Invited Post: The Ripple Effect

Mara Glatzel from Medicinal Marzipan has long been one of my favorite body image bloggers, in part for her worldview and in part for her graceful, inspirational prose. But what strikes me most about Medicinal Marzipan is its honesty: Glatzel shares her vulnerabilities as well as triumphs in the route to wellness (including a recent post that gave me one of my own biggest "aha!" moments in the past several years about my own eating concerns). 

I was pleased to learn that Mara has developed a tool for helping others find their own place on the vulnerability-triumph spectrum, with Body Loving Homework, which she describes as "one part Ebook, one part digital anthology, and one part self-study coaching program—designed to help you find clarity around what you deserve out of your life and your daily experiences." When I sampled a few of the 100 writing prompts in the book, my responses ranged from joy (apparently my answer to "My body remembers" is a hint racy) to discovery (I think of myself as pretty calm, so imagine my surprise when several of my answers to prompts involved the word panic). I asked her to guest post here about incorporating self-acceptance into our daily lives, and the place where self-image and body image intersect. 

If you’re anything like me, you know exactly what it feels like to go through the motions: saying yes, piling on the additional work, doing the emotional housekeeping, working out the logistics, and taking everyone else’s needs into account.

You’re probably really good at it too—a skill cultivated and honed over the course of your life.

I used to think that taking care of others was what I was best at, what I was put on the planet to do.

I used to think that just because I was good at it, I was relegated to going through the motions the rest of my life.

This conveniently fit in with other beliefs that I held about my life—feelings of being unworthy, unlovable, unforgivably damaged—because, through taking really good care, I was able to make myself useful in a way that didn’t require me to necessarily stick my neck out.

I was kind.

I made dinner.

I cleaned up communal physical space.

I put down whatever I was working on, attending instead to the emotional crisis at hand.

I do not intend to set up a paradox here, as in: when I hated myself, I took care of everyone else, and when I learned how to love myself for who I was, I only took care of myself.

For me, it wasn’t one or the other. It was in the appearance of a choice in the matter. It was knowing that I was worth loving not only for my caretaking abilities, but also for the rest of me as well.

When I learned how to love myself, truly love myself, and believe in the fact that I had more to offer the world than laundered socks and mended hearts—I was able to believe, also, that I was more than what I had been permitting myself.

When I was single or momentarily attached, I used to joke that I was a “starter wife”—the kind of girl who picks up broken, sad partners, and uses her love to shine them up like a little penny, gently reinforcing their strengths through the repetition and constancy of my adoration.

Until the day that they got so shiny, they wanted to hop into someone else’s pocket.

In these moments, I was left alone, heartbroken, but, when I was truly honest with myself—at least partially to blame. I had avoided infusing myself into these relationships, because I deeply feared that doing so would scare my partner away. I had internalized messages during my youth—messages of being too big, too loud, too passionate. I had been told by my experiences that people stayed around longer if you made your needs as brief and palatable as possible, and then went about your day becoming exactly who they need you to be.

I remember the exact day when I realized that I could, instead, choose to be myself.

I realized that if I was myself, and it didn’t work out, at least I knew ahead of time instead of wishing and praying that my real self wouldn’t pop up unexpectedly and drive someone away.

For me, self-acceptance has been the slow integration of who I was presenting as and who I was inside. It was the process of becoming who I already was. It was putting all of my faith in the idea that if I could permit myself to be myself that I could love that person—even when I was afraid to do so. 

However, as will naturally occur when you begin to change one aspect of your life—suddenly, the impact spread, and I was astounded by how pervasive my self-hatred had become.

I found unexpressed sentiment and choked on words in every facet of my life—work, relationship, family. I found that in fact I really hated where we had chosen to put that new bookshelf or that in my heart, I wished we had painted the bathroom blue instead of red. I was surprised, as these feelings weren’t even large, big scary to divulge feelings—I was saying yes and keeping quiet in all aspects of my life.

And, at first, I thought I was doing all of this out of some sort of damaged self-esteem around my body, but, over time, I realized, it wasn’t my body—it was my most basic sense of worth and deserving. It was who I was, deep inside, that was hurting and needed to be freed.

What I thought was about the size of my hips, was actually about the cultivation and maintenance of healthy boundaries within the context of my relationships.

What I thought was about whether or not someone thought I was attractive, was actually about speaking my needs out loud, in the presence of another.

What I thought was about my body—was about how I was living my life.

The human body is a convenient scapegoat. 

Contentious by nature, degraded by the media, and a highly personal battleground, our bodies carry more than their fair share of the pain, hurt, and rejection that we experience in the world. For example, it was much easier for me to hate my body than realize that I needed to dramatically upgrade my ability to create and maintain healthy boundaries.

In many ways, hating your body is easy. You’ll never be alone. You will always have others to join you in your self-hatred, commiserating over the size of their thighs or how this was the week that they are going on a diet or he didn’t reject me—he rejected my body. As in, things that you can fix or have control over.

When it is about your body, it is a problem that society tells you you can fix—head to the gym, hop on a diet, indulge in some plastic surgery. Even if you wouldn’t resort to some of those options, they are out there, filling up the social consciousness with feelings of safety and well-being. Whether or not you choose to access them—the option is there.

You can change your body. You can make yourself prettier. You can buy new, sexy clothing.

You know how to do that, and on many levels—it feels safe.

What about when it’s not about your body? What about when it is about your basic ability to connect with other human beings, relax into intimacy, or be both yourself and yourself in the context of a couple?

That feels much less safe.

This is the messy zone, the dark closet that we shove all of our odds and ends in, in order to keep the rest of our house tidy and presentable. The answers here are not cut and dry. They do not apply to everyone. You cannot read about them in the self-help section of your favorite magazine.

They come from learning to listen to the voice inside your body, the small part of yourself that lets you know what you’d most like and what your wildest dreams are.

I had been keeping myself small—occupied by the an overflowing to-do list of laundry and groceries, wrapped up in the melodrama of my own creation, and concerned with the well-being of those around me first, and my own needs—last, always.

It wasn’t that learning to love myself dramatically altered who I was. I haven’t stopped taking care, but I am confident now that I am choosing to take care and that the people who I choose to take care of are worthy of my most profound love and consideration.

Learning to love myself has permitted me the ability to realize that I was worthy of anything that I put my mind or heart to. It was the quiet process of choosing, every day, that who I am is important. That my words matter. That my actions are an extension of my heart, and that they should be respected as such.

That I am worthy of my own love and the love of those around me, and not because I’ve cooked them dinner.


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Mara Glatzel is a self-love coach + author of Body Loving Homework: Writing Prompts for Cultivating Self-Love. She works with women who are ready to create the lives they want — and deserve. Her blog, Medicinal Marzipan, has inspired thousands of women to heal their relationships with their bodies, and treat themselves with relentless compassion. Catch up with her on Facebook or Twitter, or join her body-loving mailing list for secret swapping and insider news.

I Dream of Deenie

I was recently diagnosed with a medical condition. I’ve got a mild case of it, but it brings a few troublesome complications regardless, nothing serious. And as one might well do, the first thing I did when I got home upon receiving my diagnosis was Google it to learn more. The list of symptoms included what took me to treatment in the first place, a good number of troubles I don’t have, and a surprising entry: poor body image. The diagnosis? Scoliosis.

Now, if I’m being officially diagnosed for the first time at age 35, obviously my scoliosis isn’t terribly problematic. I was monitored for it as a child (do they still do those annual scoliois screenings at school? It somehow seems like a remnant of the ’70s, like the Dorothy Hamill haircut) but it was so mild that it barely qualified as scoliosis, and it didn’t warrant treatment—certainly not intervention like surgery or a brace. Basically, my muscles compensate for my wonky spine, running me through varying degrees of pain; I treat it with exercise, occasional ibuprofen, massage, and masturbation. (Deenie in da house!) In other words, it’s not a huge deal, and it’s not something that weighs on my mind a lot.

But there it is, that symptom far down on the list—below the physical pain, below the visual cues—poor body image. There’s a whole body of work devoted to studying the psychosocial effects of scoliosis, particularly in adolescents, but it boils down to this: Something about your body is “wrong,” and chances are it’s not something you ever thought was a problem, and you really can’t do much of anything about it. Wearing a brace may or may not have an impact on patients’ body image, but there’s evidence supporting a correlation between scoliosis and body image, regardless of treatment.

Now, the people being studied aren’t people like me: I’m an adult, for starters, and one with a very mild case of scoliosis. Though I’ve been told repeatedly by chiropractors, tailors, and osteopaths that there’s something irregular about my form, nobody until recently has used the word scoliosis about my body since the sixth grade. Whatever body image problems I have come from the usual suspects—perfectionism, media, growing up girl—not my spinal curvature.

But it’s not hard for me to see how my body image has shifted ever so slightly in the past few weeks. Part of it was the pain that drove me to seek treatment; it’s difficult to feel like your body is something to be proud of when you’re wincing whenever you take off your shirt. But more than that, I’ve learned that—and this is an unkind term—I’m misshapen. I found myself complaining of feeling “broken” and “twisted”—words I’ve never used to describe myself. Whenever I’ve had a problem with my body, there’s been a part of me that has known it’s in my head, because the concerns I had were solely about about how I appeared. If I thought my thighs were unappealing, there was still a part of me that understood that "unappealing" was subject to interpretation. With a twisted spine that was causing me pain—that wasn’t in my head, that was in my bones.

But in a way, whatever feelings I had are beside the point here. My literal body image—that is, the visual projection I have when thinking about my body—had shifted as well. My new mental drawing of myself was small, dropped onto a large white canvas, drawn in a combination of pencil and ink, and, yes, crooked. In my head, I went from looking somewhat like this:

(No, I do not look like Suzuki Beane in my head; she is far cooler than I could ever wish to be. It's just that Louise Fitzhugh is a far better illustrator than I am.)

to looking more like this:

Most of the time when I refer to body image, I’m really referring to negative self-talk. The image part doesn’t come up much, not for me; I’m pretty sure that my actual mental drawing of myself is reasonably spot-on. Even at my lowest, I don’t actually envision myself with elephantine thighs or a ballooning waistline; it’s more that I see roughly the same body in my mind that I saw the day before when everything was fine, but suddenly it’s unacceptable for one reason or another. I can dissect that all I want, but what it comes down to is that the interpretation of the image is what’s poor, not the body image itself.

But with the specific and decidedly dysmorphic shift in body image that accompanied my diagnosis, I’ve become aware that there is a body image living inside my head, one that’s plastic and that can shift according to new information it receives. And I don’t necessarily have any conclusions as to what this might mean, because in my case I don’t think my mental projection is erroneous. (Yes, I recognize that that’s sort of the point—that the very idea of body image means that you don’t think your mental projection of yourself is erroneous. I’ll never know how close my mental image actually is to the real deal. At least not until brain scan image projection is a helluva lot more developed, and when that happens I am using all my brain scan image technology to be able to put my dreams on YouTube.) It was only when there was new information presented—the information about myself as someone with a spinal curvature that causes me some troubles every so often—that a disconnect appeared. (For the record, once I recognized what was going on I felt fine mentally, and physically it’s really not a problem now that I’ve learned some corrective exercises.)

I guess what I’m wondering here is A) What the “image” part of “body image” means to you, and B) How your body image is affected by medical conditions that have nothing to do with weight or conventional attractiveness. (You could argue that severe scoliosis affects conventional attractiveness, I suppose—but hell, Marilyn Monroe was rumored to shave half an inch off one high heel of each pair to lend a sway to her step, and I've got that naturally, so I’m at an advantage here, oui?) Do you have an actual visual image in your head of what your body looks like? Is it in a distinct medium—like photography, drawing, animation, video—or is it too indistinct to single that out? Does the image change? Do you think your body image matches up with what’s really there, in a visual sense if not on the level of judgment/perception? Could you draw or otherwise externally project your body image? And have you ever found your body image being formed by things outside the normal trajectory of body talk?

Nutricosmetics, Part II: Morality, Capitalism, and Selling Us Ourselves

"Apples' soluble fiber helps your body eliminate nasty toxins that could show up on your skin.
It's nature's beauty bar!" —Cranach the Elder, subtextually

When I first learned about Renaissance beauty ideals in high school—or rather, the idea that physical beauty was then widely understood as an indicator of moral superiority—my first thought was that we still sort of think that way. We’re just not as blatant about it as Castiglione was in 1528 in his Book of the Courtier: “Beauty springs from God, and is like a circle of which goodness is the center. And hence, as there can be no circle without a center, there can be no beauty without goodness...outward beauty is a true sign of inward goodness.”

Today I think we still do make that equation, but the myriad variants on female beauty—the femme fatale, the beautiful damaged soul, heroin chic, the gorgeous bitch whose looks could kill—complicates it a good deal. We’ve introduced more archetypes, more ways to be prototypically feminine and beautiful, than just our walking angels. Morality still comes into play in our discussions of beauty—for example, we still use terms like “good skin” and “bad skin” that reflect our conflation of morality and beauty—but we’ve largely shifted away from openly and directly equating morality and beauty. Instead, we readily talk about another sort of “inner beauty” that manifests itself physically. Radiance, confidence, allure, je ne sais quoi, “a special quality,” or simply “it”—we freely talk about “inner beauty” as something that can’t be faked, as something that has to come from within. And in that sense, I’m wondering if nutricosmetics are being touted as a route to a sort of “inner beauty,” serving as a modern-day extension of Renaissance ideals of beauty and inner goodness. Nutricosmetics promise more than good skin; they promise inner beauty. Not the sort of inner beauty we’re referring to when we talk about radiance or confidence, of course—but I’m pretty sure nutricosmetics companies are banking on consumers making the connection between their product and confidence-as-inner-beauty. And given the ways that we moralize what women put into their bodies, nutricosmetics marketers are probably wise to take that bet. Nutricosmetics attempt to commodify an intangible spiritual quality, using words like glow, energy, balance, and replenishing, by linking it to something similarly intangible (health) via something highly tangible (a pill, a tea, a tonic, a beverage).

I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to say that we equate health and morality (certainly the “war on obesity” and the intense vitriol it brings speaks to that), and that in particular what women choose to put into their bodies becomes a moral issue. (The success of many a trite diet-food campaign—hell, the success of an HSBC ad campaign from several years ago—depends upon it.) Putting the right things into your body is near the top of the pyramid of morality for western women. We link health and morality, and we certainly link health and beauty (I challenge you to find a beauty guide of any length that doesn’t address nutrition and exercise; certainly if I were to write one I’d include health). So nutricosmetics, in linking health and beauty, become a representation of the ways we still link beauty and morality. The pills and potions become the linking object that allows beauty, health, and morality to combine in ways that become difficult to consciously untangle—which is exactly what makes it ripe for capitalist culture, where such elisions and difficulties become the basis for effective marketing.

Capitalism works in part because it takes our private, intrinsic qualities and makes them extrinsic. With nutricosmetics, capitalism takes our abstract ideas about goodness and beauty—specifically “inner beauty”—and transforms them into products we can buy. Nutricosmetics marketing works specifically because it takes our most abstract and intrinsic of qualities—radiance, vitality, glow, “a certain quality,” whatever you wish to call it—puts it into a capsule, and sells it right back to us. Is there a more tangible manifestation of “inner beauty” than a pill that promises good skin?

We talk about how the makeup industry does this, and certainly there’s a moral component to face paint and topical skin care, but throwing health and ingestible products into the mix complicates matters. Where cosmetics enhance and correct, nutricosmetics purport to transform us, literally from the inside out. Cosmetics try to cover our flaws; nutricosmetics try to make us flawless. And specifically in American markets, they do so while allowing us to skirt our old-fashioned Puritan ideals. With nutricosmetics, we don’t even need to do the work of sticking to a “good” diet or eat “right.” All we need to do is buy.
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For part I of The Collected Thoughts and Writings of Autumn Whitefield-Madrano on Nutricosmetics, click here.

Nutricosmetics, Part I

Tastes like berries! May or may not do jack shit for your skin, but efficacy is hardly the point.

I was 15 the first time I tried what’s now known as nutricosmetics. I read in some magazine that it was prenatal vitamins, not being great with child, that gave pregnant women their famous “glow,” and that the glow was easily obtained by taking prenatal supplements. I bought a bottle, and despite taking the pills faithfully, my hair didn’t suddenly start growing in glossy and lustrous, my nails didn’t sprout more quickly, and while I probably was aglow, what 15-year-old girl in reasonably good health isn’t? Just about the only change I noticed was the classic B-vitamin effect (i.e. neon pee).

I could tell the vitamins hadn’t really done much, so I didn’t buy them again--until college, and then again in my early 20s. It’s the same reason I sometimes buy boxes of “Skin Detox” from Yogi Tea, and used to apply a vitamin C cream under my eyes until I finally admitted it really wasn’t doing anything: I wanted them to work. And hey, if the whole idea is that it’s hope in a jar anyway, then maybe my wanting them to work would be enough. It’s like my beauty editor pal said: “It’s like the confirmation bias in psychology… If you just shelled out $300 for a cream, your brain is in this mode of, This is going to work. You have that optimism that can actually make you radiant.” I can get all huffy about some anti-aging snake oils, but vitamins and teas? Yeah, I’ll play.

For once, I was ahead of the curve. Once relegated to “the dusty aisles of health food stores” (the kind that smelled like carob nut clusters, not the kind that smelled like, say, lemongrass-freesia candles and California Baby Wash), nutricosmetics, or nutriceuticals, are expected to grow 6% a year to reach $8.5 billion by 2015, the New York Times reports. Nutricosmetics are foods, drinks, or supplements meant to enhance beauty, usually the skin. (Some consider skin creams containing nutrients purported to aid beauty, like vitamin C cream, to be a nutricosmetic; others loosely apply it to novelty cosmetics meant to be eaten with no ill effects, like a godawful brown sugar-honey lip scrub I got at a beauty sale. I’m using it here to mean ingestibles meant to enhance beauty.) You can find Borba “Skin Balance Waters” in delis; dermatologist Dr. Perricone peddles his “Skin Clear” supplements at Sephora; Balance’s Nimble bar, designed “specifically for women” (because our skin is different?), was at the checkout the last time I went to Duane Reade.

I’m curious about nutricosmetics, and suspicious of them too. In the coming days I’ll be talking more about my larger hesitations about them, but for now I’d just like to look at how we created a market for them, and why it happened now instead of during the 1970s vitamin boom. Nutricosmetics have been around in other countries for a while now; the Times article touches upon their role in China, where supplemention has long been a part of regular health care. (And the first time I saw a drink purported to aid with beauty, it was in the Czech Republic. The drink was sugary, which seemed to defeat the purpose, but perhaps it was easier for me to dismiss its claims because I couldn’t make out much of the labeling on the bottle. Funnily enough, “Beauty Water” was in English.) I think there’s a market for them now because of the ways we segment information, particularly health information, and particularly health information for women.

Pretty much any women’s magazine will repeatedly and explicitly state that simply eating right and exercising is good for you and that the particulars of it are up to you, and they’re absolutely correct. But that larger message gets lost in the drive for microinformation that fills every inch of space in ladymags: runners at the bottom of the page about what this vitamin can do, starbusts of information on health pages about the benefits of everything from beet juice to gingko biloba. Microinformation has gotten more plentiful due to the web (duh) but also publishing advances that make it easier to make information more graphic--easier to digest, but also with less room for exploring complexities.

Here’s how microinformation gets onto the page: Let’s say a journal publishes a piece about the effect of lutein on skin elasticity. An editor would find the study and pitch it to her boss to be included in an upcoming issue as one of the short information busts (like those one-sentence “didja know?!” brightly colored circles you see all over ladymags). They decide to run it, and the magazine’s research team verifies the information for factual accuracy, usually just reading the study but possibly talking to the people who conducted the study. It’s factually correct, and the information burst runs as, say, “Lutein increases skin elasticity! Be sure to eat your turnip greens.” It’s correct--lutein does increase skin elasticity, and turnip greens contain a lot of lutein--so the magazine has done its job.

It’s not really that simple, though. Consumer magazines are meticulous about fact-checking, and most fact-checkers I know are good at their work and care about making sure they don’t let bad facts slip through. So it’s not that anyone’s negligent; it’s more that fact-checking too often serves the purpose of making sure things aren’t wrong, not making sure they’re right. A study might say that lutein is good for skin elasticity but also note that most adults get plenty of lutein with relatively little effort through their diet, or note that the study was done on people who were lutein-deficient and that the effects don’t increase once you’ve met the relatively low recommended daily allowance. Or maybe it increased skin elasticity by 2%, or maybe the study involved 12 people, all of whom were white women over 50. Or maybe the study was just a bad study, in a way that wouldn’t be clear to a diligent but overworked fact-checker with an English degree, not a medical one. Or, more likely, the fact-checker points out all of the above, but there’s only room for 15 words in 18-point font with the wraparound on the graphic element, and art can’t give us more room on the page, and you’re running at deadline and the information isn’t wrong, it’s just not as holistically accurate as it could be, so let’s just take one for lutein, okay? What’s the harm?

And there isn’t any major harm, of course. But our hoarding of nutrition microinformation takes away from the larger point, which is that if you have a balanced diet you won’t have to be chowing down turnip greens because you’ll organically be getting your RDA of lutein, and you won’t have to worry about what nutrients will make your skin elastic because you’re getting what your body needs just by being sensible. More to the point here, it creates a market for things like the Nimble bar, because oh hey it’s got lutein and didn’t I read somewhere that would make my skin more elastic?

The more we segment information, the more we segment ourselves and our buying choices. Now, I don’t think nutricosmetics are abhorrent (probably the worst thing about the Nimble bar is that it tastes like chalk). But when I stop and think about how we’ve dug our own hole here through our constant intake of microinformation, I get uneasy. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that nutricosmetics have only really caught fire in the States in the past couple of years, despite Americans’ love affair with pills, which is nearly matched by our love affair with easily digested health information. Couple our love of health information with the quest for beauty, and you’ve got a market waiting to happen. There is no new way to become more beautiful; it’s all variations of the stuff that’s been around forever, e.g. painting your face, getting a little exercise, styling your hair, and trying to make the most of what you have. Creating niches of service-oriented information can be helpful, but it also leads the march toward creating niche markets. Lutein, iron, and beta carotene aren’t new; they’re just being packaged as new and branded with a hyperinformed consumer in mind. Without niche information as provided in mainstream women’s media, the Nimble bar wouldn’t exist.

“Slow living” might be a fad, but we’re still American, forever looking for shortcuts to something that takes real time, real effort, or real skill. Nutricosmetics don’t give us anything we don’t get in a well-balanced diet, and that’s one reason to question the sudden market for them--but it’s not the most important one. Tomorrow I’ll be looking at some of the larger ideas behind nutricosmetics, as well as nutrition-based beauty regimes that might fall into the “slow living” category. In the meantime, tell me: Have you bought nutricosmetics? Do you take any supplements with your looks in mind? I’ve already copped to my “Skin Detox” tea, and I’ll also admit that a major motivation for taking my omega-3 oil and eating lots of salmon is because I notice a difference in my skin when I’m diligent about it. What about you?

Golda Poretsky, Wellness Counselor, New York City

For Golda Poretsky, body acceptance isn’t quite enough. “I named my business Body Love Wellness because for me body acceptance was the key for everything else to fall into place—but you can’t just arrive at acceptance. If you’re coming from a place of not accepting your body, you first have to swing the pendulum the other way to love.” Drawing on the “diets don’t work” principles of Health at Every Size, her background in nutrition and holistic health, and her skilled combination of enthusiasm, warmth, and frankness, she counsels group and private clients who want to exit the dieting cycle. Her book, Stop Dieting Now: 25 Reasons To Stop, 25 Ways To Heal, was published in paperback and Kindle, and she lectures and gives workshops around the country, including teleclasses. We talked about the willingness to fail, being revolutionary, and how a question about cough drops got her wheels turning. In her own words:

On Trust 
I was literally on diets from the age of 4 on. I was either on a diet or off a diet, and if I was off I felt like I should be on. In 2005 I did Weight Watchers and I lost 40-something pounds, and I thought life was great. I still hadn’t met my goal, but I was feeling really good—and then the weight started coming back on, and I was still doing the program. I was all, “What’s the deal?” People turn that around onto you and make it like you’re doing something wrong. I literally had this Weight Watchers check-in where we sat down and they were like, “Well, you must be eating a lot of cough drops.” No, I’m doing everything I’m supposed to be doing. So I started to research it a little bit, and I started to think about it, and I realized it wasn’t just me. I found Kate Harding’s blog, which is sort of what everybody finds when they first come around to this, and I was like, “Oh! I don’t have to be in this constant paradigm of worrying about my weight, struggling with food all the time.” I started seeing research saying that losing weight and gaining it all back was the norm. But it's still hard to let go of that desire to lose weight, and there’s always that one person you know who keeps up their weight loss for years, and you think, Well, they must have it right. 

That lack of trust in their own experience is the attitude a lot of people have when they first come to Health at Every Size. They think, “Okay, size acceptance makes sense, but it’s not for me.” They try to resolve new information that way, by dismissing it for themselves. Because it’s not a comfortable place to say, “I know 99% of people see things one way. I see things differently.” It’s hard to live in the world that way because we still have these internalized worries about how people are literally being cast out for being different. I see it with clients, I saw it with myself, and we have to say, “Okay, you know, it’s not easy. Certain people are not going to agree with you, certain people are not going to support you—but you’re a revolutionary.” It’s more internal than anything else. The idea of being revolutionary is one of the ways I support myself when I feel overwhelmed. It helps me remember that it’s not easy, and that change takes time.

I always remind people that they need support, and that it’s not this thing that happens overnight. I’ll hear people say, “I tried body acceptance for a week and I didn’t get it, I couldn’t do it.” It takes time. It takes trust in yourself. It takes the willingness to fail and keep going. You might feel great about yourself for two weeks and then suddenly you’re walking down the street and you catch a glimpse of yourself in a window, and you think, Wow, I thought I looked better than that. But if you’ve been thinking about self-acceptance, you begin to have the tools to take that moment as just information. You can say, “Okay, I didn’t like my reflection. So maybe I just have some work to do on seeing myself in the mirror. And what else was going on with me that day—was it a bad day anyway? What was my internal dialogue like?” It’s taking negative experiences as information rather than proof that you're bad or wrong or ugly or whatever. It’s trusting that if you keep doing this, it will work—which it will. Not liking what you see in the mirror one day isn’t proof that you’re not doing body love right. It’s information that indicates, Okay, this is something I can work on. I think very often we see our quote-unquote “failings” as proof of something not working, as proof that we’re damaged, rather than part of the journey. Things are rarely that linear.

On the (Non)-Intersection of Dieting and Confidence 
I remember starting Weight Watchers with a friend of mine. In a couple of weeks we’d both lost about eight pounds, and I remember her saying, “I know I lost weight, but I feel less attractive.” I was like, Me too! People say this stuff to you once they start noticing, like, “You look really great.” And then you’re like, How did I look before? I didn’t think I looked that bad. There are studies about how dieting lowers your self-esteem: There’s this feeling, like you get on the scale and you’ve lost weight, and the sun is shining and the birds are singing—there’s just this feeling. And then you get on the scale again and you’re up a couple of pounds and the world falls apart. Everything becomes tied to your weight. And when you’re able to separate feeling good from weight, you get to feel consistently good about yourself—which is actually more attractive to other people.

There are always people you know who are just really attractive--you’re drawn to them, and they’re just really sexy people. But they’re just people! People tend to think that that quality is just this innate thing, and maybe it is, partially. But I also think it’s about that person having a clear concept of what’s attractive about themselves. They know they’re worthy. The internal is much more external than we realize. So if you’re okay with yourself no matter what size you’re at, it goes from, “Oh, I feel thin, so I can go out with my friends and have a good time” to you just feeling whatever you feel. You can go out and have a good time, you can meet people and believe that you’re as attractive and beautiful and sexual as someone who is thinner than you. We hear a lot of times, “It’s not about how you look; it’s about how you feel.” Well, yeah! But it’s very hard for people to just make that happen. It’s a big mind-set shift.

I’ve worked with a lot of people to try to make that mental shift happen. But it’s not just a mental shift; it’s also physical. I have this thing called the body-love shower. And all it is, is that literally, in the shower, you really concentrate on how good it feels to touch your body—how good it feels to touch your shoulder, your chest, your butt. You do everything in a way that feels good for you. You really enjoy the sensation of touching, and if you do this every morning for a week, you will feel differently about your body. You will. And suddenly it’s not about how you look. It’s about what your body is capable of sensually, how your body is capable of giving and receiving pleasure. And that is much bigger than what magazines tell you.

On Living From the Neck Up 
A lot of times we’re taught to live from the neck up. That’s another issue I hear a lot from people, because they don’t accept their bodies and they don’t even want to think about their bodies. There’s a disconnect, and that disconnect allows you to act a certain way toward your body. If you’re not part of your body then you can starve it or binge or whatever, because it’s not you. It’s like it’s this part of you that isn’t acting the way it’s supposed to, and you kind of whip it into shape or whatever, but it’s not you. So when you eventually start to connect the two and you’re like, “This is my body. How do I want to be treating it? Do I want to be intentionally hurting it? It is me.”

Living from the neck up makes it difficult to really look at the whole of yourself. When I was in law school, I went through this period where I couldn’t look in a mirror, and I’ve talked with other women who sort of have this too. I literally would look just for second, really quickly, with the light off. I wouldn’t really look. It’s creepy! And I was also much thinner then, I was younger. I was really struggling. What helped me is affirmations. I started to actually say affirmations in the mirror. It sounds really corny, but they sort of saved me. At first I couldn’t do it without crying, but there was a part of me that was like, Do this. It changed my relationship with the mirror. Now I actually do a lot of mirror work with my clients, especially if they’re fixated on one part of their body being not okay. I have them find five things they like about that part of the body and say them aloud. That can be hard, to say things you love about your body when you don’t necessarily believe it yet, but I really think you can’t just try to accept yourself, you have to try to truly love yourself. Most people think acceptance is the first step, but I think if you're trying for acceptance, you'll land somewhere between acceptance and dissatisfaction. You have to go all the way to love and then maybe you’ll settle into acceptance, or maybe you'll really go for broke and experience true love for your body.

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Feeling invigorated by Golda's words? Body Love Wellness is offering a deal to readers of The Beheld: The first five people to sign up here will receive a free Body Love Breakthrough session, which will help you develop essential tools for wellness and self-acceptance. Fantastique!

How Can I Feel More Comfortable Wearing Glasses?

Midge!

"Guess what I got?" I goaded my boyfriend over the phone. By "boyfriend" I mean that we met at the mall one day, exchanged phone numbers, and decided over the phone to be boyfriend-girlfriend, and I saw him a total of three times in my life before "breaking up." I was, as you may have guessed, 13. "It's something that will make me look better."

"A new dress?" No. "New shoes?" No. "A new Trapper Keeper?"* (A new Trapper Keeper?!)

It was contact lenses, and his guesses were increasingly exasperating, because I took my contact lenses very, very seriously. Getting contact lenses was one of the best things that had happened to me in my 13 years on planet Earth. It also happened to coincide with slimming down a bit, gaining a couple of vertical inches, growing out my perm so it lost a bit of its ziggurat-like quality, and wearing the clothes I'd purchased on a family trip to the east coast, where I went shopping in Boston—at Filene's Basement even (which I'd even read about in teen magazines!)—instead of ShopKo. I was hardly a swan, but my contact lenses were essential to scooping me out of Awkwardland and landing me at least on neutral territory.

I never looked back. I keep a pair of glasses that I wear around the house, but in public, I am glasses-free—always. For a while it was the fear of seeming geeky (again, 13!), and I also connected shedding my glasses with suddenly entering an era in which I was, on occasion, considered pretty. Boys came a-knockin'—not that, Trapper Keeper guy aside, they would have knocked any earlier if I'd had 20/20 vision—and it all sort of got bundled up together. I always hated the boys don't make passes at girls who wear glasses quip (apologies, Dorothy!), and besides, I could witness at school that it wasn't true. Still, the idea stuck. I'm about as likely to wear my glasses to work as I am to come in with a chihuahua.

That would be the end of the story, if it weren't for my increased ocular discomfort. A combination of allergies (dust!), my profession (lots of screen time), and my environment (dirty, sweaty New York) means that about one out of four days, I'm in some pretty severe discomfort. (And let's not forget about how easily my eyes now get bloodshot, detracting from my otherwise glorious visage. Science says!) Going without my contact lenses is not an option (I'm at around 20/400, which Wikipedia tells me is legally blind but which I think just makes me a prime candidate to star in a hilarious rom-com, don't you think?). Which means: I've gotta learn how to wear glasses, preferably soon.

I see women every day who wear glasses and look smashing in them, either because they've chosen frames that mesh perfectly with their face to the point where you don't think of them as being a glasses-wearer but just the owner of a great face—or because they've chosen frames so distinctive that they jump out and become a statement. I don't look at any of my bespectacled friends and think, She'd be so pretty, if only... If anything, the women I know who wear glasses seem to project an air of efficiency and confidence, if only because I'm silently in awe that they feel comfortable doing something that makes me feel so self-conscious.

My level of enthusiasm for my glasses really can't be captured digitally.
Also note the spectacular failure of the fishtail braid. You're not here for my how-to advice, I gather.

One of my close friends, of the distinctive-frames sort, posits that my hesitancy comes from the fact that my glasses are, well, mousy. They're glasses that are trying to pretend like they don't actually exist, like they're just some odd arrangement of my hair that happens to resemble glasses. She's egging me on for spectacle-spectacles, and I want to try it, so I walk into store after store and try on frame after frame, and every time, I look in the mirror and hate what I see. I don't normally hate what I see in the mirror, mind you—it's something about having this thing on my face that catapults me right back to seventh grade, pre-contacts, pre-boys, pre-blossoming.

So, readers, I turn to you. I could really use some perspective on this: As a matter of my health and comfort, I seriously need to find a pair of glasses that I feel somewhat comfortable in. I need some wisdom to help me both find glasses that I like, and then to help me get over my self-consciousness once I'm wearing them. I long for the nonchalance that my glasses-wearing friends seem to possess—and more than that, I long for the comfort of not having my eyes twitch out more days than not.

Do you wear glasses? If so, how did you learn to be comfortable in them—or, if you always felt at ease in them, why do you think that is? Do you have tips on what to look for in a pair?


*This, as history would have it, was prescient. The era of Facebook has shown me that my ersatz boyfriend of 1989 now runs a delightful scrapbooking site with his partner, Donny. No wonder he thought a Trapper Keeper might up my appeal.

Thoughts on a Portmanteau: Manorexia, Drunkorexia, and Liarexia

Webster's, 1894: Anorexy: Want of appetite, without a loathing of food

As Portmanteau Week here at The Beheld* concludes, I’d like to turn away from cankles and mandals—I know, how could anyone turn away from mandals?—to something with a tad more gravity: manorexia, drunkorexia, and liarexia.

These spinoffs of anorexia seem, at first (and second) look to undermine the severity of these conditions. Anorexia indicates that the sufferer needs treatment; manorexia implies that the sufferer is an outlier, not quite an anorexic (even though that’s exactly what he is), more of an anomaly than a person who might be welcomed into a treatment community. Drunkorexia conjures up not anorexia with alcoholism comorbidity (or alcoholism with disordered eating comorbidity) but a gaggle of sorority girls who skip dinner so they can hit up the beer bong and still fit into their Sevens. As for liarexia, the word didn’t appear to exist until this very month, with the Daily Mail piece about women who eat heartily in public but who restrict in private. The condition, of course, has been around for ages—it falls under the umbrella of ED-NOS, or eating disorder not otherwise specified, which actually has a higher mortality rate than both anorexia and bulimia.

Overall, I’m inclined to agree with Stephanie Marcus at The Huffington Post, who writes that “labeling the behavior ‘liarexia’ distracts from its seriousness,” which I feel goes for all of the above terms. But here’s where I’m going to trot out my beloved Gloria Steinem quote again: Because of feminism, “We have terms like sexual harassment and battered women. A few years ago, they were just called life.” The emergence of manorexia shows that people are beginning to understand that men can be afflicted with eating disorders—something that wasn’t true outside of the medical community (and often within it) less than a decade ago. Drunkorexia might get the mental wheels turning in some women who have been doing it for so long that they don’t realize it might actually be a problem, not just a Saturday night. As for liarexia, it highlights the larger problem behind the condition: We’re so on guard about women’s food intake—and we attach so much emotional and moral value to what we eat—that eating a cheeseburger becomes a signal that all is well on the food front, even when it’s not. See also: DIPE, or Documented Instances of Public Eating—which, incidentally, the Daily Mail piece addressed.

In fact, the Daily Mail piece that raised my ire is actually a pretty solid piece that raises awareness that one doesn’t have to have a full-fledged eating disorder in order to have a problem. I’m constantly reading up on this stuff, so I’m always glad to see a public take on eating disorders that goes beyond the classic poor-little-rich-girl tale (thankfully, there are more complex depictions of EDs out there now, but that’s a fairly recent development). But most people learn about eating disorders primarily through mainstream outlets, and by relying on cutesy terms, those outlets are failing the public. The Columbia Journalism Review opined that this New York Times piece about anorexia offshoots was frivolous, even as the writer stressed that addictions and eating disorders are troubling. “But worth nearly 1,400 words in the Sunday Times (the Style section, but still)—and deserving of the implicit validation that comes from reference as a ‘phenomenon’? Doubtful.” Yet I’m doubtful that the CJR would have taken issue with the topic if actual medical terms—say, anorexia with alcholism comorbidity, or ED-NOS—were used instead of the word drunkorexia. In pointing fingers at the Times for its reportage, the CJR dismissed a legitimate concern as a “trend piece.” But with a word like drunkorexia, can you blame them?

Anorexia spinoffs are the inverse of cankles: Where cankles invents a trivial problem to shame us, drunkorexia/manorexia/liarexia labels an existing legitimate problem and then inadvertently trivializes it. And I am fairly sure it’s inadvertent: Neither the Daily Mail liarexia piece nor the New York Times drunkorexia piece glosses over the issues at stake. (I’m picky about the way this stuff is reported and certainly see gaps in the presentation of the information, but overall I found it reasonably responsible.) What I’d like to see from here is a proper naming of what’s going on. If coining one corner of ED-NOS as liarexia helps alert some of its sufferers that what they’re doing is not normal behavior, then I don’t want to get rid of liarexia. Admitting to yourself that you have an eating disorder—especially when it’s not one that leaves you thin enough to warrant concern from others, or that doesn’t have easily diagnosable behaviors like purging—can be a long, self-searching process. My optimistic hope is that the minimizing of ED-NOS through terms like liarexia and drunkorexia may, on occasion, worm their way into sufferers’ minds in a way that a clinical term might not. (Manorexia is more problematic: Men with eating disorders already suffer a double shame, both the shame of having an ED in the first place and then the shame of not being taken as seriously as a woman with the same symptoms might. Male anorectics are already sidelined and belittled enough—but I suppose that there may be anorexic men who find solace in the term, as it indicates that other men suffer in the same way.)

I just want these terms to be portals to real discussion that could lead to real treatment for the people who need it, instead of allowing them to reside in the mental space created by the trivialization of their problem. I’m guessing that for every woman for whom hearing drunkorexia sounds an alarm, there’s another woman who uses it to laugh off her symptoms, popping martini olives—you know, dinner—into her mouth as she jokes about being drunkorexic. If we’re going to use these words as ways to develop a more comprehensive understanding of eating disorders, we need to do so with care.

*    *    *    *    *

Language evolves with the people: Copyediting is my bread and butter, but nonetheless I wholeheartedly subscribe to a descriptive approach to words and grammar. (Don’t tell my clients!) You’ll never find me hand-wringing over the inclusion of LOL, OMG, or IMHO in Oxford; these are terms we use to help us communicate, and if we’re going to communicate effectively we need to make good use of all the tools at our disposal, IMHO. This includes portmanteaux—even the ones I’ve examined with skepticism this week.

But I’d suggest that we should proceed with caution when coining new words. There’s no evidence that language changes more quickly than it did before the Internet; what the Internet has done is give rise to the ability to create mini-phenomenon. When I was researching terms for Portmanteau Week, it stood out to me how the words were clustered. Cankles hit its peak in 2009 (it had gone mainstream well before then, but 2009 provided the most buzz); drunkorexia was big in 2008; liarexia has more than 14,000 Google hits, and I’ve yet to find one of those results published before July of this year. (Mandals, ever the outlier, stands alone, popping up with seasonal regularity.)

What this indicates to me is that we’re eager to examine what may (manorexia) or may not (cankles) be a genuine cultural shift, and that we’re getting better than ever at coining catchy words to describe them. I’d like to see us be careful to not chase clever terminology at the expense of the actual meaning of the words. Trend-ifying portmanteaux may hopefully (hopefully!) work well when we're talking about things like cankles (if we can agree that 2006-2009 was the era of the cankle and be done with it, I'll be thrilled). But it doesn't work out so nicely when we're talking about legitimate concerns that need legitimate examination. We can't allow for the issues behind those talk-cute terms to be swept under the rug once their press cycle has expired. If coining manorexia leads more sick men to seek treatment for anorexia, fantastic—but we need to keep discussing these issues in order to avoid turning them into the trend that their catchy portmanteaux labels indicate they are. Let’s not forget that the Times drunkorexia piece appeared in the Fashion & Style section (as do most things affecting the ladies, but that’s a different post). Human suffering is not a trend, and giving it the trend treatment makes that easy to forget.

 
*Note that I must qualify Portmanteau Week with “at The Beheld,” because otherwise I’d run the risk of confusing readers who surely participated in 1995’s “Fun People” Portmanteau Week. Everything I do, I do it for you. Also, please allow the record to reflect that as analytical as I got here, I recognize that the concept of Portmanteau Week is utterly ridiculous. Or—and with this I shall allow Portmanteau Week to close with love—ridonkulous.

Sunny Sea Gold, Writer, New York City

Writer, editor, and recovered binge eater Sunny Sea Gold shares her personal story with a forthright fearlessness, both on her support site, Healthy Girl, and through her book. Food: The Good Girl’s Drug is a step-by-step guide toward recovery for an eating disorder that has only recently begun to be fully addressed. One of the most outstanding aspects of her book is in its very subtitle: How to Stop Using Food to Control Your Feelings. Her writing spurred me to think more comprehensively about the roots of eating disorders (hint: It ain’t all about the airbrushed models), and if you read her book, it’ll do the same for you. She’s currently a deputy editor at Redbook, and the former health editor at both Seventeen and Glamour. We talked about the media as eating-disorder scapegoat, the role anger can play in recovery, and having “such a pretty face.” In her own words:

Sunny Sea Gold at 29 weeks pregnant with her first child

On the Role of Media in Eating Disorders
Therapists pretty much agree that there are three main causes of eating disorders, and most of us who get them have a combination of the three. One is your genetics. Second is your physiology, like the biology of your actual brain—your personality. Some people are incredibly resilient and slough off difficult messages; other people are not. In my book I call them Velcro; things stick to them. I’m Velcro. The third thing is environment. Environment is broken into two parts: the environment of your home, what your mom and dad said to you, the behaviors they modeled. The other part of environment is culture. So about one-sixth of eating disorders can be blamed on cultural environment, like the pictures we’re shown. That’s what I mean when I say skinny models don’t cause eating disorders. I just think that’s completely oversimplified and kind of ridiculous. If we magically were able to suddenly change the images we see in order to be diverse in all ways, gradually that part of the pressure would relieve itself. But it wouldn’t relieve that need of a girl to control her food intake because she can’t control her life.

I think people focus on the images because they’re an easy scapegoat. It’s something outside of yourself that you can look at and demonize, and get angry about. You can’t get angry about genetics, you can’t get angry about personality. You can get angry at your parents, but after a while you’ll forgive them. But you can forever blame and be angry at the fashion industry and the media. Not that I don’t think people should have some anger—I think the passionate advocates for change in the media have made a difference, and I hope that people still keep talking about it. I do think there’s a lot wrong with the images we see, and I’m hoping in some very small ways to work from the inside to help. But I think it’s largely about having something to be angry with.

It’s also about rebellion. The media is a convenient thing to rebel against. And rebellion, for me, was a very important part of getting better. I wasn’t really angry at the media—I rebelled against the dieting stuff. I was pissed off at diets and diet books and diet pills and diet gurus, and that anger made me strong. I didn’t have full internal strength yet: I hadn’t been through therapy, I hadn’t sort of resolved my issues, and I needed something to kind of pull me upright. The anger of rebellion really helped me do that. After a while, I didn’t really need it anymore. I’m still disappointed and frustrated by the way our society deals with weight. But I could let that intense anger go. Media rage probably helps other people get to that point. 

On “Love Your Body”
Serious body image issues are very, very rarely ever about your actual body. So learning to love it isn’t really what’s going to change anything. What’s actually going is that you have a control issue, a self-esteem issue, depression, anxiety. Just like the fashion industry or magazines are convenient places to place our anger on, our bodies are a very convenient, tangible place to place our angst, our disgust, whatever else. You know how sometimes you’ll leave the house and feel fine? Then something—you don’t even know what it is—happens during the day, and the next time you pass a mirror you feel like you look like gunk. And you are suddenly the ugliest creature on the planet, and so fat. There’s no way your face or body has changed in a matter of hours; something inside of you has changed, and we just place it right on our bodies. The other stuff is too amorphous, and it’s scary and not easily remedied. Our bodies, we’re told, are easily fixed: four weeks of this, five pounds in one week, or whatever.

In a way it’s almost like hope: If only I could get my body to be a certain way, I’ll be happy. When I stopped believing that, I felt lost for a while. Because I thought, Oh great, now I’m stuck with my life. For so long I’d been thinking that when I’d be thin, or when I’d stop binge eating, everything would be fine and I would be perfect. Then my body got to be the right size for me, and I stopped binging, and everything was not perfect. I didn’t have severe depression anymore, I didn’t binge, my body was healthier, and all sorts of things were resolved from there. But I remember feeling slightly depressed—and scared. 


On Presenting a Pleasant-Looking Package
For a while I purposefully left pictures of myself off my website because I didn’t want to crowd my message. I didn’t know what people’s reactions would be; I didn’t know if they would feel that I couldn’t possibly know what I was talking about because I was objectively fairly attractive. So I was like, Okay, let’s just leave that out of the conversation, because it doesn’t matter here. And I don’t think it does.

But I know that looking a certain way has probably helped me get my message across. I know that difficult topics can be easier for society to swallow if they’re delivered in a pleasant-looking package. And, yes, I think I’m pleasing enough—attractive enough to create a positive feeling in someone, but not so attractive as to turn them off, you know? That just happens to be how I came out. I know that there are people in the world who are objectively not attractive, and that’s an experience I don’t understand. I don’t know what the struggle might be for someone who has odd features to navigate a beauty-obsessed society. It’s a place that I’m lacking. Even when I was really heavy, my mom would be like, “Oh, your face is so beautiful”—the classic “such a pretty face.”

I think of Stephen Colbert’s “I don’t see color; people tell me I’m white.” I don’t really focus on looks, but I think they have some sort of visceral, primordial effect on humans, and you can get your message out if you wrap it in an attractive package. Even Naomi Wolf says that, saying that there’s a reason she does her hair and puts on lipstick, so people will put her on TV and share her message. When I did finally put a video of myself on the website, some of the girls who had been reading were like, “You look like this? I had no idea—I pictured you in a completely different way.” I don’t know how they had pictured me, but they were reacting to the way I looked.

On Legacies
One of the things—you know, that one-sixth of the things that caused me to binge eat—was the messages I got in my family environment. I don’t blame my mother because she didn’t know any better, but she grew up thinking you had to be pretty to be loved. Not just pretty, but the prettiest. And she was. Her mother was very beautiful too, and my mother’s grandmother actually measured my mom’s features when she was a kid—you know those old-fashioned 1950s devices? She measured my mom’s features to see how far apart everything was, and declared that she had a perfect face. That’s what was going to get her love and acceptance. She was never encouraged to develop any of her other skills—her painting, her interior design, her writing, none of that. It was just being beautiful and modeling bikinis, which she did for a while.

So when I came around, I was born into this family where attractiveness was incredibly important. My mother thought I was cute as a kid, so I didn’t get that kind of thing like, “Oh, you’re not cute enough.” What I did get was constant affirmation that it was super-important, and that I’d better stay that way. She would make a point about comparing other girls in the class to me: Well, you know, you’re the prettiest one in your class, or Well, she’s as pretty as you are. There’s no point to that! It does absolutely nothing, except to make you crazy, and it did. Luckily, whatever it was about my personality—that anger, that rebellion—came up eventually and I rejected it. One of the ways that I did that was becoming overweight. In order for me to say, No, I totally disagree with your values and I’m not going to go along with it, I was like, I’m just gonna get fat and then see what you think. I feel like that anger helped me reject those values.

Now my mom has learned so much, and she’s careful about what she says to her grandchildren. But to some degree those forces are always there. Just today—this literally happened two hours ago—a woman left a comment for me on my website, and she was saying that she’d gone to high school with my mom and her sisters, “and they were all so pretty.” I mean, she’s a nice lady and she was just reaching out, and that’s fine. But it made me laugh, and it was an example of how my mom’s not alone with her intense feelings about beauty. I’m very appreciative that when I describe someone to other people, I’m not describing how pretty they are. I understand that beauty is valued in this society, and it’s pleasant to look at beautiful people. And of course I care about making myself look presentable; it’s fun to get dressed up sometimes. But beauty is not a value. It’s not something I care about intensely. And I’m so grateful for that.

Beauty Blogsophere 5.5.11

The latest beauty news, from head to toe. 

Note: This roundup is early this week because tomorrow brings a Very Special Guest Post. Stay tuned!

He didn't get Botox, and look how empathetic!

From Head...
Botox makes you a social dunce: Because Botox hampers your ability to make facial expressions—therefore hampering your ability to naturally mimic someone's expressions, which triggers your ability to read them (we all it, without thinking about it)—it may make you less sympathetic toward others. Egads! (Via No More Dirty Looks.)

Playing pretty in rural India: The relatively low price of color cosmetics (as opposed to skin care) has made color cosmetics popular among low-income rural Indians—which accounts for 70% of the population, after all. Researchers expect color cosmetic sales to soar 19% through the next three years—that's a lot. Let's just hope that the photosensitive chemicals in cosmetics that are causing 80 hospital visits a day in the Chandigarh area aren't a part of this boom. 

Must-see manscaping: No, not that manscaping. Special effects makeup artist William Lemon III designed these incredible landscapes on men's faces. Eerie and gentle and beautiful.


To Toe...
Fish pedicure appeal: An Arizona appeals court rules that a salon owner may challenge the constitutionality of the state's crackdown on fish pedicures. That bodes well for the mayor of Swindon, a town in south England, who's opened up a fish pedicure store, Dr. Spafish, in the town's shopping centre. (See what I did there? Centre?)

Classic Car Collectors Against Domestic Violence?

...And the Business In Between:
Mary Kay and domestic violence awareness: Mary Kay has done excellent work around DV research and awareness, contributing more than $11 million to programs in the past decade and pioneering solid research. So I know that the company's recent stunt of pulling up to the Massachusetts State House in a trademark pink Cadillac to raise awareness is more than just a stunt.

Global beauty options: Americans go nuts for Boots, even though my British sources tell me that it's basically like going nuts for Walgreen's. But if the mere mention of "colour" cosmetics tickles you anyway, note that they have a new U.S. e-commerce site. And if Boots just doesn't cut it, check out Cleopatra's Choice, which allows you to shop skin care products by the region they come from. Regional options are limited but diverse. (I am a total junkie for this kind of stuff. It's from Latvia? It must be good!)

Walgreen's masstige plan: Of course, Walgreen's ain't so bad itself. WWD reports (pay-blocked, unfortunately) that Walgreen's—which acquired New York chain Duane Reade last year—is taking a cue from the "Look Boutique" pioneered by its acquisition, which features masstige products in a vaguely spa-like setting, complete with fragrance counters. Look for Walgreen's to become a bigger player in the drugstore cosmetics market...

...and look out Procter & Gamble's clever new campaign: "Have You Tried This?" is explicitly geared toward getting women to put just one more product in their basket at a drugstore. It's always fun to play with new products, but "trying this" means $7 billion to the company (which makes Cover Girl, Clairol, Pantene, Olay, Vidal Sassoon, and more), so just be aware. Of course, since P&G is also one of only fifteen Fortune 500 companies whose boards had representation from all of the U.S. Census Bureau's major groups, I suppose you could do worse.

Avon scandal: Four executives in its branch in China (which has recently switched exclusively to direct sales) were fired for bribery. Looks like it won't hurt the woman-led company, though: After a middling 2010, Avon's profits more than tripled in the first quarter, in large part due to strong Latin American sales.

Merle Norman gets a makeover: Merle Norman is updating to not seem so "old lady," in the CEO's words. As much as I hate sales pressure, I remember going to Merle Norman with my mother as a teenager when I was breaking out; it was one of the only times she and I bonded over beauty, and the only reason we went there was because it was one of the brands that was around when she was a teen. So I'm rooting for Merle!

Cadbury's new skin line: Chocolate producer Cadbury is partnering with Anatomicals to make body products that will promote their three new bars. Listen: I like chocolate. I like body lotion. Am I the only one who's totally grossed out by the thought of chocolate-scented stuff on my body? Those "chocolate wrap" things at some spas make me shudder...

Me using "Vietnamese sunscreen," which, judging by my shoulders, I should have used earlier.

Sunscreen in developing nations: With the sunscreen market lagging (we rich Americans haven't been taking enough tropical vacations—quick, do your part for the sun care market!), research group Euromonitor is urging sun care manufacturers to target "emerging markets," i.e. poor but developing nations, where sunscreen isn't yet seen as a necessity. This needs to happen for everyone's protection, but I can see potential for this this to go horribly awry in some fashion, à la Nestle and infant formula. Albino advocacy groups in Kenya indicate one small but interesting slice of the issue: Because sunscreen is currently categorized as a beauty product, Kenya won't lift the tax on it, even though albinos need a strong SPF (especially in the Kenyan sun) to be protected. 

New York teen tanners outta luck?: New York legislators are considering a ban on tanning for teens. To be honest, I'd assumed this had already happened. Yikes!

Breaking news! Donald Trump sort of douchey: On the off-chance you haven't read Anna Holmes's Washington Post piece on Donald Trump's sexist antics—many of them relating to commenting on women's looks in inappropriate settings—hop yourself over there straightaway.

Wordy girls: I'm a sucker for analyzing the words we use to describe women. (Copy editing + women's magazines = big surprise.) Luckily, I'm not alone: Sally at Already Pretty looks at what it means to be a lady, and Alexa at the F-Bomb examines fat, slut, and lesbian. (Rather, lesbian-as-putdown, not lesbian-as-lesbian.)

The body of Princess Kate: Virginia Sole-Smith has a wonderful history of reminding us that when we freak out about women's bodies—for good or bad—we're playing into the machine that got us to this frenzy in the first place. Read here why we need to stop freaking out about Kate Middleton's middle.

Deregulating barbershops in Japan: Matt Yglesias comments on the temporary relaxing of regulations for barbers and beauticians in Japan as a response to the trauma over there. He argues that the preexisting loophole that allows beauticians to work outside their salons—say, at weddings—proves that regulation is overall unnecessary, which I disagree with. But the comments on the piece are largely of the "Why does someone as serious and Big Thinky as Matt Yglesias give a shit?" Hmm, maybe he gives a shit because it's a labor concern?

Retouching videos: Both of these are longer than they need to be, but each are worth a quick glance. Anyone interested in this stuff has already seen retouching videos (Dove's "Evolution" being the best and most famous) but what's remarkable here is that you really see the amount of labor that goes into creating an image, as it's basically an ad for Photoshop tutorials. The second is about the ways in which men are trapped by beauty standards. (Via The Beauty Myth 2011.) It doesn't really give new information, but I'm sharing it here because of the reaction I had to it: I felt a hot pang of sympathy for the model here that I haven't when I've seen women being used in this manner. I don't think this means that I'm less sympathetic to women's objectification; I think I'm just so used to seeing women being used in this way, and being a woman myself and bearing all the objectification that brings, that, sadly, it doesn't faze me any longer. Which makes me sad.

How to Be a Good Salon Client

A pedicurist sees this all day long—and I guarantee it ain't always this pretty.

Part of why I don’t engage more beauty services—mani/pedis, facials, etc.—is because I feel acutely aware of the weird power dynamic inherent in many salons. I, a middle-class white woman born in America, am paying a probably not-white person, likely an immigrant, less than I make to do the sort of beauty labor on my body that I’m unwilling to do myself—I’m outsourcing my own grooming, essentially. Most often I just choose to opt out. But in talking with Virginia Sole-Smith of Beauty Schooled and hearing about what it’s like on the other side of the waxing table, I started to see that simply opting out isn’t the only way to handle that dynamic: As a client, I can engage with it responsibly, in ways that go beyond just tipping well and smiling (though do that too). Here, her tips for being a responsible salon client.

1) Tip. Always. “I don’t care if you didn’t like the service—you always have to tip out. The most fundamental injustice in the beauty industry right now is that the salons are all based on a tipping model, which means that workers’ wages are too low. Salons underpay their workers and pass the responsibility for making up the difference over to consumers, so they can advertise lower prices. So think of the listed price of your haircut or bikini wax as a fake price tag and add 20 percent more. That’s pretty much across the board—definitely in discount nail salons. It’s a little less true if you go to a really high-end salon; if a hairstylist works on commission and you’re paying $150 for a cut, the stylist is probably getting 40% of that. So she’s doing fine. But remember that the shampoo girl and her assistant who does your blowout aren’t making that. They’re making, like, $8 an hour. People often tip hairstylists 20% and give the shampoo girl $3; I’d rather give the shampoo girl $10 and scale back a bit on the stylist. Better yet, tip everyone well. I usually tip more than 20%; for a $35 pedicure I’ll tip $10, because I know those workers are often only paid about $50 a day. If you can’t afford to give a tip, you can’t afford to get a pedicure.”

2) Make it mutual. “Make it a point to ask their name. If you make conversation, don’t just go on about what you want—have a conversation with them as you would any other person. I hate when I go to a nail salon and I see women talking on their cell phone while there’s a woman scrubbing her feet. I know you’re there to relax, and that’s fine—you don’t have to talk through the whole thing. If you’re getting a facial, you’re paying to basically take a nap. But recognize that this is a human being who is working on you; don’t pretend she’s a robot, because she’s not. She’s touching you and being physically intimate, so it would be nice to ask how her day is going. Pay it back a little bit. That can be tricky to do, because you’re paying for the service and she has to give that service. But keep the fundamental respect.”

3) Be an advocate. “If you’re going into a place that’s awful with fumes and not enough ventilation, ask for the windows to be opened. You can even encourage salons to give their workers masks and gloves — or if you notice workers wearing protective gear, make a point to tell the owner that you appreciate them making worker safety a priority. The owners aren’t going to do that unless they think that the customer wants it, because they don’t want to lose business. So anytime you say, ‘Wow, these fumes make me sick,’ and talk to a salon manager and say, ‘Hey, can you open more windows or put a fan in here?’—particularly with the really toxic stuff, like the Brazilian blowout and acrylic nails—the manager is at least listening to you. They need to hear that from customers.”

Beauty Blogsophere 4.15.11

What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe.

Princess Arthchild Gourielle-Helena Rubinstein, Salvador Dalí, 1943

From Head...
Helena Rubenstein portraits: The lady sat for Dalí! (She commissioned him to design a compact for her collection as well.) Twenty portraits of her by various artists are on view at Sotheby's.

Mermaid beauty: Mermaid expert extraordinaire Carolyn Turgeon (author of the enchanting novel Mermaid) interviews makeup artist Rona Berg on mer-beauty. And now that your appetite for fishwomen is whetted, check out the second ad on BellaSugar's roundup of most bizarre beauty ads ever made.

A colorful history: Nice writeup of lipstick's history by Sam Correy. Cleopatra also engaged in mermaid beauty, it seems, adding fish scales for shine to her "lipstick" made of beeswax and crushed ants.

Oily skin win: I love a good beauty experiment! BellaSugar again, this time with an intrepid reporter trying the oil-cleaning method--that is, washing your face with oil.

Barbarella beauty: Die-cut false lashes, printed hair extensions, and nail stamps at this vaguely futuristic beauty show.

Blowout blowup: The Department of Labor has issued a hazard alert on Brazilian blowouts—you know, that hair treatment that dumps formaldehyde (which even some morticians won't use anymore) on your head. I'm pleased but baffled as to why this issue, of all issues, is what is making the government sit up and take notice of the complete lack of regulation in beauty treatments. Is it the scary f-word of formaldehyde? What about the lead, the parabens, the sulfates, the tar—not startling enough? Or is it, as indicated by the action being taken by the Department of Labor, not the Food & Drug Administration, because every time a woman gets formaldehyde poured on her head, there's a salon worker who's handling the stuff too?

...to Toe...

Fancy footballer: Between Detroit Lions defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh, comedian Tommy Davidson, and Josh Freese from last week's roundup, the pedicure is shucking its cloak of femininity. All the more reason for A Certain News Network and other reactionaries to tone down their freakout over this 7-year-old boy's cotton-candy-colored Essie pedicure.


...and Everything In Between
Johnson & Jobbery: The maker of Neutrogena and Clean & Clear, Johnson & Johnson, was fined for paying kickbacks for contracts under a UN relief program in Iraq. We're talking drug corruption, not an acne scrub scandal, but still, yikes. 

Criminal beauty: Between the teenager being fined $1 million for setting fire to hairspray at an Illinois Walmart, and a curious vandalism of a Florida anti-choice display involving boxes of unopened Mary Kay products, beauty products are playing accessory to crime this week.
 
Fair Pay Day: Virginia at Beauty Schooled examines the gender gap in beauty work, in honor of Fair Pay Day (April 12). It's particularly interesting in light of Inc.com's report on the fastest-growing industries for startups, which highlighted beauty salons and barber shops.

In the red: Also as a part of Fair Pay Day, Mrs. Bossa nicely runs down the symbolism of the color red in connection to women's labor--paid, unpaid, and paid-in-kind.

Sears & Your Bucks: Sears is ramping up its cosmetics department, in most cases creating a department where there was none. Why should you care? Because Sears is seriously struggling (when was the last time you went to one?), and we as women are a part of its revitalization plan. It's an illustration of our market power, and it's easy to forget that we really do have that market power when we think of the beauty industry as something that merely exploits women's insecurities. It does, to be sure--underarm beautification, anyone?--but let's not forget that the market is a two-way street, and that businesses rely on our dollars to do their work. (Another reminder: Spa-going ladies basically own Groupon.)

Plus-size yoga: The new, cleverly named Buddha Body Yoga studio caters to a heavy-set clientele. I'm all for an environment that allows all participants to honor their bodies...but isn't that what yoga is all about in the first place? Yay for Buddha Body, but boo on the "yoga lifestyle" that has created the need for it in the first place. We've lost the plot, folks, when yoga has become so much about cute Lululemon pants and adorable printed mats, and less about its focus as a mind-body practice that would naturally lend itself to a heavy person wishing to find peace, just like all yogis.

Frankenbarbie: College student creates life-size, correctly proportioned, utterly grotesque Barbie. (Thanks to sustainability blogger Fonda LaShay for the link, even if it'll give me nightmares.)

Beauty in one's Seoul: Japan has long been the Asian leader in the cosmetics market, but Korea is joining the game full-force. With the events in Japan leading to concerns about contamination of Japan-produced cosmetics (which the Japan Cosmetic Industry Association refutes), could Korea make giant leaps in the next year?

Six beauty procedures that qualify as torture: Interesting stuff at Cracked (face slimmers?), but there was a tone here that I found disturbing--there was zero examination or sympathy of why people might choose to do these torturous procedures. An Asian woman doesn't spend two hours a day gluing her eyelids to create a fold because she's vain or has nothing she'd rather be doing; she does it because of the class connotations (including increased job opportunities) it can confer upon her.

Cosmetic genital mutilation? Ghanaian human rights activist Nana Oye Lithur draws a connection between western cosmetic surgery on one's genitals and female genital mutilation. I don't equate the two—but FGM is an abstract reality for me, not a daily reality of my countrywomen, which isn't the case for Ms. Lithur.

The three graces of Hearst? Mediabistro points out WWD's somewhat sexist treatment of three powerful fashion EICs under one roof at Hearst, once the Elle acquisition goes through. How belittling is it to assume that there can only be one top dog at Hearst simply because there are three (very different) women's fashion mags? Nobody's doing a cutesy Condé Nast chart of Daniel Peres of Details versus GQ's Jim Nelson.

Vickie Dowling, Psy.D.,Clinical Psychologist, San Diego

Vickie Dowling specializes in helping her patients cope with the emotional effects of skin disorders. She’s uniquely qualified for the gig: A psoriasis patient since childhood, she developed her first debilitating full-body flare in college, a time when many young women’s self-esteem and body image are already in flux. A chronic, noncontagious autoimmune disease in which skin cells turn over more rapidly than normal, psoriasis’ physical effects include patches of dry, flaking skin and/or irritated patches. But it’s the emotional effects of psoriasis that made me want to talk with Vickie: Sufferers report heightened self-consciousness, frustration, embarrassment, and anger. And given the emphasis on women’s appearance, it’s no surprise that women with psoriasis report all these emotions in greater numbers than their male counterparts. We talked about focusing on our gifts, the loneliness of skin disorders, the power of education, and how to literally be comfortable in one’s own skin—a goal that people with and without skin disorders seek. In her own words:

On Her History

Being a teen brings vulnerability around self-image under normal circumstances—adding a chronic visible skin condition amplified my self-consciousness. Entering college, I pretty much had a good self-image—I liked my hair, I had a good figure, and I had good skin. I was pretty spoiled, so to speak, with how I looked, and I kind of took it for granted. I think a lot of us take a lot of things for granted until we have something stripped from us. I don't think I can "what-if" [to think how life may have been different without psoriasis]. I can't roll back.

Not only was my skin inflamed literally from head to toe, I also lost most of my hair. You know how in high school yearbooks, they ask you a question, like what your prized possessions are? I said mine was my hair. So it was devastating—I felt like nothing looked normal. My feelings of sadness, loneliness, and isolation felt almost as if they were permeating my sense of being. I gained weight from medications and decreased activity. I had a limited collection of clothing. It felt pretty traumatic for that age.

Most of my girlfriends were supportive, even if they were ignorant—much like myself at the time. But they were busy students, and they couldn't really help me physically; I really became pretty physically dependent at this time. And many of my male friends simply fell by the wayside. Some of the men I had dated completely lost interest. I felt very lonely—and given my level of dependency, I had to move in with my parents on the opposite coast and a new place. I basically lost a huge portion of my support network.

My very first step to getting where I am now is when I received a brochure from the National Psoriasis Foundation, from my dermatologist. I really think that education is critically important. That education was the first piece of gradually learning that I wasn't alone. I was maybe 20 when I went to my first support group—I drove to L.A., probably an hour and a half drive each way, because I wanted to meet other people who had this. Somebody who knew what I was suffering from.

On the Power of Education

People are sometimes afraid of various disorders—and if it's a skin disorder there's often a fear of contagion. We're afraid of "getting" things. People in our culture are afraid of our mortality, and a disease or disorder kind of brings you face-to-face with limitations and mortality. There's also a curiosity—people don't know what to say when someone is different. People are often embarrassed to be seen looking, or to be looked at. People with amputated limbs, people with crooked teeth, people who are obese, who have facial deformities, spinal deformities, acne—all of these things, they share similar kinds of interest, curiosity, and fear from the public. Many people aren't going to be familiar with a specific condition, so it helps to come up with a pat answer so you feel comfortable, and you educate people. For psoriasis, I tell people my skin reproduces itself faster than yours does—yours takes a month to resurface and mine resurfaces every couple of days. Someone who begins to feel more comfortable in their own skin can remove that basic pat answer, maybe using humor if that feels comfortable. Humor relaxes people. As you begin to feel more comfortable with yourself and others, they will begin to feel more comfortable with you. If humor works for you, then you can share how stigmatizing or embarrassing your condition can be.

I was denied salon services once, when I went in for a haircut many years ago. Since that episode, I've frequently brought up the topic when I've gone in for a haircut, even before they begin. I used to take in National Psoriasis Foundation brochures for the stylists, because I didn't want to go through that experience again—it was humiliating. If you're proactive, you're taking the reins—you're taking charge to the degree that you're capable of. Now, when I bring it up, most stylists are like, "Yeah, we've had training." If you educate others, they can become allies.

On Literally Being Comfortable in Your Own Skin

A gift that psoriasis has given me is that I'm less concerned of what others think of me—both when I'm flaring and when I'm in remission. Of course I like looking good and I don't dress sloppily, but I'm not as concerned with my appearance as I used to be. Before I had the experience of psoriasis, I looked in the mirror more than I do now. I don't avoid them; I just don't seek them out. I don't typically wear constricting clothes; I wear a lot of natural fibers. I think it's also humbled me significantly, and has given me the compassion that I have for my patients. It's really helped me become more compassionate, because I have genuine empathy and actually understand how it feels to be 1) disabled, 2) have to deal with unpleasant treatment regimens, and 3) be concerned with my appearance.

It's also given me a sense of humor, both to help me cope and to help others feel more comfortable in my presence when I do break out. For instance, when I returned from my last absence from work, I joked about my "free chemical peel,” because my skin was constantly shedding—most people think I’m significantly younger than I am. In fact, many people who have psoriasis actually have beautiful complexions when they're not flaring, because they have constantly fresh skin. I try to focus on things like that, and work really hard at changing my perception of things. I reframe how I think about certain situations.

You have to learn to nurture yourself, first and foremost. There's a tendency to be self-critical and judgmental, and most of us place these burdens on ourselves as though they're obligations, instead of making a choice about it. Saying, "I want to do this, I know I'll feel better—my condition X will feel better and I'll be more comfortable" is going to bring you to a better, more comfortable, and healthier place physically, and probably a better, safer place emotionally. Once you do that, you can get into educating and volunteering—helping others helped me tremendously. When you're focusing on others it takes away the focus from yourself.

Another way to shift attention from yourself is to do relaxation exercises—one of the ways that those work is that you're shifting your focus, distracting yourself. Distraction is a great tool for self-care. One of the things that I talk to my patients about, whether they have health issues or not, is thought-stopping. I'll tell people to just say the word stop in their head, and that if they're in a place where they can say it out loud, to do that and clap their hands to place more emphasis on it. I tell them to think in as much detail as possible about a stop sign. Most people think about a stop sign as just a stop sign. But if you really think about it, it's octagonal, it has block capitals, white letters on a red background, the newer ones are kind of iridescent and the older ones have a flatter paint. The newer ones sometimes have a trim around the edge; there's a bolt or screw at the top and the bottom that's mounting them onto the metal post, and some of those metal posts are solid and some have little holes all the way down. There's a lot of detail there. And what does thinking about that do? It shifts your attention. It distracts you from focusing on your pain or discomfort—and that pain or discomfort can be physical or emotional.

You have to let yourself be sort of emotionally comfortable too. A lot of people with psoriasis have to pick and choose clothes that are going to be physically comfortable but allow them to feel less self-conscious. Many who have psoriasis chronically will hide it—they'll wear long sleeves, pants, long skirts, even when it's warm out or when it's irritating. They'll wear lighter-colored clothes. I'm wearing darker-colored things now that I've avoided for years and years. I love it! I actually went out and bought several black and navy sweaters because I hadn't been able to wear them in years. One of the things that I feel lucky about is that I've worked through some self-consciousness. I don't draw attention to myself, but I won't make myself uncomfortable for how I look.

You have to practice to become comfortable in your own skin. Just like when you're learning to walk as a toddler, or when you're learning to ride a bike, you fall down a lot. You've got to practice, practice, practice—and it's the same thing with being comfortable with yourself. It's not something that came easy to me at first. I can speak quite simply and easily about it now because I'm practiced at it, but it wasn't always easy. You have to recognize that it takes time, and you need to give yourself permission to make mistakes. Often, people believe they have to be perfect, even in building this skill, and that's not the case.

Beauty Blogsophere 4.1.11

Uncle Sam's nephew Frederick wants YOU to report bad makeup reactions to the FDA. (Scroll down.)

What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe.

From Head...
 No, I am not done talking about Elizabeth Taylor: Rundown of Ms. Taylor's influence on beauty trends. I can't pull off the eyebrows (is it mink oil? shellac?), but the look is amazing.

...and the most ridiculous product name of the week goes to...: Nars Super Orgasm Blush. Am I a prude, or is this just too much? That color is private, thank you.

Word choice: Allure asks readers to weigh in on whether it's "appropriate" to go to work without makeup. Now, I get asking if readers feel comfortable showing up bare-faced (here's my workday-with-no-makeup writeup)...but appropriate? I just cringe a little at that word choice because it basically agrees with the Ninth Circuit Court when it ruled that certain employers can indeed force a woman to wear makeup to work. Not work appropriate: sniffing the White-Out, stealing someone's string cheese out of the pantry fridge (sorry, this wound is fresh), forcing interns to do body shots. Work appropriate: looking clean, well-groomed, and bare-faced if that's how you roll.

Feel pretty without makeup: And it's always appropriate to do just that! Courtney at Those Graces gives tips on how.

No-airbrush ad campaign dissected: I'll take a no-airbrush ad over an airbrushed one, I suppose—but I've been suspicious of the Make Up For Ever ad campaign since it launched. It is breaking exactly zero barriers: Their point is that you can look Photoshopped by wearing their product, not that Photoshopping to create the perfect look digitally warps our perception of beauty. The folks at Partial Objects get into this more deeply.


...to Toe
Beware the permi-cure: Long-lasting lacquer pedicures apparently can mask symptoms of health conditions. Short of something seriously funky (fungus? fur?) I wouldn't know what my nails were telling me, but a podiatrist said it so it must be true! (Though am I alone in not thinking that two weeks can't really be called "semi-permanent"? That's my normal pedicure polish duration, though manicure requires weekly.)

Most squeamish health news of the week: Toenail clippings indicate lung cancer risk. I'm picturing an ersatz oncology lab at my corner nail salon.


...and Everything in Between
Hey, Mamí: Mexico isn't known for being terribly progressive on women's rights, and street harassment both in Mexico and in the United States is a major issue for Latinas (well, and everyone else, but the machismo ethos ensures that it takes on a particular tone for Hispanic women—here's a video on street harassment and women of color). The Mexican interior ministry has developed a handbook on preventing sexist language (example: Don't say "You are prettier when you keep quiet"). Of course, a lack of street power doesn't mean Mexican women don't have purchasing power—I'm not sure what to make of L'Oréal's telenovela campaign targeting Latinas.

But let's not leave out men: Interesting that according to Latino men's self-reported take on grooming, vanidad is more important than machismo, spending more money than non-Latino men on hair styling products, moisturizer, and fragrance.

Hog balm!: It's old-timey beauty's week, apparently, between the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation's podcast on 18th-century beauty tricks (the historian makes recipes from centuries ago, and reputedly her hog's lard balm is the shiznit) and a Scottish university's day of re-creating 15th-century Italian cosmetics. Finally, a way to make my body hair grow faster: bear fat!

Sustainable beauty: As nontoxic beauty products grow in visibility, more aspects of "green" beauty come to the fore. Sustainability is the new thing: The Union for Ethical BioTrade's upcoming conference will focus on cosmetics; palm oil—used in about 70% of cosmetics—isn't yet available in a sustainable form, and Thailand is hoping to get in on the action with its wealth of natural, sustainable ingredients.

The real problem with "baby Botox": Great takedown at Beauty Schooled of why we might not want to gawk and point at the "baby Botox" stage mom who reputedly gives her 8-year-old daughter Botox injections. Doing that makes it about that krazy mom and lets us off the hook for our ever-growing roster of extreme beauty standards. Remember: It wasn't long ago that pubic hair waxing was considered kinky, not mainstream. (Still, let's hope it's an April Fool's hoax.)

What up, Dove?: Love it or leave it, you can't ignore the Dove Real Beauty Campaign if you're a body-positive beauty-lover. But between last week's ad featuring white skin as "after" and black skin as "before" and their new deodorant designed to make your underarms prettier, their commitment is questionable at best.

Devil's deal?: A British survey reports that 16% of respondents would trade a year of their life for the perfect body. And while this is disturbing, it also seems alarmist. You know what? I might trade a year of my life for the perfect body too, and no, I don't hate my body. I plan on dying OLD, people, and if this fairy godmother would take away a year in a nursing home in exchange for a "perfect" body that function perfectly and looked it too (and that would forever set my mind at rest) for the next 50+ years leading up to that, hell, sign me up. The problem here (besides lack of fairy godmother) is that this isn't hypothetical. So many women have already given years of their life in pursuit of the perfect body.

Globe-trotting beauties: A guide to what international products are worth toting home. (I am at the very end of my Czech hand cream after spending last spring there. Quelle horreur!)

Uncle Sam wants you: Maybe not Uncle Sam, but his little brother, or maybe a nephew—let's call him Frederick? FDA Frederick wants you to fill him in on bad reactions you've had to cosmetics. As a reminder, there is virtually no regulatory oversight on cosmetics, which explains why there is lead in things that you put on your lips and why it's totally legal. This is your chance to contribute.

Race, Eating Disorders, and Body Ideals

It was between this and vuvuzelas to find South Africa images that didn't
add to the black-woman objectification pile-on. So!

  

Black South African models are slimmer than their white counterparts—a significant reversal from the U.S., where black models are heavier than white ones.

The initial research prompt was not about models, though, but about eating disorders. Remember when we all thought that eating disorders were only a white-girl thing? The study doesn't address eating disorders in South Africa, but other reports say that EDs among black South African women are on the rise. This echoes recent findings that Latina teens have a higher rate of bulimia than other teen groups in the U.S., as Latina American teens and South African women are groups in the midst of a historic shift in their respective countries.

It's a step in the right direction that women of color, both in the States and abroad, are finally being recognized as equal-opportunity sufferers of eating disorders; being seen as exempt from EDs may prevent sufferers from seeking care, and can also prevent doctors from asking the right sort of questions that would lead to a proper diagnosis and treatment.

But it's somewhat disheartening to see the science community so eager to boil down the increase in EDs among women of color to shifting body ideals. That's a part of it, sure—Latina media stars aren't as thin as white starlets, but they're still thinner than the average woman, and even at their curviest they represent an impossible ideal. (News flash: Not all Cuban women roll out of bed looking like Eva Mendes.) But let's look at other pressures that are particular to nonwhite women and girls in South Africa and the U.S.: striking a balance between assimilating to be accepted by the larger world and maintaining a distinct cultural identity; absorbing the hopes and dreams that were denied to their mothers by apartheid or economics; a greater likelihood of facing discrimination, both overt and covert; and, in the case of Latina teens, a greater likelihood of being an undocumented resident and knowing that your parents—or you—could be exported to a homeland, perhaps one you have no memory of. "That's a very real anxiety that not many kids have to deal with," said Rosie Molinary, author of Hijas Americanas: Beauty, Body Image, and Growing Up Latina, when I talked with her for our interview. "They came here at 2 years old, and somebody might be like, 'Send them back to El Salvador,' and it's like, 'Great, well, I don't know Spanish.' "

The point is: It's not that suddenly women of color are now all up in arms about becoming really skinny; it's that they are facing a bundle of unprecedented anxieties, and it's seeking a measure of control and relief that's largely the root of eating disorders for all women. The pressure to be thin might pull the trigger, but if we rely solely on that measure we're going to continue having blinders on as to who is really at risk.

Which brings us back to the thinness of black South African models. Model Carol Makhathini reports that the dichotomy exists because black models are automatically assumed to be larger than white models, increasing the thin imperative. It makes sense on one level, but certainly black women are assumed to be larger than white women in the States, and it doesn't play out that way in thinness-obsessed America. Another possibility is that South African women are playing out history on their very bodies. Apartheid ended in 1993, but given the preponderance of racism in the U.S. nearly 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, it's not surprising that racial tensions and other forms of racial inequality run high in South Africa. Combine that with it being the world's leader in raping women, and suddenly black South African women's bodies can be seen not as their own, but as symbols—symbols of legacies of the past, hopes for the future, of a race-gender war that will take generations to resolve. It's unclear whether black South African models suffer from eating disorders in greater numbers than their white colleagues--but research indicates that black South African women display greater eating disorder pathology than other ethnic groups, and at comparable rates to white women. But eating disordered or not, black models' bodies hold more potential for projection in a nation where race is so distinctly loaded. It's no wonder that their bodies are more molded, more sculpted--and are literally less--than those of their white peers.

Personal Care Spending May Help Well-Being—But Not in Every Way

Does well-being correlate to spending on personal care? When I saw the well-being index compiled by the NYTimes* I cross-checked** it with the personal care spending data that was released in January. Note that “personal care” encompassed everything from makeup and skin care to gym memberships, which isn’t ideal (yes, gym memberships are “personal care,” but I think they’re a good deal different than an eyeshadow spree) but it’ll have to do. What I found was that spending more on personal care didn't significantly correlate to happiness, stress levels, or depression—but did significantly correlate to obesity.

1) The five cities that spent the most on personal care ranked 6.8% higher on overall well-being than the five cities that spent the least. Unsurprising: Money buys some aspects of well-being (say, access to health care) in addition to lipstick and gym memberships, so we need to figure out if it's about money overall, or just money spent on personal care. So:

2) Of the top 5 and bottom 5 cities in personal care spending, income correlations held true, meaning that cities that spent more on personal care made more money per capita. The top 5 cities had an average income of $61,838; bottom 5 raked in $53,260. But if you remove the top and bottom city—well-heeled Arlington, VA ($90,662) and down-at-the-heels Detroit ($33,035), each of which were way off the mean—the cities spending less on personal care actually come out $1,340 ahead in average income but remain lower on the well-being index. So there’s something else going on there besides disposable income one can drop on chemical peels. What else goes into well-being?

3) The Times evaluated 20 factors of overall well-being. These ranged from internal factors like happiness and job satisfaction, to external factors like access to health insurance and nighttime safety, to clear economic indicators like adequate food and shelter. Of the factors, I hypothesized that a handful of them might account for the difference in well-being between the cities that shelled out for personal care and those that didn't: stress, happiness, depression, obesity, exercise, and fruit and vegetable intake.

Overall, the cities that spent more on personal care also fared slightly better on those well-being indicators—but only slightly, nowhere near enough to account for the 6.8 percentage-point spread between the two groups. In fact, the only appearance-related well-being factor that was significantly different between the cities that spent the most and the cities that spent the least on personal care was obesity. Stress had a 0.6% difference; depression a 2.7%. But there was a 7.7% spread on obesity between the two groups of cities.

But—Health at Any Size advocates, listen up!—the exercise rates and fruit/vegetable intake weren’t that different between cities that spent a lot on personal care and those that didn't, with only a 2.6% and 2.2% spread, respectively. So people in regions that spend more money on things like exercise equipment don't actually exercise that much more (or eat many more fruits and veggies), but they still weigh less. (And then there's Austin, whose residents spend nearly five times more on personal care than the average of the bottom five cities, but exercise only 1.16% more. Without having a breakdown of how the personal care dollars are spent, it's impossible to know whether people in the high-personal-care spending cities are buying more big-ticket items like treadmills, or if they're getting massages or expensive hair treatments or if they all use Crème de la Mer or what. Personally, I like to believe that Austinites buy NordicTracks to hang their acoustic guitars on.)

In addition: External factors that appear to have nothing to do with personal care spending—nighttime safety, for example—seem to account for more of a difference in well-being among all communities, but are disproportionately weighted in the cities that ranked high and low in the personal care spending. This indicates to me that a greater amount of personal care spending might ameliorate internal factors that contribute to well-being—stress, depression, happiness—but doesn't do squat for the kind of things that can't be fixed by taking care of your body and appearance. Like, how safe you feel walking outside at night, or whether you can see a doctor when you need to.

Bottom Line:

Unless you’re really rich or really poor, there doesn’t seem to be a great correlation between how much you make and how much you’re willing to spend on personal care. And the numbers bear out that spending more might make you a little happier (or maybe you’re happier because you’re going to the gym or playing with lipstick), but doesn't, in aggregate, do squat for the factors that have a greater impact on your overall well-being. 

The biggest difference in well-being that I measured in the cities spending the most and least in personal care was access to health insurance. I liken this to the research that indicates that money can make you happier—up to $75,000, that is. It seems that personal care can help equalize some of the factors that contribute to well-being, but not the ones that require real, actualized change. Your stress levels, your happiness, how much you exercise—these, to a certain degree, you can control, and things like fitness equipment and the occasional blowout can contribute. But sculpted abs or a Brazilian can't compensate for lack of access to health care, or feeling unsafe in your community is at night. Those, it seems, require action in the public sphere.

*I'll trust their data, just not their bullshit excuse for casually mentioning the appearance of a rape victim. The Public Editor has a more comprehensive take, thankfully. Jezebel dissects the events nicely, as does Poynter.

**Methodology, if you can call frantically tabulating numbers on my calculator app while sipping office Flavia “methodology”: The Times’ well-being index is charted by congressional district, so I looked at the congressional districts that represent the cities of the top 5 communities and bottom 5 communities for personal care spending. Where the cities span multiple districts I averaged the districts. Per capita income for the districts found here.

Beauty Blogsophere

What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe. 

From Head...

Photoshop yourself...with makeup: I'm behind on this, but when I read about Make Up For Ever's ads with no airbrushing, I got excited. Then I saw that the ads were to promote their HD line of makeup, the idea being that you're basically airbrushed the minute you start wearing the stuff. Nevermind! (Also note the awesome oh-hi-armpit poses and fish-lip faces that nobody, ever, has looked like except when taking their own snapshot, probably after a couple of G&Ts, or am I alone here?)

"I feel like a queen": I'm just a hair skeptical of the Dove campaign, but still took delight in reading about their newest model: a 99-year-old Israeli great-grandmother.

Avon calling: In other senior beauty news: 82-year-old Texan man is recognized as Avon's oldest male rep.

Science sez: On the clean beauty front, a group of influential scientists have officially put forward a call for greater regulation in chemical testing. You know, chemicals like the stuff that goes on your lips, your skin, your eyelashes, your hair. (Thanks to No More Dirty Looks for the tipoff—and in general for their keen attention to this stuff.)

...to Toe 
Snakeskin pedicure?!?! I thought we were supposed to be getting away from scaly feet?

Is it worth the vegan beauty brigade's trouble? Girlie Girl Army, take it from here.

One false step: When I first saw this bit on toenail extensions, my eyes rolled back into my brains. But then with the pictures (not for the foot squeamish) and accompanying text that makes it clear this is sort of reconstructive surgery lite, it made me feel warm and fuzzy about the thought of fake toenails. (I'm of the "my feet need to breathe" camp, not the "feet are disgusting and should be covered at times" camp, and if I lost a toenail it would really bum me out aesthetically.)

...and the Things in Between 

"Skin balls" (ewww!): This happens to me all the time! Why some body butters "roll off" your skin.

My favorite coverline ever was "Erotic Sex!": Dense but worthy scholarly writeup on Cosmopolitan magazine. It's not that it tells you anything that the irregular reader of Cosmo doesn't know on some level, but it does a nice job of breaking down the data and examining the male gaze aspect of a magazine geared toward women.

Do we want models to look like us?: Glamour called out research that indicates that women say they're more likely to buy goods when the model looks like them. It sounds encouraging, but note that the scholar behind the research is also the CEO of an inclusive modeling agency (plus-size, older, even disabled). I'm eager to see what he does next, since he seems like he understands both the pull for non-alienating models and "aspirational" images. I'm just hesitant to hail this as a sea change quite yet.

Dads in the house: Nice essay on helping your daughter navigate making her way through the beauty myth. Step one: Don't ogle women in front of her, duuuuh.

The Good Girl's Drug: If there's a young woman in your life struggling with food issues, particularly binge eating, please go and buy a copy of this book now. Food: The Good Girl's Drug by Sunny Gold is a fantastic mix of personal story, hands-on advice, cheerleader, and sage. Binge eating can be overcome, and this book shows you how. 

I think I'm a Duchamp: Seems I'm not the only one who hates having her body referred to as a piece of fruit: An Australian underwear line is trying to rebrand women's body types to recall great artists—Rubens, Da Vinci, etc. A mild improvement, I suppose (less judgmental, to be sure), but the fact that the word "rebranding" was the most appropriate word I could find here says something.

Qu'est-ce qu'il y a? We American ladies are still after the Frenchwomen's je ne sais quoi? Apparently we're even taking product design cues from them. The airless pump? The mass brands designed to look like high-end, thus creating my mock-favorite word of the week, masstige? That was them.

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Images of Eating Disorders

Notice what's not in the official National Eating Disorders Awareness Week materials:
skinny women staring into mirrors.

I know that yesterday I made a point out of saying that eating disorders are only tangentially related to beauty. But one aspect of EDs that’s more directly related to beauty is the imagery we use to portray them, and what messages those images send. 

The #1 image selected—by amateurs and professionals alike—to illustrate eating disorders is a photo of an extraordinarily thin woman, who may or may not be staring into a mirror and seeing a distorted (larger) version of herself. Runner-up: same woman, but this time standing on a scale. (I’d put together a collage of them but that would defeat the point I'm hopefully about to make. Google-image eating disorder photos if you want to see what I’m talking about.) 

 The images often chosen to represent eating disorders not only leave out a huge chunk of sufferers, they also glamorize the disease, even if the sharp-relief ribcages and clavicles are selected to startle. We’re a society obsessed with the thinness of women and what women are eating (all the better when the two go hand in hand!), so it’s difficult to show the side effects of some EDs without glamorizing them to an extent. This goes double when we're talking runway images (which a lot of them are): If we can count the ribs of a model strutting down the runway, we simultaneously get to gawk at her perceived illness while also seizing permission to take her in as an object. I'm guessing that people putting these images out there in this manner claim that the subjects are so underweight that they cease to be attractive—a hollow defense when we’re talking about images of working fashion models. Anorexic Isabelle Caro’s billboards were indeed shocking (indeed, the pictures in the link may be triggering)—and now, after her death, tragic. But let's not forget: Isabelle Caro was a fashion model, i.e. a member of the profession that defines glamour. We couldn't help but glamorize her sickness even as we mourned it.

But on top of the accidental (I hope) glamourization of EDs, these images reinforce the idea that anorexia and bulimia are the only EDs worth mentioning. In fact, the most common eating disorder diagnosis isn’t anorexia or bulimia or even binge eating disorder, but ED-NOS, or eating disorder otherwise not specified. ED-NOS can encompass everything from someone who appears anorexic but is still getting her periods so doesn't meet all the diagnostic criteria for anorexia, to someone who chews and spits food, to people with selective eating disorder, to overexercisers, to people with unshakable food rituals, to people so obsessed with having a "clean" diet that it controls their lives. Last year the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders finally made binge eating disorder its own category; until then it too was lumped in with ED-NOS.

How this links to imagery: If someone as tragically sick as Isabelle Caro is the main visible face of eating disorders, what does that say to the average-weight or overweight woman who is torturing her body in different, less visible ways? I’ve known women who delayed getting treatment for years because their bodies didn’t match what their image of an ED was. In any addiction, there's always someone sicker than you whom you can use to justify not getting help, but it becomes particularly dangerous in EDs because of the perfectionism that's evident among so many sufferers. A normal-weight woman with ED-NOS can tell herself that eating nothing but raw vegetables for a week is healthy, not a sign of an eating disorder, because she doesn't look like that; a binge eater can rationalize that she just doesn’t have any willpower, because look at "those" people with eating disorders; an anorexic can always find someone “better” at anorexia to prove she’s not that bad off—or that she has farther to go.

And, you know, I get it: I’ve worked in magazines for a decade, and I know that dramatic images summon our attention. To complicate matters, the external symptoms of EDs make for easy pickings of illustration; it’s a helluva lot harder to effectively illustrate perfectionism and alienation from emotions than it is to illustrate someone who’s just lost a bunch of weight. (Google-image other mental illnesses to see what I mean. Did you know that hugging one’s knees in stark lighting is a side effect of depression?)

I’m not sure what the corrective measures might be. I’d love to see more media outlets cover EDs in a comprehensive way. There's some solid treatment of anorexia and bulimia in ladymags, but next to nothing on binge eating or ED-NOS: Sunny Gold’s Glamour coverage of binge eating disorder was literally the first time I’d seen BED discussed anywhere. (Her site and excellent upcoming book chronicle her journey in more depth.) I’d like to see press give as much ink to, say, Monica Seles’s memoir about overcoming BED as it did to Demi Lovato’s recent check-in to an ED clinic. (Demi who? Exactly. But did you even know about Seles’s illness and recovery? Lazy book publicist—or us preferring the glamour of visible self-destruction over a quieter tale of an athlete downing 10,000 calories in a sitting and gaining 37 pounds?)

But (ahem!) to keep this beauty-focused, what I as a beauty blogger want to see is more thought and creativity put into the images we all use to depict eating disorders. I want an end to ED images that have a dual reading as glamorous; I want an end to ED images that invite us to scrutinize patients' bodies; I want a close watch on ED images that perpetuate the idea that people with eating disorders must be thin, or white, or young, or pretty, or women. I want media outlets to choose images that show that people with eating disorders aren’t all thin—and that they do things other than stand on scales and look in mirrors. 

Some of them have a difficult time grocery shopping:

Many of them ascribe inappropriate emotions to food:

 

Some go through the long, hard process of treatment:

And others, eventually, recover.

But the best idea I’ve heard came when I e-mailed some friends about what images they think would be appropriate to illustrate stories about eating disorders. We hashed out the problems with scales (what number do you show?), food (could that be that a trigger?), bodies (best done verrrry carefully), and of course the mirror shot (invites the viewer to judge, and...yawn, so not original). And then, in response to my question, “What art would you choose to illustrate a piece about women with eating disorders?”, one woman quietly, simply replied, “Art by women with eating disorders.”

So today, I give you just that.

Top row: Art by Sarah Coggrave. Bottom: Art by Katie Seiz.

Eating Disorders Are Not the End Point of Body Dissatisfaction

I don’t write that much about body image on here, for a variety of reasons. When I started this blog I wanted to talk about female personal beauty and appearance; body image is certainly a part of that, but there is already so much ink on women’s bodies that I didn’t feel like my time was best spent there. Also, because body image issues have high visibility, there’s a broader permission for women to be frank there than there is regarding overall appearance. (When was the last time a conventionally thin woman told you she was having a “fat day”? I’m guessing it was more recently than the last time any woman told you she was having an “ugly day.”) We’re fluent in the accoutrements of beauty—makeup, skin care, hair—but don’t frequently voice their essence, and that’s what I’m trying to do here. Body issues come up but I try not to make it my focus.

But the National Eating Disorders Association has declared it National Eating Disorder Awareness Week, and they’ve asked everyone who cares about eating disorders to do just one thing this week to raise awareness. I’m one of those people, and I have this forum, so I’m doing my part.

Here’s the thing, though: The connection between beauty and eating disorders is much more tenuous than it seems on first glance. I don't think that the end point of body dissatisfaction is an eating disorder; it’s not like she who is most dissatisfied wins the booby prize of an ED. Body dissatisfaction is one of many symptoms of an eating disorder; it is not a cause. Other symptoms of an eating disorder include what we usually think of as the disorder itself: restriction, bingeing, purging, weight loss, weight gain, compulsive exercising, chewing-and-spitting, and so on. 

So if those are the symptoms, what’s the cause? If you’re interested in that, you should be reading the excellent ED Bites; this entry gets to the heart of it. In short: It’s a complex mixture of biology and environment, like pretty much anything when you’re talking mental health. People had eating disorders before our culture’s thin-imperative struck so heavily; yes, they’re more common now, but I think that’s in part because dieting (which certainly is prompted by “thin is in”) can trigger a latent ED. We see—and love!—the neat story arc of a chubby girl who goes on a diet and everyone thinks she’s way purdy now but then it just goes! too! far! And then, of course, she gets help and is redeemed. But it’s not that the diet causes the eating disorder (plenty of people diet, healthily or not so, and don’t develop eating disorders; 8% of “normal dieters” do go on to develop one); it’s that restricting one’s diet can serve as a biological trigger for something that was there to begin with, whether that be further restriction or binge eating or whatever. When you’re not eating enough, or when your body’s resources are going toward digesting a compensatory high-calorie binge, your thinking is cloudy; if you’re biologically predisposed to having an ED, whatever safeguards you might have against it crumble a lot more easily.

Treatment professionals know this, and some laypeople do too; so why does awareness about eating disorders so frequently focus on body image? In part, it’s because everyone can relate to it—even people who are generally satisfied with their bodies have moments in which they bemoan something about it. So the 90ish% of people who don’t have an eating disorder read that compact little trajectory and are better able to sympathize. It turns an eating disorder from something stubborn and frightening and alienating into something that’s understandable; something that, for a healthy woman with body image concerns, has a ring of there-but-the-grace-of-God.

And also, it’s not like body image and eating disorders are unrelated. It would be disingenuous to say that people with eating disorders aren’t preoccupied with their bodies—some more than others, to be sure (there are plenty of ED patients who neither have body dysmorphia nor are fat-phobic, including not just binge eaters but anorexics too). But overall, the body is the focus for many, many women with eating disorders.

But that’s exactly why we need to be wary of making an exclusive link between body image and eating disorders. Because if we focus on the easy arithmetic of negative body image (severity x) = eating disorder, we do exactly what women with eating disorders do. We make the body the issue, when the body’s appearance is not the problem, nor the cause, nor the solution. We need to look at brain chemistry, family history, perfectionism, alienation from emotions, depression, anxiety, temperament, and more, in addition to the thin imperative, fat phobia, and even the mirror. And until we do, we’ll consider those root causes of eating disorders secondary to appearance. Do ED sufferers really need that message reinforced?

Of course I’m all for awareness of body image issues, for reasons that are so obvious that I’m not even going to list them here. I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t, say, be calling out messages that we find harmful, or that body dissatisfaction isn’t really a problem just because it doesn’t lead to eating disorders. It is a problem, and every woman has a right to a positive body image. I’m just wary of taking a mental illness and using it as a means of communicating a message that serves a different end, even if that message is essential to the well-being of all women. 

I especially don’t want to use ED sufferers to legitimize the way we watch like hawks over other women’s bodies, even if our intent is positive. One example of this: Emily Gordon's astute piece (not about eating disorders) about the (unfounded) rumors about Christina Hendricks dieting. “They’re Kate Winsletting her,” she writes of the fetishization of Hendricks’s body, seized upon all too often as a validation of how “real women have curves” (as if curveless women are impostors?); when Kate Winslet finally had enough of everyone gushing over her “real” body, she lost weight and became...unreal? Or something. But the point is, when we set up curvy women as somehow liberated and slim women as lucky, or sick, or beholden to a beauty standard—any of which may or may not be true—we keep the focus right where we don't want it: on their bodies. We stare at women's bodies and imbue them with all sorts of characteristics and qualities that may or may not be pertinent.

That is, we do exactly what women with eating disorders do to themselves. And I’m trying to opt out.

Ali, Beauty Editor, New York City

In her 10-plus years as a beauty journalist, Ali has worked at some of the biggest ladymags out there—bridal, teen, lifestyle, more—and is now department head at a major publication (trust me, you’ve seen it). But I’ve worked with dozens of beauty editors; what made me track down Ali for an interview was that we’d joked before about “girls like us”: curious, intelligent women who always wanted to dig a little deeper. I assumed that we’d share the same healthy skepticism of the beauty industry, so I found her healthy—but not entirely skeptical—take on the beauty industry compelling and illuminating. In good ol’ service magazine fashion, I’ll be posting her inside-scoop beauty advice later (first up: toner is a scam); here, she talks about raising her eyebrow at the green beauty movement, why we shouldn’t blame the industry for our self-esteem woes, and the survival of the prettiest. In her own words:

On Evolutionary Theory
I think cosmetics make people feel good about themselves, not bad. It's healthy to want to look beautiful. Mental patients don't brush their hair or wash their face; they don't care about what they look like. Evolutionarily, we're meant to peacock around and look good to attract a mate, and these companies assist in that. You could say, Okay, but they're preying on women's insecurities. They are, in a way, but they're also creating an industry that does some beneficial things. I almost think that fashion companies prey on women's insecurities more than the beauty industry. That's an industry making a fortune off women feeling bad about themselves—those Victoria's Secret models? Compared to beauty ads, the ideal they present is even more unattainable. Then again, Victoria’s Secret models do have those beautiful lips and gorgeous hair. I don't know.

In college I did my thesis on the theory that there is a universal standard for beauty, and it was largely influenced by Nancy Etcoff's writings; her book, Survival of the Prettiest, touches upon how it's healthy to want to be pretty. And that, weirdly, the same things people think are pretty in the Unites States are pretty across borders. Lipstick deepens the red color of lips in the same way lips darken during arousal; when you're in love, your pupils dilate, and mascara gives you the same look. It's a part of our process—I don't think it's unnatural. A lot of women take it to this whole other crazy plastic surgery level, but mascara and lipstick? It's just part of being a woman. They used kohl on their eyes in ancient Egypt; we use eyeliner. The same things make women attractive, and there are evolutionary reasons for it.

 

Nefertiti to Cleopatra: Really, it's just a matter of time before we all look like Liz Taylor, right?

On Feminism and Self-Esteem Crises
I remember a study about aging that we did at a magazine where I used to work. Using objective measures, experts estimate about 10% of the population looks younger than they are. But when we asked people about themselves, 80% of them think they look younger than they are. Eighty percent! And when I worked at a teen magazine we did a survey; one of the questions was whether the girls thought they were above average in appearance. The majority said they were! And that’s the teen years, when there are supposed to be all these problems with self-esteem.

But it’s not going to make news if you say, “Oh, girls are happy with themselves.” What kind of headline is that? And what makes news is what we gather around. But I feel like people sometimes use the big bad beauty companies and their advertisements and quote-unquote unnececessary products as an excuse for why they feel bad. You don’t want to feel bad for no reason; you want to latch onto a reason for these insecurities we all have, so you don’t feel crazy, so you don’t feel like you’re unbalanced or negative. There are people who just don’t feel right inside, and it’s easy for them—and I don’t blame them—to say it’s because, “Oh, I’ve been looking at these attractive women.” But I think you have to abandon those external forces and look inside and be like, "Really, why aren’t I happy?" It’s not because you don’t look like some ad. If we excavated each woman’s insecurities, like they do on a Hoarders episode, there would be deeper things going on.

We’re not meant to sit in front of computers and go to offices; we’re meant to be hunting and gathering, so obviously our brains are misfiring in some ways. I’m sure some feminists would be like, “No, I’m totally normal—it’s society that’s wrong.” But I don’t know. I think some feminists might resist talking about beauty because they think the minute they open that discussion, it belittles their bigger points. But the fact that more feminists aren’t really talking about beauty and our insecurities about how we look in that way is part of why some of these things are still going on. It’s at the heart of what they’re trying to get across.

Some of my friends from college are journalists who really delve into current events and these intellectual topics, but they still e-mail me all, “Where do I get this beauty procedure done?” I’m like, “You see? You still need beauty advice even though you’re these smart feminist girls!” I guess that’s what I struggle with about this industry, personally—I feel like what I’m doing is not nearly as important as what they’re doing, like they’re “real” writers, and I’m a selling machine. But then I try to remind myself that people really like reading this. When a reader writes in about having large pores, she feels a whole lot better after I write to her with some tips or do an article with advice. Still, I don’t feel that intellectual legitimacy. But it’s funny that some people look down upon a journalist like me who’s in women’s service magazines. I may or may not want to know about the third reich of blah blah blah, but they always want to know what lipstick to buy!

On Trendsetting
The source of the best trends, if you really trace it back, it always starts with that person who isn’t necessarily physically attractive but is wearing something all balls-to-the-wall, I’m-awesome, look at me. And if you want what she has, you look at what she’s wearing and you copy it. Sometimes you meet these women and they have this aura about them, like electricity comes out of them. I’ve interviewed plenty of celebrities, and they have that. Like, Megan Fox has that. She’s also beautiful—I can’t even look at her, she’s so pretty—but it’s not just about that. People like her, who are so secure, so comfortable with themselves, they put you in a comfortable place and you feel better just being around them. So you look at someone who has that quality and you’re like, What does she have that I can get? And if it's black nail polish, then at least you can get the black nail polish.

But it isn’t always a person who starts beauty trends. You know how all of a sudden the same color is everywhere, like seafoam green? In Paris there’s this color show where they do textile and color trends. I swear to God, I think it’s one person who decides it all!  All these beauty companies send their product development people to the same forecasting companies and conventions, and then spring rolls around, and Orly, OPI, Revlon, you see their nail polish collections and it’s all seafoam green, coral, yellow, and gray. Same exact colors. I don’t think it works that way for fashion—there really are some artistic innovators in that industry who everyone knocks off, like Miuccia Prada. But these beauty companies aren’t reacting to anything in the zeitgeist—right now they’re developing products for 2013. They’re creating the zeitgeist.

On Green Beauty and Big Business
You could go to the Environmental Working Group and they’ll take any ingredient in a beauty product and tell you it’s going to kill you based on one study done 500 years ago on a rat in China. But I walk around New York every day breathing in carcinogens and eating red meat, and I just think no matter how careful I am about the beauty products I use, there’s no getting around exposure to harmful chemicals. You'd have to live in a bubble to get back to having a clean slate and then use natural products. There are people who have sensitivities to phthalates or parabens, but you could be just as sensitive to an all-natural essential oil. But people are into being green. That’s fine, except when you’re dealing with companies that lie. A lot of the big companies do that, just putting bilberry extract in their products—except it’s way down the ingredients list—and slapping a leaf on the package.

Some of the great, small brands that are green get bought up by the big ones. That doesn’t mean they’re going to change the products and make them shitty—a lot of times it’s better because now you have this huge R&D machine to work with. Clorox bought Burt’s Bees, and when I went to the Burt’s Bees factory and asked about it, they were like, “It’s the greatest thing ever—they let us continue doing what we were doing, but we have an infusion of cash so we can do more.” Not all acquiring companies do that. Some of the big companies treat lipstick the same as diapers; they move their CEOs around and it’s always some dude who has the MBA calling the shots and treating all the products the same. But other companies—Avon, for example—have strong female leaders and I think you can see that in the way they respect their customers.

On “Does It Work?”
There are some companies that can back up their claims, but if you were a regular consumer you'd never know. That’s because if these companies actually made the claims they technically could, their products could be considered a drug. For example, Olay: Their anti-aging creams do reduce wrinkles—better than some prescriptions—but if they claimed it that way on the box the FDA would investigate and they'd have to turn it into a drug, and then they lose money. But companies that can show me in-house studies—independently performed, double-blind—they're legit.

I think what makes it “work,” though, is if it makes you feel better. In a way, who cares if it’s going to make your skin look a certain way? Results are nice, but sometimes it just feels good to put on expensive face cream. If you’re spending $300 on your cream, of course you’re going to think it’s working better than your friend’s $30 cream—even though it might not really be. It’s like the confirmation bias in psychology: If you put money into something, you’re going to see any type of evidence supporting your belief that it’s working. It’s the placebo effect half the time. If you just shelled out $300 for a cream, your brain is in this mode of, This is going to work. You have that optimism that can actually make you radiant. If you’re thinking, Oh, I just got this $5 bojangle cream, I don’t give a shit—then no, it doesn’t work. If you squirt on a cheap, drugstore face lotion and you squeeze on an expensive department store one, you’ll notice a difference. One’s silkier and has a nice fragrance, even if they both do the same things to your skin. You want to believe in the dream.

Colette Nelson, Professional Bodybuilder, New York City

Mention the name Colette Nelson in bodybuilding circles and you can pretty much guarantee the response will be smiles of recognition all around. Over the years she has carved a niche for herself as one of the most respected and admired professional athletes on the circuit. However, what few people realize is that competitive bodybuilding is only one string attached to this woman’s bow: Colette is also a registered dietician and certified diabetes educator, holds a master’s degree in science—and still manages to fit being a hair and makeup artist into her demanding lifestyle. (She also happens to be a bit of an artist when it comes to spray tanning…)

 Photo: Kyle Quest Studios

But it’s the bodybuilding that intrigued me the most, as she’s one of the few competitors who manages to combine extreme muscularity with extreme femininity, which has likely been a key to her astounding success in the sport (check out her site for a rundown of her contest history)—and it’s what made me want to delve deeper into the phenomena of female muscle as the possible new face of beauty. In her own words:

On the Beauty of Bodybuilding
Bodybuilding—at least women’s bodybuilding—is simply a new way of judging beauty. They say “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” and for those who attend and judge women’s bodybuilding contests, the muscular woman is beautiful. Call her a female Adonis if you will. Now, this may seem like a somewhat arrogant statement but let’s stop to consider this: Do you call the woman who spends hours in front of the mirror doing her makeup arrogant? Of course not, so why should we give this label to the woman who works out hard in the gym and then chooses to display the results on stage? Both are seeking what they deem to be perfection. 

Some may think it’s a huge contradiction and that muscle and femininity—or indeed beauty—cannot go hand in hand. I like to think that in some small way, I and women like me are proving that muscle can be both feminine and beautiful. The qualification to that statement is, of course, as long as it doesn’t go to the extremes of drug use, which many women fall victim to. I’ve never been an advocate of drug use, and yet I have had a very successful career in bodybuilding. I’ve gone about as far as I can go without sacrificing my femininity, which I am never willing to do.

On Femininity
Yes, some women may fall into the trap of taking drugs that threaten their femininity in an attempt to be “bigger and better” than their rivals. And the price they pay is significant—it’s emotionally traumatizing. It’s not unknown for women to begin losing their hair due to “male pattern baldness” and have to shave every day to remove significant facial hair growth. It’s not my place to judge or criticize these women—but should they ask for it, I can offer them my help. That’s how I got involved in the hair and makeup side of competitions. I’m not saying that all my clients are trying to cover up masculinizing side effects of drug use, but there are a small percentage of women for whom this is true and those were the first ones I helped. Now I do hair and make up for all contest categories, from bodybuilding to figure and bikini.

As a female bodybuilder you walk a fine line. You love muscle, and yet you love being a woman at the same time. I have always embraced my feminine side. I love doing my hair, makeup, nails….and I love fashion. Go figure! I think that is what makes me interesting—being a sexy girl with muscles. I may not be the biggest girl when I compete, but I do have decent size. I am just not willing to sacrifice my femininity for size. I also think that more women would be interested in looking like Jillian Michaels with that type of body than to go to the extremes of muscle size that can only be achieved with significant drug use.

 Photo: Dan Ray

On Supplements
I have to touch on the drug issue because, like it or not, it is a part of the sport of bodybuilding. For myself, I have never considered bodybuilding to be my career, so I was never willing to take it to that extreme. You don’t make money in the sport—you make it from offshoots of the sport, be that modeling for fitness magazines, movie work, or whatever. You need to focus on the big picture, and when you take drugs the big picture outside the sport can go from poster to thumbnail size.

In addition, I have a career as a dietician and diabetes educator. I need to be conscious of the image I present to both patients and fellow professionals. For me, drug use would be professional suicide—and let’s face it, I did very well during my competitive career without them!

On Contest Prep
Contest preparation begins about 16 weeks before a show. You start becoming more aware of your hair, your skin, your nails—everything. I don’t color my hair until about two weeks before a competition. That way it’s clean, healthy, and not over-processed. I also exfoliate my skin—more than I would just for myself—to make sure I have no blemishes. I also get facials three weeks before the show and start tanning about 10 weeks prior to competing. I never tan my face—only my body. Tanning can be extremely aging to the skin, and I’m not into that!

 Photo: Dan Ray

On Adolescence
When I was 12 years old I saw pictures in a magazine of Cory Everson and Rachel McLish and liked that look. My dance teacher at the time was muscular and I recall her saying she wanted to be thinner. But I loved those bigger, muscular bodies. Back then I was really skinny—I came from a family of skinny minnies—and I never considered myself as looking good. To me I looked frail and not interesting. At that time I was also diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, which made me feel weak, broken—even damaged. I remember asking my doctor what I could do to make this situation better, and he said I had to pay attention to my diet and start working out. So I started going to the gym at a very young age—I really didn’t know what I was doing, but I went! It gave me a feeling of empowerment. I felt stronger and ultimately more accepting of my body. I got hooked on feeling strong.

On “Attention: Bodybuilder Ahead!”
I really don’t use this body I’ve built as a tool to get attention in everyday life…but I have to admit that I do love attention. People make comments—which are for the most part positive—and I get a kick out of how some people respond to me. Like, they always say, “Oh, I want to arm wrestle you.” I live in New York and the people here are very accepting of individualism, so I rarely get negative remarks aimed in my direction. 

People aren’t used to seeing a woman with muscle, though, so they do stare. We aren’t really brought up to know how to respond to a muscular woman. All I know is that it gives me a level of confidence and strength which I was lacking before, and people can feel that from me. That tempers their response.

On Perfection
Bodybuilding challenges our conditioning about what beauty looks like. With a muscular body you are creating art. I was always classed as “pretty,” but I wanted more. I am a total type-A overachiever—I’ve always been that way. And for me, building my body and reducing my body fat was a logical step toward perfection. When you have toned your body, you have altered it, nurtured it, re-created it—and when you are lifting those weights you feel like a superhero. Bodybuilders may seem neurotic in their attention to detail, but who said that trying to achieve an ideal of perfection would be easy? It may not be easy, but is it worth it? Do I really need to answer that?!

 Photo: Ivana Ford