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Category: Beauty

Anorexia Before Spring Break

On a Xanga blog ring called the Bikini Coming Soon Challenge, one 19-year-old related the anxieties she was experiencing only days after returning from a week on the beach with friends: “Tonight I was looking on Facebook at people’s albums from spring break. I saw the guy’s album that I kind of was starting to like before spring break. In his album were pictures of all these pretty girls — tan, skinny, looked perfect in their bikinis — and all these guys were commenting on the pics: ‘She is so hot!’ or ‘wooowww!!’ Stuff like that. Seriously, that’s what I want.

“This just makes me want to lose so much weight and then have those guys see me.”

She concluded: “I hate boys, I hate my body. Goodnight.”

This is the problem with valuing women’s looks above all else.

Dita von Teese, No Less

Dita von Teese, fetish model and wife of Marilyn Manson, has something to say about Hollywood standards of beauty:

Rocker MARILYN MANSON’s wife DITA VON TEESE has hit out at Hollywood standards of beauty, branding them unrealistic and unoriginal.

The curvy burlesque dancer, who has dark hair and pale skin, is frustrated with the pressure on women to be stick-thin, with blonde hair and tanned skin.

Von Teese tells UK’s Cosmopolitan magazine she wishes women would value their health over their looks and be individuals.

The showgirl says, “My advice would be to experiment, ignore trends and work out ‘this is how I look best.’

“We don’t all have to blend in or look like SIENNA MILLER.”

Good for her! Mind you, I wouldn’t call wearing a corset “valuing your health,” necessarily (have you seen an X-ray of a woman wearing a corset?), but she’s on the right track.

I especially like that she mentioned pale skin. Skinniness as a Hollywood value is oft-criticized, but it’s very, very rare to see even thin women with pale skin in movies, Nicole Kidman notwithstanding (and she’s gone blonder as she’s gotten more famous). And rarer to see anyone complain about it.

I remember reading a post on Big Fat Blog about the infamous Dove ads, and amidst all the discussion about the weight of the models (there were those who felt they were too thin to be representative, and those who were happy to see any flesh on a model), someone posted about how disgusted she was that one of the models was very pale; of course “pasty” was used. She did get her consciousness raised by some of the other commenters, but cripes.

Why is it okay to hate on pale people? (And yes, I’m looking at some of you who snarked about pasty redheads).

Fat-phobes go after Redbook

Apparently “women’s lifestyle” magazines are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. Women like me complain that their covers are constantly adorned with stick-thin sexbots. When they respond by putting pictures of normal-sized women in their pages, and with their editor saying that she’s a pretty average American woman at a size 12, so-called “anti-obesity advocates” go ballistic.

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NYC Museum Recommendation: Munch at the MoMA

If you haven’t gone yet, go. I went two weekends ago, and it’s amazing. I love the MoMA anyway because I have a modern art obsession (I would marry Mark Rothko possibly before Anderson Cooper), but the Munch exhibit is worth a visit in itself. My favorite piece of his, which is part of the exhibit, is below the fold. It includes boobies, so if you’re working for John Ashcroft, don’t click. But they’re tasteful, artistic boobies.

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Beauty Call

I need some help here. If you’ve ever spent a winter in New York, you know that many older buildings like mine have eyeball-shriveling levels of heat. Then there’s the general dryness in the air, and the cold.

As a result, my face is a flaking, crusty mess, but even worse, my scalp is itching and flaking all over the place. Does anyone know what to do for a snowstorm from one’s scalp, preferably without turning one’s hair into a greasepit?

Be Ashamed.

There’s so much going on here that I don’t even know where to start:

shame

From a website called “Modesty Zone,” which is targeted entirely at women (their other products include a t-shirt which reads “Girls Gone Mild” on the front, and “Be Daring. Keep Your Shirt On” on the back).

Because remember, kids, the female body is shameful. Hide it. Especially if you’re a cow.

Sick

Have you heard of Jocelyn Wildenstein?

She’s had a lot of work done.

(Note: the links are frightening, and maybe not work safe.)

Flea had a mocking entry on her blog about la Wildenstein, with lots of ridicule and disgust from commenters, and it got me thinking. At first I couldn’t come up with anything stronger than, “problematic,” which is progessive-speak for, “This offends me, but I haven’t yet figured out why.”

I think I know why I’m bothered, though.

Jocelyn Wildenstein is in a very select group of plastic surgery patients, people who are often referred to as cosmetic-surgery addicts, but there are women who have begun to edge into her territory. Cher, Joan Rivers, Mary Tyler Moore, Farrah Fawcett, Charo. And you hear the same thing: Ewwwwww. They’re hideous. They’re sickening. They’re grotesque.

It’s results-oriented, this nastiness. It insults these women for the same reason that the beauty industry insults unmodified women: they’re not attractive to us. Those stung lips, those pithed noses, those frozen faces, those rock-hard tits. What were they thinking? Don’t they know how ugly they are? Don’t they know how much prettier they were before? Who’d want to fuck that?

Don’t get me wrong, these women make me uncomfortable, too. I look at Wildenstein and I remember the momentum of my own disorder. I remember what it was like to need work. I worry for her and for all of them. But would we be holding Wildenstein up as an example of everything gone wrong with beauty as our culture defines it if she’d undergone fifty-odd procedures and come out the other end looking preternaturally beautiful instead of strange? Would we have a problem with one painful face lift or a couple painful collagen injections? If plastic surgery in general were just as painful but not as distinctive, would we be as vituperative towards the women who undergo it?

Update: I don’t want to see anyone in comments making cracks about Wildenstein’s appearance. Yes, she’s no longer conventionally attractive. Yes, the operations she’s undergone signal a body dysmorphic disorder that probably warps her sense of self out of any resemblance to reality. None of those things are controversial, so they don’t really need to be pointed out again. No viciousness, okay?

Hot Geezers in Magazines

Well, they aren’t exactly elderly, but you’d think so by the way the Times writes about them.

Brace yourself. Very soon in beauty and fashion ads you will be seeing faces of women who are actually in their 40’s – or even older. If you look closely, you may even see a wrinkle or a line or two. Granted, these are not ordinary faces: Kim Basinger in the new campaign for Miu Miu; Sharon Stone, the image for Dior Beauty. These are extraordinary, storied, famous, perhaps even infamous, faces. Faces with staying power.

Ok, I’m braced — show me a wrinkle!

Now, I suppose this ad campaign is good. It’s great that we’re finally able to look at older women (sorry, but I don’t think 40 quite qualifies as “old”) and see that, by George, women don’t physically fall into pieces after their 16th birthdays. But the tone of this piece irritates me; it’s silly that we’re shocked, just shocked, at the idea that women over 25 can be beautiful enough to be put in advertisements.

Of course, it’s shitty that these women are basically being used to sell wrinkle cream and anti-aging potions. And I think that the reporter here is correct when she says that this is largely an economic decision, in response to shifting age demographics. But I’d like to eek out a little glimmer of hope, and say that this does also reflect a shifting beauty standard, where older women are still perceived as attractive. There are all kinds of problems with beauty standards in general, which I won’t touch on now, but this could be a tiny step in the right direction. Or, if not the right direction (because selling women useless crap in an attempt to make them look 20 isn’t exactly the “right” direction), at least a better direction. Thoughts?