What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between. This, too, can be yours. From Head... In your face: A new sector of the Arab health and beauty market is officially booming: facial hair transplants.   ...To Toe... Teeter totter: I tend to raise my eyebrows at evolutionary psychology, but I'm still intrigued the the notion of "supernormal stimulus"—that is, an artifically exaggerated version of a stimulus found in nature—because it seems to apply to both nature and nurture. That is, if you're conditioned to find something attractive, an exaggerated version of it may well exaggerate that attraction, regardless of its origins. With that in mind: the evo-psych reasoning for why we find high heels sexy. (Thanks to Nancy Friedman for the link.) ...And Everything In Between: Walk with the animals: An Israeli law against animal testing of cosmetics, originally passed… Read More...

What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between. From Head... You can be beautiful too: Is there a difference between salon and drugstore shampoos? The answer, if you are a faithful reader of The Beheld and therefore probably inclined to be a hint skeptical of the beauty industry, will not surprise you at all! ...To Toe... Pedicure dreams: The first pedicure for Mary Ann Doll, age 90, courtesy Hospice Dreams (sort of a Make-A-Wish for seniors in hospice care). ...And Everything In Between: In bloom: It's official: Drew Barrymore will launch her own makeup line with WalMart. Flower will retail between $5 and $14, but is aiming for a "masstige" angle—prestige products and connotation at a mass market price. Certainly WalMart has the funds for a prestige-level research and development machine, so we shall see. Say cheese: The autonomia Marxist scholars reading… Read More...

  I love pantyhose. What’s not to love? They add a little warmth, they even out splotchy skin, they give a hint of support if you’re into that (or a lot of support if you’re into that), they keep you from sliding around in heels, and, most important, they make you look just a little more polished. I buy the cheap drugstore kind—to my chagrin I can no longer find the kind that comes in a plastic egg—but given how often I wear them, I have probably spent hundreds of dollars over my lifetime in pantyhose. I love pantyhose. Which is why I was genuinely confused—to the point of being surprised by my own naivete on the matter, given my years working in fashion magazines—to find out that plenty of people don’t. Somehow I missed the spate of articles in 2011 on the matter,… Read More...

What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between. From Head... Shifty stuff: You know about flappers, of course, but do you know about the Shifters, a subset of flapper that may or may not have had a Ponzi scheme going on? Either way, they had some serious fashion codes involving hats and paper clips: Two clips on the brim meant a Shifter was looking for a kiss, and so on. ...To Toe... The idle woman's pedi: Are you really supposed to wait 24 hours after painting your toenails before wearing heeled boots? ...And Everything In Between: Busy bodies: Fast Company takes a business-end look at Procter & Gamble's strategies, and find the company comes up short. Case in point: the gazillion and a half Olay products on shelves, confusing the company's message. (Remember when it was just...Oil of Olay?)Korea time: Even… Read More...

One-third of a tube of Maybelline Great Lash     Four-tenths of a gram of Crème de la Mer (equal in weight to ?)   One gel manicure, pinkie only Seven false eyelashes One five-thousandth of a bottle Chanel No. 5 Enough whitening toothpaste to keep 2.5 teeth bright for a year   Or...you could subscribe to The New Inquiry. Your call.   Read More...

What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between. Hair brooch, most likely used as a mourning memento   From Head... Hairy history: Next time you're in Missouri, swing by Leila's Hair Museum, featuring centuries of ornaments and jewelry made from human hair, which is awesome and creepy in equal measures. There's also a Victorian Hairwork Society, if you want to get social about it. (via Makeup Museum)...To Toe... Ms. Fix-Its: Taking the "blowout bar" service one step further, Fix Beauty Bar has mani-pedis that you can get while your hair is blown out—the sheer glamour of which did not go unnoticed by Deep Glamour, which features an interview with the cofounders this week. ...And Everything In Between: Get your claws out: Vice president of Ask Cosmetics, a nail-care company, accused of defrauding the company of CND $700,000 over a four-year period. Big gamble: Rajat… Read More...

 "The camera served Tereza as both a mechanical eye through which to observe Tomás's mistress, and a veil by which to conceal her face from her." —The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera (film, 1998)   Several years ago, I found myself overwhelmingly attracted to a colleague, and, despite the existence of his long-term girlfriend, we wound up kissing at a party. Affair is too grand a word for what ensued in the following weeks, nor is it wholly accurate, as he soon told his girlfriend about our liaison. She promptly broke up with him and then called me, wanting to talk. We agreed to meet at an ice cream parlor, of all places. What struck me upon seeing her sitting at a corner table was her beauty: wide-set eyes, honey-colored curls, creamy complexion. I’d met her once before, so it wasn’t… Read More...

Claire Napier is a midlands-based, commissionable illustrator and comic artist whom I met through the now-defunct Feminist Fashion Bloggers group. I saw bits of her visual work on her blog, but was largely struck by her thoughtful writing, whether that be things like her musings on conventional femininity, or something out of our shared sphere entirely, like her awesome gift guide for the unemployed. So when she reached out to me about my series on compliments with some ideas about visually expressing her own complex feelings toward unsolicited compliments from men, I jumped at the chance. Enjoy! (If you'd like to enlarge the panels, either click on each one for a full-size version or try the control + function to enlarge the entire page.)   Read More...

What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between. Photo by Rémi Thériault From Head... Whip my head back and forth: Marie-Camille Lalande at WORN Journal on—well, I'd say "suffering from alopecia," but given the tone of the piece, that would be mighty presumptive of me. "Being a bald woman and embracing it was just another way of flipping a proud middle finger to the rigid constraints of accepted commercial taste." ...To Toe... Twinkie toes: Amid America's collective freakout over the Hostess situation, let's take a moment to learn how Twinkies got their name.   ...And Everything In Between: Fumble & Bumble: The founder of Bumble & Bumble was arrested for a wee oversight on his 2006 taxes, when he failed to notify the IRS about the $29.6 million he raked in after selling part of his company to Estee Lauder.… Read More...

  The Fête of the Order of Cuckoldry Before the Throne of Her Majesty, Infidelity, France, c. 1815   Looking at appearance and infidelity vis-à-vis the Petraeus household made me curious about what role beauty actually does play in betrayal. Most of us know from casual observation that it’s fully possible for a person to cheat with someone who isn’t as physically attractive as that person’s primary partner—but is there any sort of pattern there? Are people likelier to cheat with someone who’s conventionally better-looking than one’s partner? I was surprised/relieved to find that there weren’t any studies available that delved into that particular question. (Not sure how that would work in a lab setting anyway: “Please send photo of mistress to...”?) But there’s a wealth of research looking at other intersections of appearance and infidelity. Some of the more interesting findings: 1) Women reported feeling more threatened… Read More...

  The sex lives of public figures bore me. Rather, the sex lives of public figures interest me no more than that of, say, my dentist. My view on sex is generally pretty solipsistic: If it’s not me having the sex in question, I don’t particularly care about it, and I don’t understand why anyone besides those directly affected would. So I didn’t pay much attention to the David Petraeus scandal—at least, not until I read this excellent piece by Meghan Daum that questions the mandate of beauty in high-profile women. The article draws upon Petraeus’s wife, Holly, and the flurry of nasty comments in the “chattersphere” about how one could hardly blame Petraeus for sleeping with his attractive biographer, given that Mrs. Petraeus dared to look like a middle-aged woman who doesn’t pay homage to the beauty industry at every opportunity.… Read More...

What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between. From Head... On pride: Brittany Julious on beginning to lose what others call women's "crowning glory": "I wrote about how my mother began to lose her hair at the same time that I began to lose mine. ... My professor said it was not deep enough, or raw enough, or critical enough. I thought, how can you tell me what is relevant in my life? What is tragedy if not the pursuit of value through vanity?"      ...To Toe... Pedi crime: A Wisconsin pedicurist was arrested for disorderly conduct after allegedly slamming a customer's foot into the pedicure bath when she complained about his techniques.    Zara the Greek   ...And Everything In Between: Opa!: I always assumed clothing chain Zara was named for,… Read More...

"Nicky," Here Are the Young Men, Claire Felicie, 2009–2010 When I write here of beauty, most of the time I’m actually writing of convention—of what we as a culture have given our stamp of approval in the realm of beauty. The point isn’t any person’s actual appeal; the point is the standards and parameters we create around beauty. But the way I experience beauty in my day-to-day life is personal, not sociological. When I register someone as beautiful—that is, when a person shows up on my radar as you should continue to look—it’s because of a quality the person has. A flicker in the eyes, a smirk, the way the person moves. That sounds vague because it is vague, it has to be vague, because if it were charted and fully understood, it might lose its properties of fascination. Beauty’s ineffability is part of what makes… Read More...

What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between.   Self-Portrait (Dedicated to Leon Trotsky), Frida Kahlo, 1937 From Head... Art brow'd: My first thought upon learning of the Art Gallery of Ontario's publicity stunt—the museum circulated fake unibrows, which patrons could wear to receive reduced admission for the institution's Frida Kahlo exhibit—was that it was essentially harmless. Like it or not, Kahlo's unibrow is part of what distinguishes her in the contemporary mind, and if that's a portal to people learning more about her work and the passionate radicalism behind it, so be it. This open letter convinced me otherwise, for people wearing the unibrow "[tell] us that they are wearing the unibrow not in an earnest tribute to the artist and her work, but with a cool and distant irony." (via Feminist Philosophers)… Read More...