would look at this particular picture of the (trim, lovely, recovered) celebrity and want it trimmer still, I hated that it was part of my job to communicate this request, I hated that the… Read More...

Edith Wharton and Yo Momma

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Somewhere in all the hullabaloo over Jonathan Franzen's Edith Wharton essay, we forgot to fact-check.
...aaaaand, I'm back, after two weeks of a blogging break. What's happening, internet? Edith Wharton, whose looks were the only thing that made her sympathetic, according to Jonathan Franzen, Great Observer of The Human Condition  I'll be posting actual content this week, but for today I'm just getting into the swing of things, so here's my warmup: For only two dollars—yes, two American dollars!—a month, you can get a subscription to The New Inquiry's digital magazine. This month's theme? Beauty. I was enlisted to play the role of co-editor this issue, in part because several of my favorite interviews have been repurposed, and in part because it features my response to Jonathan Franzen's assertion in The New Yorker that Edith Wharton's lack of physical beauty was one of the few things making her sympathetic. You'll have to subscribe to read… Read More...

Unplugged

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People! It has come to my attention that I, like many citizens of the Internet, indeed need to occasionally unplug. I'm going to take a…
People! It has come to my attention that I, like many citizens of the Internet, indeed need to occasionally unplug. I'm going to take a short break from blogging (like, a week), the idea being that a week spent actually reading articles instead of skimming them, having a chance to replenish my well—and, hey, maybe sitting down with a book and finishing it instead of flurrying off to write up a blog post—will do both my well-being and my writing here some good. But never fear! You want more Beheld, you say? Yes, I can hear the cries from the mountains to the forests to the oceans white with foam—and as it happens, I've got it, unless you're the rare reader who has gone through my entire archives. This blog didn't get much traffic in its early months, so I'll… Read More...

Beauty Blogosphere 4.23.12

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Toilet-seat-cover millinery, smelling like Donald Trump, thinspo, and the contradiction of modesty fashion bloggers.
What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between. (A couple of days late, apologies!) From Seat Assignment: Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style, Nina Katchadourian From Head... Doin' it Flemish style: Artist Nina Katchadourian makes awesome Flemish-school-style portraits using airplane toilet paper, seat covers, and the occasional travel pillow as accessories. (via) ...To Toe... Playing footsie: The "whoda thunkit?" chatter on men getting pedicures continues, this time inching a hair toward the idea that maybe it just, I dunno, feels nice? I don't like the bumbling tone of this Daily Mail chronicle of a man getting a pedicure (and the headline, "Should you send your other half for a pedicure?" rankles), but at least it's not trying to paint footsie-wootsie care as somehow strictly medically necessary and therefore legitimately dudely. ...And Everything In Between: Spending state:… Read More...

The Conundrum of Body Hair

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Body hair contains the threat of embedded masculinity and embedded female maturity—that is, female sexuality—but damn if I see that and don't shave every day anyway.
1933 ad for underarm-specific razor with curves, which I can't believe isn't a thing now.   It’s skirt season again (my favorite), which means the body-hair feminist conundrum is cropping up again. I shave year-round, and at this point I don’t particularly examine the “why” behind it anymore. But it’s a loaded topic, and for good reason: The traditional feminist arguments in favor of performing beauty work fall flat when applied to depilation. It has little to do with fantasy, play, or self-expression; it’s expensive, occasionally painful, a time-suck, and just sort of a pain in the ass (actually, it’s a pain somewhere else). Sally successfully argues for the role of confidence in deciding to depilate—certainly that’s why I do it, more on that below—but in reading comments it struck me how loaded the whole body hair thing really is.… Read More...

Concealer: Makeup and Addiction

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If lying is part of addiction, can the concealing function of makeup become a crucial part of an addict's lie?
Hope in a jar.   If I use the phrase "addicted to makeup," I'm usually referring to how uncomfortable I feel going out in most social situations without the stuff. The reasons I'm uncomfortable are a post of their own, but they boil down to the same old story: feeling as though what I'm bringing to the table isn't quite good enough; wanting to conceal "flaws." There are plenty of other reasons I wear makeup—and I'm pleased to report those reasons are generally more positive or at least less of a psychological downer—but as far as using the word addicted, that's what I mean. More important, that's how I most often hear it when others use the word. Reading this interview with Cat Marnell—the beauty editor at xoJane whose extraordinarily candid pieces on her ongoing experirences with drugs are painful,… Read More...

Beauty Blogosphere 4.13.12

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Beauty news, Freaky Friday edition: Birchbox for Him, Barbie for President, snail facials, and National Eyebrow Week.
What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between. From Head... National arch: Benefit, the company that dubbed itself "the brow authority," proclaims April 16-22 National Brow Week, during which all participants are encouraged to grow eyebrows, think about eyebrows, groom eyebrows, promote eyebrows nationwide and globally, encourage safe eyebrow play, host cross-eyebrow communications, heighten eyebrow visibility, facilitate eyebrow sustainability and stewardship, and foster the fundamental rights of all eyebrows. ...To Toe... Man-icured: Yes, Media, Tim Tebow got a pedicure (as have Charles Barkley, a defensive lineman with the Detroit Lions, the governor of Indiana, and Michael Jackson's doctor). But just in case you thought these dudely-dudes were being (ew!) girly, never fear: These are sports pedicures, and MSNBC is here to assure us there's nothing girly about them. ...And Everything In Between: Also, it's not common use… Read More...

Race, Recognition, and Exotica

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For white people with a hidden "exotic" lineage, ethnicity is largely an internal experience—making the externalized label of "exotic" uncommonly alluring.
This is not me. (It is, however, a Caddo headpiece.)   The central idea behind my examination of the word exotic was hardly difficult to pinpoint: Calling a woman exotic is calling her the Other. And putting women into that category—particularly when there’s eau de hypersexualization wafting about with the method—isn’t something nice people do, agreed? Agreed. So here’s my dirty little secret: Whenever exotic been applied to me, I’ve...sort of liked it. For me, a white woman who has a not-terribly-distant-but-not-terribly-visible non-European background—American Indian, specifically Caddo and Cherokee—being set apart with exotic can feel like a acknowledgement of my heritage. My ethnicity doesn’t jump out at you, and because of my skin color most everyone would call me white, including myself. But it’s evident enough—my cheekbones, my hair, my yellow-tinged skin—that every so often an “exotic” floats my way.… Read More...