Permission to Flirt

Judgments, Rosea Lake

By now, you’ve probably seen art student Rosea Lake’s photo Judgments, which went viral earlier this month. Unlike, say, videos of children on laughing gas, this went viral for a very specific reason: It does what the strongest images do, namely that whole “worth a thousand words” bit. Judgments communicates the constant awareness of, well, judgments that women face every day we leave the house (and probably some when we don’t), and I won’t say much more about the actual image because it speaks well for itself.

That said, I’ve read commentary on the image that has also struck a chord, specifically Lisa Wade’s spot-on post at Sociological Images about how Judgments pinpoints the constantly shifting boundaries of acceptable womanhood, and then relates that to something women are mocked for: all those darn clothes (you know women!). “[W]omen constantly risk getting it wrong, or getting it wrong to someone. … . Indeed, this is why women have so many clothes! We need an all-purpose black skirt that does old fashioned, another one to do proper, and a third to do flirty....” Wade’s main point is an excellent one, as it neatly sums up not only what’s fantastic about the image but why women do generally tend to have more clothes than men.

But my personal conclusion regarding Lake’s piece was actually somewhat different: To me, it illustrates why my own wardrobe is actually fairly limited in range. The first time I saw it, I was struck by how effectively it communicates exactly what it communicates. The second time I saw it, though, I made it personal and mused for a moment about how save one ill-advised maxidress and one black sheath that hits just above the knee, literally every single one of my hemlines is within an inch of “flirty.” This is semi-purposeful: It’s a flattering length on me, and I’m a flattery-over-fashion dresser, so I’ve stuck strictly with what works. And isn’t it a funny coincidence that what happens to flatter my figure just happens to be labeled as “flirty” here, when in fact “flirty” is probably, for the average American urban thirtysomething woman, the most desirable word on this particular chart to be described as? (Depending on your social set you might veer more toward proper or cheeky, and of course I don’t actually know which of these words women in my demographic would be likely to “choose” if asked, but I have a hard time seeing most of my friends wanting to be seen as prudish—or, on the other end, as a slut.)

Of course, it’s not a coincidence, not at all. I may have believed I favored that hem length because it hits me at a spot that shows my legs’ curves (before getting to the part of my thighs that, on a particularly bad day, I might describe as “bulbous”). And that’s part of the reason, sure, but I can’t pretend it’s merely a visual preference of mine. As marked on Judgments, that particular sweet spot—far enough above the knee to be clear that it’s not a knee-length skirt, but low enough to be worn most places besides the Vatican—also marks a sweet spot for women’s comportment. Flirty shows you’re aware of your appeal but not taking advantage of it (mustn’t be cheeky!); flirty grants women the right to exercise what some might call “erotic capital” without being seen as, you know, a whore. Flirty lends its users a mantle of conventional femininity without most of femininity’s punishments; flirty marks a clear space of permission. Curtailed permission, yes, but sometimes a skirt’s gotta do what a skirt’s gotta do, right? So, no, it’s no accident that nearly all my dresses fall to this length. I wear “flirty” skirts in part because I play by the rules. I’ve never been good at operating in spaces where I don’t have permission to be.

Of course, that permission will change: The lines as shown on Judgments indicate not only hemlines and codes women are judged by, but where women are allowed to fall at any particular age. A “provocative” teenager might be slut-shamed, but she isn’t told to keep it to herself; a 58-year-old with the same hemline might well be told just that, if not in as many words. “Proper” isn’t necessarily a sly way of saying “frowsy” when spoken of a middle-aged woman, as it would be for a 22-year-old.

Given how widely this photo made the rounds, it’s clear it struck a nerve, and I’m wondering what that nerve is for other viewers, in relation to their personal lives—and personal wardrobes. Do you take this as commentary on rigid rules for women, or on the constant flux of expectations—or are those just two expressions of the same problem? Do you dress within “permission,” or do you take pleasure in disregarding permission altogether? Or...?

On Veterans Day

"Nicky," Here Are the Young Men, Claire Felicie, 2009–2010

When I write here of beauty, most of the time I’m actually writing of convention—of what we as a culture have given our stamp of approval in the realm of beauty. The point isn’t any person’s actual appeal; the point is the standards and parameters we create around beauty.

But the way I experience beauty in my day-to-day life is personal, not sociological. When I register someone as beautiful—that is, when a person shows up on my radar as you should continue to look—it’s because of a quality the person has. A flicker in the eyes, a smirk, the way the person moves. That sounds vague because it is vague, it has to be vague, because if it were charted and fully understood, it might lose its properties of fascination. Beauty’s ineffability is part of what makes it register to us as beauty.

It's that elusive transcendence—which may or may not be beauty—that comes to mind with Claire Felicie’s remarkable photographs of soldiers taken before, during, and after their tours of Afghanistan, titled Here Are the Young Men. If you saw these photographs absent of context, some of them might have that sort of unclassifiable but intriguing quality about them to you; others wouldn’t. But when you learn that these were taken before, during, and after a life-changing experience that most of us will thankfully never know for ourselves, other qualities leap forward. Aversion, deadening, patience, cynicism, hatred, weariness, reluctance: The photos reflect something more complex than a mere loss of innocence. The phrase “the fog of war” refers to the shrouding of facts, evidence, and ability to determine the best course of action that something as extraordinary as war brings. I think of it here because of these men’s faces: You can’t look at them and draw any sort of universal conclusion. Some men look like the grew into themselves during their tour, a sort of adultness settling across their face. Other men, afterward, are unable to look into the camera. There’s no one way to know how war will change any individual, or any nation.

These photos also call into focus the fluctuating gap between what we really see and what we expect to see, both overshadowed by our knowledge that predetermination will change what we see. As Heather Murphy writes on Slate’s photo blog, “[T]here is something else in that third picture; a dullness to the eyes, a stiffness to the jaw. Isn’t there? What’s interesting about this project is that you can convince yourself that someone changed dramatically from middle to right, only to compare right to left and talk yourself out of it. It must just be angle or lighting, you say.” Yet Murphy reaches the same conclusion I do: “But even after you’ve concluded that wrinkle isn't really any bigger, it's undeniable that there is a difference. … It's not about the obvious clues like a frown or matted hair, but something far more nuanced.”

This can be applied in a far broader context: How our assumptions regarding people’s experiences color how we visually perceive them. Those broader applications are worth looking at, but today, for once I’m not thinking of how to make these questions bigger. I’m thinking of the soldiers—the veterans—and their before, during, and after. Whatever any of us may think of the war in Afghanistan, these people were there fulfilling their duty—as many of our parents did in Vietnam, our grandparents in WWII, our great-grandparents in the Great War that made the eleventh day of the eleventh month a global call for peace, and a global remembrance of those who served. I don’t want to glorify war or its participants by commenting upon Veterans Day. But an honoring needn’t be one of glorification; it can be an honoring of experience. And today, we honor just that.

Strike a Pose: Vogue, Eating Disorders, and Desire

Vogue stopped using bird models in 1921.

Several years ago, after a long day at the magazine I was freelancing for at the time, I hailed a cab and cried the whole way home. The chief cause of the crying was the last task I’d had to do at the office before departing for the night: Communicating to the art department that a top editor wanted to digitally slim a celebrity whose former battles with anorexia were well-documented in the press. Transcribing her request onto the circulating page proof, every stroke of every letter felt like it was being scratched upon my skin. I hated that anyone would look at this particular picture of the (trim, lovely, recovered) celebrity and want it trimmer still, I hated that it was part of my job to communicate this request, I hated that the editor was so high up as to make it improper for a lowly freelance copy editor to question her, I hated that the people reading the final product wouldn’t understand all the labor that goes into making beautiful people look beautiful on the page. Most of all, I hated that the celebrity might look at the story, spot the digital manipulation, and yearn for her days of hunger. I hated it.

So you would think that I’d be thrilled about Vogue’s recent announcement that they are no longer going to work with models who appear to have an eating disorder, will encourage designers to consider their practice of unrealistically tailored sample sizes, and will be “ambassadors for the message of healthy body image.” All 19 global editions of the world’s leading fashion magazine signed on to the pledge, this after an international flurry of other body image actions in the world of high fashion: Italy and Spain’s leading fashion coalitions banned models with BMIs deeming them underweight, and in March Israel recently passed a law doing the same. And indeed, I felt a wash of righteous joy when I read about the announcement: I mean, this is Vogue we’re talking here. Vogue! The emblem of why the fashion world is so often hostile to women’s bodies, the embodiment of the severe impact the thin-young-and-beautiful imperative has on women worldwide. Let’s be clear: This is a good thing. But for the reader, it’s not as good as it seems.

The impact here appears to be significant, yes. Its largest actual impact is on the labor force in question: In addition to no longer working with models who “appear to have an eating disorder,” Vogue will not work with models under age 16 (and will ask casting directors to check identification), implement mentoring programs for mature models to give guidance to beginners, and encourage producers to provide privacy and healthy food backstage. Modeling is precarious work, a fact often overshadowed by its glamour in the public eye; for Vogue to publicly acknowledge that its success is partially built upon the backs of young, precarious laborers, often émigrés from developing or unstable nations, does a real service to those workers, and that fact shouldn’t be lost.

It’s the last item on Vogue’s six-point list that nags at me: We will be ambassadors for the message of healthy body image. To herald Vogue as a game-changing ambassador of healthy body image is to forget that fashion photography is specifically designed to elicit a response—yearning—within us, and few things in our culture inspire yearning like thinness. To point out the obvious: Thinness will never disappear from Vogue’s pages, only ill, underage models. Fashion photography is transportive, both real and unreal. The point for the reader has never been to be able to actually imagine ourselves in the photograph. Let the fashion still lifes do that; we can step into that empty dress, slip our arms through that stack of bracelets. The point of fashion photography is to synthesize distance and reality as we recognize it: It has to be close enough to what we recognize as real to trigger our response, but far enough away to make sure that response leaves us wanting, not contented. This is what fashion photography does; this is what makes it compelling. Longing built into its very function.

“The history of photography could be recapitulated as the struggle between two different imperatives,” writes Susan Sontag in On Photography. “[B]eautification, which comes from the fine arts, and truth-telling, which is measured not only by a notion of value-free truth, a legacy from the sciences, but by a moralized ideal of truth-telling, adapted from nineteenth-century literary models and from the (then) new profession of independent journalism.” Fashion magazines epitomize both of these imperatives: Grace Coddington’s magnificent styling certainly falls into the realm of the fine arts, but fashion magazines are always ultimately selling and promoting products that actually exist and are for sale—that is, they have an amoralized ideal of truth-telling. (Not that selling is without morals, but the sort of truth that advertising purports is quite different than the sort of truth we get from photojournalism. A seller’s intent, even if it’s a positive one, doesn’t stem from morality.) Even if few readers of Vogue are actually able to purchase the clothes on its pages, they can buy the fast fashion knockoffs; they can be inspired by the looks on the pages.

And, of course, they can be inspired by—and aspire to—thinness. Thinness became encoded as a part of the creation of desire, for all sorts of reasons that, if you’re reading this, you probably understand. The thinking here is that Vogue’s move to not use models who appear to have eating disorders will help separate that encoding; certainly Vogue will remain a manufacturer of desire, and they have all sorts of talent beyond emaciated models to do so. I’d love to see thinness separated from desire just as much as the next woman. But the Vogue announcement, on balance, is never going to be a part of that, for on the most basic level, simply refusing to work with models who “appear” to have an eating disorder hardly means the thin imperative will vanish from Vogue’s pages. We have encoded acquisitional desire as thinness—you can never be too rich or too thin—and the entire industry is predicated upon acquisitional desire. Yes, yes, magazines should do their part to end the conflation of thinness and desire, and on the most perfunctory level, Vogue has done so. But the work—the real work—must go far deeper.

For as significant as it is that it’s Vogue, with all its class and tastemaking connotations, making this announcement, it’s also a double-edged sword. If the go-to reference for the absurdity of the thin imperative has always been Vogue, and then Vogue says it’s switching up the game, we’ve suddenly lost our reference point. Yet the referent still exists. Models are going to remain far thinner than the average woman, fashion images will continue to do their job of creating longing and desire, and otherwise sensible women will keep doing the master cleanse. All that has changed besides models' labor conditions is that Vogue gets to seem like it's doing the right thing, and those who have been agitating for body positivity get to feel like we've made progress. Vogue is doing nothing truly radical to change the thin imperative, and to pretend otherwise is to silently walk in lockstep with the very system that put us in this situation to begin with.

There are other concerns with the announcement as well. Some argue it doesn’t go far enough, and I’d agree; certainly not everyone who has an eating disorder "appears" to have one, and when you’re talking about a workforce whose livelihood depends upon skilled manipulation of self-presentation, that risk runs even higher. I’m also a hair suspicious of the timing—both as a PR move to smooth over damage done by “the Vogue mom,” whose controversial piece in the April issue detailed putting her 7-year-old on a diet, and as a reaction to where Vogue is positionally. The circulation of American Vogue dipped 1.7% in the first quarter of 2012 (though it did extraordinarily well in 2011, earning the title of Ad Age’s magazine of the year), and the slow decline of its readers’ personal income may be figuring into their outlook. From 2008 to 2011, Americans’ average per capita income grew slightly (with some recession dips); in that same period, the Vogue reader’s median income dropped, from $64,429 in 2008 (which in and of itself was a 2.3% dip from 2007) to $63,094 today. This keeps Vogue readers substantially above the national per capita income, but I can’t help but wonder if this is an acknowledgment of the behind-the-scenes middlebrowing of the title. For all its prestige and class connotations, Vogue hasn’t been as highbrow as we might think; when I worked at a teen magazine a few years ago, I was surprised to find that readers’ parents were slightly better off than Vogue readers. And let’s not overlook that Conde Nast’s truly highfalutin’ title, W—which has a median reader income of $155,215—has made no such announcement. W has the luxury of doing whatever the hell it wants; Vogue needs to stay relevant to people outside the inner circle in order to continue its success. I’d like to think that prestige audiences care about body image diversity as much as the average American woman, but I’d be thinking wrong.

Despite my arguments here, I am pleased that Vogue is making efforts to stay relevant and on-point with a growing national conversation about body image. I’m critiquing, not criticizing, the announcement. It’s at least a gesture in the right direction—and it’s showing that a critical mass of complaints and activism can actually work, which is enormously encouraging for all the body image and media literacy advocates who work tirelessly in the face of some daunting and culturally embedded issues. And, again, the labor impact here is significant. But as far as its larger impact on readers, I’m not ready to cheer. Short of a complete and total ideological overhaul, there is nothing Vogue could do to truly change the story, for it’s a business that revolves around creating and sating acquisitional desire; it’s why Gloria Steinem referred to the relationship between advertising and women’s publications as the “velvet steamroller.” The policy changes won’t hurt women’s body image, I don’t think. Neither will it truly help. As long as Vogue is a part of the machine of desire—and there is no way for it not to be—the narrative will remain the same; imagery, truth, and beautification will continue their morality play; and readers will receive the same message they always have. And a very thin band will silently play on.

Thoughts on a Word: Glamour (Part II)

I’ve had my chance to expound on glamour (which, of course, I did from my chaise longue with a Manhattan in hand while my protégé took dictation), but the concept of glamour is intriguing enough to warrant a revisiting—not from me, but from four women who each have their own distinct relationship with glamour. I’m delighted that each of them—author Virginia Postrel, publicist Lauren Cerand, artist Lisa Ferber, and novelist Carolyn Turgeon—took the time and effort to share their thoughts on glamour with me. And now, with you.

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Virginia Postrel, author, columnist, and speaker who is currently writing a book about glamour, to be published by The Free Press in early 2013. She explores "the magic of glamour in its many manifestations" at DeepGlamour.net, a group blog.

Like humor, glamour arises from the interaction of an audience and an object. Someone or something is always glamorous to a specific audience. So there has to be something about the glamorous object that triggers and focuses the audience's desires—that makes them project themselves into the glamorous image and feel themselves somehow transformed. But those qualities are different in different contexts, and they may not even be things that are widely recognized as "glamorous."

A good way to understand glamour is to start not with fashion or people but with the glamour of travel. Think of classic travel posters and contemporary resort ads, with their images of exotic locales, peaceful beaches, or seemingly effortless transportation. What makes an image of the New York skyline, a cruise ship against the blue Mediterranean, or Ankgor Wat at dawn so alluring? Why does the sight of a jet rising against a sunset or full moon seem so glamorous?

The glamour of travel lies first in its promise to lift us out of our everyday existence. We project ourselves into this new and special place, imagining that there we will fulfill our unsatisfied longings—whatever they may be. Just getting away doesn’t make travel glamorous, however. Going every year to your family’s cabin on Lake Michigan may be fun, but it’s too familiar for glamour. A glamorous destination is at least a little bit exotic. It shimmers with the possibilities of the unknown. Its mystery not only stokes imagination. It also heightens the good and hides the bad (or the banal, like all the other tourists congregating to snap Angkor Wat at dawn). As the great studio-era photographer George Hurrell put it: “Bring out the best, conceal the worst, and leave something to the imagination.”

The glamour of travel illustrates the three elements found in all forms of glamour: mystery, grace, and the promise of escape and transformation. These elements explain why certain styles or codes seem to spell “glamour.”

Take fashion. If glamour by definition requires elements of mystery and aspiration—escape from the ordinary—then the clothes you wear or see on the street every day are not going to be glamorous. Hence we often associate glamour with the kinds of extraordinary evening wear that few people can afford and even fewer have any occasion to wear. But, depending on the audience, other forms of fashion can be glamorous. Vintage styles that represent some idealized period in the past are an obvious example. So are sneakers associated with great athletes. Even something as mundane as a business suit can be glamorous if it represents a career you aspire to but have not (yet) achieved.

The "codes of glamour" change with the audience and the times. The iconography of glamour in 1930s Hollywood films—bias-cut satin gowns, "big white sets," lots of glitter and shine—is quite different from Grace Kelly in the New Look, sweater sets, and pearls. Yet we think of both as classically glamorous.

Like humor, glamour sometimes emerges spontaneously and sometimes is actively constructed. Some things tend to stay glamorous, or funny, over time. Others cease to have the right effect. Mink coats used to be a quick way of signaling a kind of glamour. I'd argue that they've been replaced with another cliche: the hot stone massage photos you see everywhere. The massage photos also show indulgent feminine luxury, but they appeal to different longings—not so much for social status as for pampering and relaxation, a private experience rather than a social good. Similarly, I write about how wind turbines have become glamorous symbols of technological optimism, in the same way that rocket ships were in the 1950s and early '60s.

Finally, some things are glamorous without being widely recognized as such. The bridge of the Starship Enterprise is intensely glamorous to a certain audience. It elicits the same kind of projection and longing that other people feel when they think of Paris or haute couture, and it also shares the three essential elements of glamour.

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Lauren Cerand, independent public relations consultant. She shares notes on living at LuxLotus.com.

Glamour is the word, pertaining to me, that I hear most often from other people, and, in truth, the word I think of least on my own (conceptually, I gravitate toward things that are elegant, or correct, or comfortingly archaic, and, most importantly, eschew embellishment of any kind. I'm a minimalist with opulent taste). That makes sense, though, if, to quote Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie, whom I heard read her poem "Glamourie" in Edinburgh years ago, "glamour is a Gaelic word," intended to mean a sort of enchanting trickery, "fairy magic" cast down over the eyes of the unsuspecting (sophistication also had similar implications, of a gloss for the purposes of deceptive artifice, in its early usage, according to Faye Hammill's wonderful cultural study, Sophistication, on University of Liverpool Press). Glamour certainly seems to play out that way, as a quality of perception more than direct experience. I don't think then, that I could regard myself as glamorous. I simply make a living from having a semi-public life and the fact that people admire my personal taste enough to emulate it. While I never stretch the truth, as lying takes too much time and I am always short of it, I am a private person at heart and so I can see the tantalizingly faint trail of breadcrumbs that I leave behind, twinkling in starlight, inspiring one to imagine the cake from which they must have fallen. Perhaps now and then it really was that grand. It could be our secret, but I'd never tell.

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Lisa Ferber, artist, playwright, performer, and bonne vivante. Peruse her works at LisaFerber.com, and keep an eye out for her upcoming web series, The Sisters Plotz.

The funny thing about glamour is that an exact definition of the word is as elusive as the quality itself. The quality is like a special fairy dust that makes a person sparkle; you can’t put your finger on precisely what it is. I think it has to start from within. When I see today’s teenage starlets trying to pull off 1940s Old Movie Star Glamour, I just think, Um, no, you can’t just do a deep side-part and red lipstick and think now you’re Ava Gardner. But there’s this woman who works the bread counter at Zabar’s who I admire because there she is in her white bread-counter smock, but she’s probably in her 60s and always has a full face of makeup on, and sparkly barrettes in her nicely done hair, and she’s gorgeous and all dressed up to work the bread counter. Whenever I see her I have to repress blurting out, “You are my hero! You look like a movie star!”

It absolutely cannot be purchased, but I do think there is an aspect of formality involved. Glamour always involves looking pulled together. Even if the look is over-the-top, it has to come across as though there was care taken. That's part of the mystique. Glamour implies that everything you meant to do is coming across just as you want it to. It’s hard to be glamorous in a track suit, but if you really want to do it that way, you can go over the top with heels and baubles and make it eccentric, because eccentricity done right can exude glamour. I think the best glamour will teeter on eccentricity, because it’s about going just a little bit too far. All the photos I love from early 20th century photographers like Horst and Irving Penn are about going too far…giant hats, luxurious gowns...clothes that serve no practical purpose, and therein lies their glamour. Because glamour is about transcending the everyday.

When people have called me glamorous, it thrills me, because I have always felt a kinship with those old-school 1930s and 1940s women. People have always told me that I seem like I’m from another time, which I think is funny because it’s not really something I’m trying to do; it’s just how I am. I’ve painted from photos of Carole Lombard, Liz Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, Jean Harlow…all of them have that Something, where it would be impossible to imagine them ever looking disheveled or weighed down by life’s woes, though of course we know they were real women with all the problems people have.

Recently I shot the first episode of my new web series, The Sisters Plotz. I wrote it, and it stars TV icons Eve Plumb, Lisa Hammer, and me (Hammer also directs). Eve, Lisa, and I were shooting a street scene in which we are dressed like glamour girls from the 1930s, and everyone we passed on the street would smile at us and tell us how great we looked. And it wasn't just because we looked "good" or were dressed up; it's because glamour, particularly the old-school, dedicated, womanly glamour of the 1930s, has an effect on people. It says just check your troubles at the door and be your glorious self. Glamour is transportive in that sense. I think glamour means a person has a quality of being slightly outside—dare I say above?—the normal realm of boring problems. A few years ago, I was going through a tough time, and my wonderful friend Chris Etcheverry gave me this gorgeous green-tiled art-deco mirror, and he said, “I know things are hard for you right now, and you might not feel your best, so whenever you aren’t feeling so good, I want you to look in this mirror and remind yourself that you are glamorous.” And I knew what he meant is that I have something inside, that glamour is a strength from the inside that allows you to transcend life’s unpleasantries.

Glamour is a quality that makes someone look and seem Famous; it’s intriguing, it is the quality that makes people wonder who you are, and what your secret is. A person finds their own glamour—it’s not about being an 8-year-old wearing expensive clothes, rather it’s about developing yourself so that you’re a person with a Something. I was watching a biography on the fantastic Gertrude Berg, the entertainment pioneer who created The Goldbergs, and her son was saying that she always dressed a certain way and had a quality about her, where people would see her and even if they didn’t know who she was, they could tell she was somebody. That’s glamour.

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Carolyn Turgeon, author of Rain Village, Godmother, Mermaid, and The Next Full Moon, coming out in March. She blogs at IAmaMermaid.com about all things mermaid.

With glamour, I see images. I see red lipstick, I see arched brows. I see Marlene Dietrich, Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard, Greta Garbo. I see sitting in a satin bed with bonbons. I see glittery, shiny things, I see everything in black-and-white, old-timey, leopard print. Glamour takes what’s beautiful and chic and makes it over-the-top. The first time I went to Dollywood—I love Dolly Parton—I went to the museum, and it’s full of all her crazy rhinestone-crusted paraphernalia. There’s this quote there where she says that she knows people might think she’s ridiculous and laugh at her, but she was this girl from the mountains who grew up running around barefoot, so to her, this is beautiful. The rhinestones and the glitter. She doesn’t care if some people think it’s ridiculous. She’s like a little girl playing dress-up, reveling in the artifice of it. Glamour can be a little like that, a way to add fabulousness and fantasy and a little over-the-top shimmer to your regular life.

Glamorous doesn’t have to be beautiful. In terms of female beauty, you can take a natural-looking girl without makeup on the beach and she might be really beautiful, but not glamorous. Glamour is, by definition, unnatural; it's about adornment and style; it’s about knowingly adorning yourself in a way that hearkens back to certain images that are cool and dreamy, otherworldly. Not everyone can be beautiful, but anyone can be glamorous, because it's something you can actually do. I like that any woman can put on really red lips, get an old travel valise and a little muff, and wear sunglasses on top of her head. (Of course men can do all these things, too, and become, among other things, that most glamorous of creatures, the drag queen.) It doesn’t matter how old she is, what color she is, whether she's rich or poor, big or small. It's the woman standing in shadow in the doorway, Marilyn standing over the subway grate, Garbo emerging from the smoke in Anna Karenina.

Say Cheese: On Smiling, Comfort, and Surrender

In the summer of 1986, a small item ran in the biweekly newspaper of Guymon, Oklahoma, that I am guessing went unremembered by all but one of the town’s 15,000 residents. The item in question was a column about how to look good in photographs, and I will paraphrase the part that stuck with me: If you want your face to look slimmer, tip your chin down when being photographed so that you are looking at the camera from a lowered gaze. And if you want to look seductive, smile faintly, without teeth.

I was both chubby and boy-crazy, giving this advice combination a compelling allure. As a result, nearly every single posed photograph of me between the ages of 9 and 34 shows some variation upon that look. Face slightly tipped down, eyes gazing up, smiling, no teeth.

Wholly Unnatural Photo Face: Exhibit A. 

This gaze works for me as an adult, to a degree, even if I question the "seductive" part of the equation. It certainly didn’t work for me at age 9; I looked as though I were attempting to seduce Pee-Wee Herman. But never mind that: I had a goal (slim, seductive) and a fool-proof way to achieve it (the advice column of my local biweekly newspaper), and it didn’t occur to me to question its efficacy. I practiced the look, goal in mind, and had a blind faith that it would make me appear slim and seductive. I stuck with it for 25 years.

Something else happened over those 25 years: I realized I preferred videos and candid photographs of myself over posed ones. Even if a candid shot caught me unkempt or making a weird face, I was able to laugh it off; I didn’t take it as any sort of statement about how I “actually” looked. But a bad posed photograph seemed an indictment. I resigned myself to not ever having a good posed photograph of myself, and in fact made my preference for candid photographs sort of a semi-feigned quirk about myself, semi-feigned quirks being the saving grace for many an analytical lady.

But early last year, in an online space far less kind than The Beheld, a stranger commented that I looked like I was “sucking on a lemon.” The more I looked at the photograph in question—a photograph I’d selected because I found it to be an artful arranging of my features—the more I realized the commenter was right, if unkind. I couldn’t very well avoid posed photographs all my life, and it was clear my 25-year-old trick wasn’t working for me anymore. I tried a handful of new tips, culled from fashion magazines instead of Dust Bowl newspapers, to become a little more photogenic. I tried gazing at the camera as though it were someone I loved; I tried blinking before the flash went off; I even tried saying prune, advice I picked up from none other than the Olsen twins. None of it worked.

No, but really, I like lemons.

A total stranger could tell my “photo face” wasn’t me, but it took a professional to tell me why. Around the time I started trying to shed my photo face, I interviewed photographer Sophie Elgort. I’d reached out to her for her thoughts on fashion—which were insightful—but it was her thoughts on being photogenic that resonated. “If somebody’s not comfortable—in person or in a photo—it’s pretty obvious,” she told me (while I, of course, was arranging my face so as not to let on that she was talking directly about me). “The difference between somebody who’s photogenic and somebody who’s not is that people who aren’t photogenic are sometimes nervous in front of a camera. They make weird twitches, or they’ll sort of crane their neck or purse their lips or do something that’s obviously not them, because they’re nervous. If you keep shooting, you can get them more into their natural element and you can get a good photo from people who say, ‘Oh, I’m not photogenic.’ You’re not unphotogenic; it’s that you’re usually posing, putting on this ridiculous face that’s not you. How can you expect to look like your best self in a photo if you’re putting on a ridiculous face?”

No wonder I liked candid photographs so much more than posed ones. I was so uncomfortable with how I appeared—face too full, lips too uneven—that I was doing everything I could to control my looks, for we try to control what we find uncomfortable. The result was not only tortured but inaccurate: Like the mirror face, the photo face is an exercise in manipulation, in falsehood. We cannot look like ourselves when we are attempting to manipulate the camera. And, as Sophie says, we cannot look our best when we don’t look like ourselves. In trying to manipulate myself into looking my best, I manipulated my way right out of it.

With every photograph taken of me, I was attempting to control something uncontrollable — my very face. And the thing is, I wasn’t fooling anyone, not even myself. Whenever I’d cringe at a photo, I was cringing not at how I looked, but at my failed manipulation. For the small, constant acts of management were revealing not only a physical truth (that I do have a full face, that my eyes aren’t as Bambi-like as I’d prefer) but a deeper truth that I wanted to keep hidden—that I wasn’t comfortable with how I looked. There was a reason I preferred videos and candid photographs of myself to posed shots—in those images, I’d surrendered control. I wasn’t attempting to slim my face or appear alluring; I wasn’t attempting to do anything other than be myself. And in being my candid, full-cheeked, pointy-toothed self, whatever charm I have was able to shine. As Sophie put it, “There’s no way you can show your charisma if you’re not acting like yourself.”

Of course, it’s hard to “be yourself” on command. And becoming comfortable with oneself is a lifelong process; I wanted to start looking normal in photos now. The solution came when I asked a highly photogenic friend how she did it. She said a few things I’d heard, tried, and discarded, and I started filing away her advice along with other well-meaning words from people to whom certain things come so naturally as to be inexpressible. Then she shrugged. “Or, you know, I heard this once—just give the camera your biggest, toothiest, cheesiest smile, even if you don’t mean it.” I flashed her the cheesy smile she was referring to, thinking she would get that I was poking fun at the idea. She just said, “Yes, like that.”

So I started to smile. Yellowed teeth, uneven lips, wide face be damned, I smile now, in nearly every photograph. I smile big and broad and with teeth. I try to laugh sometimes too, but if nothing genuinely funny comes to mind I skip the laugh and just smile. I don’t tip my head down; I don’t throw my head back; I don’t think about where my head is at all. I just fucking smile.

And as it turns out, there is a reason smiling is the #1 classic photo advice: It works. It works better than tipping your head down and keeping your lips closed; it works better than looking a hair above the photographer to keep the impression of a lofty gaze; it works better than whatever the Olsen twins might tell you.

Thanks to the lovely Paige S. and Beth Mann for the photos;
certainly my smile experiment is helped along by good company

But wait! you say. How is a fake smile any less of a manipulation than tilting your head and lowering your gaze and doing all that jazz you’ve been doing for 25 years that you just told us was some “manipulation of the self”? The answer: It isn’t. But the control of a smile versus other small manipulations takes a different tone. A smile is a signal of openness; it’s an invitation. We smile when we’re nervous or unsure (particularly women), but one reason we reach for a smile in those moments is that it soothes both the person smiling and the person being smiled at. In other words, a smile makes us comfortable. It can be a manipulated comfort, but posing for a photograph is a manipulated situation to begin with. The implied acquiescence of a smile is what can make it troublesome from a feminist perspective (“Hey baby, where’s your smile?”), and it’s also what makes some non-smiling portraits so arresting—it’s a display of resistance. But in the average, run-of-the-mill photo where I just want to look good—or rather, where I just want to look like myself—I’ll call upon the big, fake, cheesy photo smile.

I’m happy to let a photographed smile do its immediate work of making me appear more comfortable with myself. And perhaps seizing the control of a smile is just another roadblock to the goal of actually being comfortable; after all, I’m still not thrilled with my full cheeks and my small, uneven teeth. But here’s the key: The control I’m seizing no longer makes me uncomfortable. Instead of attempting to adjust my face—my face! the face I’ll have all my life!—I’m adjusting the sentiment it wears. I’m controlling my looks by adjusting the emotions I’m telegraphing, not by adjusting my actual features, which I was never able to truly control anyway. Call it something as simple as an attitude adjustment. I suppose, quite literally, that’s exactly what it is.

I try not to overidentify with photographs of myself; I try to see them as the snapshots they are, not as a representation of how I exist in this world. I probably don’t succeed. But if I’m going to fail in that regard, I may as well be overidentifying with someone smiling back at me, someone extending a temporary reprieve from self-consciousness. Someone offering, for a brief yet semi-permanent moment, comfort.

Mirror Mirror or Your Wall

I’ve written a bit before on here about how I tend to prefer videos of myself to photos, and this TV segment on self-esteem follows that pattern, so I’m particularly pleased to share it with readers. Broadcast journalists Debra Pangestu and Malgorzata Wojtunik, graduate students from CUNY’s channel 75, produced this five-minute segment on women and self-esteem, using my month-long mirror fast from last May as one of the anchors of the piece.

Courtesy Malgorzara Wojtunik and Debra Pangestu;
if this doesn't load, you can watch it at Malgorzara's website. 

So! This is what I sound like! (You should watch the whole video, but if you're just dying to hear my voice, I come in around 0:55.) I do not have vocal fry! And I apparently wear far more bright colors than I had realized! And I laugh when I’m talking, that is when I’m not looking very very earnest! This is actually the first time I’ve been on video with this caliber of filming (when I say I prefer myself on video, I’m referring to goofy vacation clips of me singing “Allentown” while IN ALLENTOWN), and it's neat to see what a difference good lighting makes. (I tried to hire Debra and Malgorzata to follow me around with their lighting kit, but they had "work" to "do.") In any case, here I am.

But the segment has a greater message beyond just proving to you that I’m not actually a middle-aged monk named Brother Frankie who's just posing as a ladyblogger for kicks. It gets into questions of how we determine our self-esteem, and how much control we actually have over our own image. Setting up a contrast between our self-image as determined by the mirror and our self-image as determined by social media, the reporters talk to Amy Gonzales, a researcher whose work indicates that social media may have the potential to increase our self-esteem. (Yes, this runs somewhat contrary to that study last year that got everyone talking, about how the more photos you had on your profile, the lower your self-esteem, which just seemed like bollocks to me and other like minds.) Study participants were put in a room and asked to fill out a questionnaire designed to measure self-esteem. Some participants had access to their Facebook profile while filling out the survey, others had access to a mirror, and the control group had access to neither.

The TV segment reports that the mirror group scored lowest on the self-esteem survey and the Facebook group scored highest, which is true, but that’s not what grabs me the most. (The mirror group’s score was lower by a negligible amount.) What grabs me is how the ways people used Facebook affected their scores: People who viewed only their own profiles scored higher than those who looked at profiles of other people, and those who made changes to their profiles during the study had the highest self-esteem of all. Which is to say: It’s not affirmation from others on Facebook that leads to a self-esteem boost; it’s the ability to gaze at and manipulate your own image. A little like...mirror-gazing and applying makeup, you might say.

I’m pleased with the segment and think the reporters should be too—they reported on a widely done topic (self-esteem) with a fresh spin, and they did it with professional panache. But there’s one sentiment I somewhat disagree with: “We cannot control what we see in the mirror, but we can control what others see on social media networks like Facebook.” One of the biggest things I learned during my mirror fast was exactly how much I do control what I see in the mirror: My “mirror face,” for starters, which ensures I’ll always be seeing a wider-eyed, poutier-lipped version of myself than what you might see when you look at me. Then there’s makeup, hairstyles, lighting, angles—not for our Facebook photos, but for the mirror. (I’ll spend more time looking at my reflection in a fitting room that’s softly lit, with mirrors hung in a way that captures me at my best, as opposed to a harshly lit dressing room that makes me look dumpier than I probably am...I hope.) And then there’s mood, moment, preexisting conditions, daily events, chance comments—we take in all of these, and they shape what we see in the mirror. It may not be conscious, but we absolutely control what we see in the mirror.

One of the main differences might be that with the mirror, we control what we see; with social media, we control what others see. But even with this, the differences are blurred. It wasn’t until my mirror fast that I had to accept—really accept—that my mirror face isn’t the face any of you would see when talking with me. I thought I could control my appearance because I could control my visual image of myself, but in fact I can do nothing of the sort. After the mirror fast, I realized there's a reason I prefer videos and candid photos of myself: I'm not posing. In trying to control my appearance whenever I knew I was being photographed, I was robbing myself of the very thing that makes me appealing (besides my ever-present scent of daffodils)—my warmth. How warm can one be when arranging one's face into a series of manipulations designed to avoid all points of insecurity? I needed to divorce myself from that image entirely before I could understand that there was something to divorce myself from. The only person I'm fooling with my mirror face is myself. There's much to say about Facebook and authentic representations of the self—but in this particular way, social media might be a more accurate reflection of ourselves than what we see in the mirror.

Curating Ourselves: Facebook, Photography, and Good/Bad Pictures

While in the midst of a twentysomething identity crisis, I took a spate of deliberately ugly photographs of myself. I’d been possessed by a sudden fear that not only was I a troglodyte, but that I’d been a troglodyte all along and just hadn’t known it, so I decided to face my fear by proving that I could look like a troglodyte but wasn’t sentenced to it. The grand outcome was that I wound up with a bunch of troglodytic self-portraits. (I no longer believe I’m a troglodyte, for the record, but that’s a different post.) This was before digital cameras, and I’ve since lost the prints, but here’s a photograph that’s about on par with them:

Fun fact: The Troggs were originally called The Troglodytes!

It’s probably obvious why you haven’t seen this photograph before: It’s terrible. But it’s hilarious to me, and I’m reasonably assured that it in no way captures my essence. (Right?). That’s exactly why I can show it to you. What’s harder for me to put out there is this photograph:

It’s not like my eyes are half-closed or that I’m wearing a goofy expression, or that it highlights some flaw I’m self-conscious about (even if I do look a hair jowly). I dislike it not because it’s particularly unflattering, but because I look timid and reluctant. It was a fleeting moment (I was at a joy-filled brunch but was quite ready for my second bloody mary), but it captures my hesitant, mousy side—a side I’d prefer not to exist at all. Yet it’s easier for me to show you the first photo—taken at an unflattering angle, while I was making a weird face, halfway through a four-day backpacking excursion—than it is to show you the second, in which I look perfectly fine and have done a certain amount of "beauty work" to look presentable.

I write here about beauty: conventional prettiness, the beauty of the individual, the work we put into our appearance. But sometimes I lose sight of what’s at the heart of beauty work: the desire to be seen in the way we wish to be seen. In other words, our desire for beauty is often a desire to determine our image. How better to do that than to keep a tight control on the tangible images we supply to the world? Not for beauty’s sake—even the best portrait of me won’t turn me into Helen of Troy—but for the sake of the traits we think make us who we are. The images we select for sharing (or at least don’t quietly untag ourselves from on Facebook) are a better indicator of how we regard ourselves than the retouching we might do on any of them.

When we start talking about sharing photographs through social media, the importance of the photographs themselves diminishes in comparison to the sharing of them. Social media encourages us to fashion our identities through editing and telegraphing our tastes: Since we can’t list every musician we like, by selecting only a handful we’re telling the world that these are the tastes that really form who we are. It doesn’t matter if you know I like Fleetwood Mac, but if I don’t put out there that I’m a jazz fan, a crucial part of my taste identity is missing. (Actually, I deleted all my tastes from Facebook and now only “like” musicians and such whom I’m friends with, but even that’s another form of telegraphing something: Nyah nyah, you don’t know anything about me.)

In the same way, the photographs we choose to share of ourselves form another arm of our public identity—and because of the primal power images have, they take up more psychic room than listings of our favorite bands. How good we look isn’t the most important factor in deciding what photos of ourselves to publish, if my quick perusal of some friends’ Facebook photo albums applies across the board. Activity appears to be king: weddings, birthdays, big nights out, costumes, social gatherings—these are the photos Facebook showcases, not merely our sleekest, most groomed selves. For that’s the point, right? That Facebook allows us to share our real lives? But what that actually does is further the onus on each of us to only publish photos of ourselves that match the image we’d like to put forth into the world. And more often than not, that image is casual, carefree, not heavily styled—but looking pretty damn good. And why wouldn’t it? Back when we had to pay for each print and rely on the goodness of friends who bothered to make doubles of a roll of film from a party, we didn’t have the luxury of curating only the best photos of ourselves. Now there’s no reason for us to put forth photographs of ourselves that are downright unflattering—but more than that, there’s no reason for us to share photographs that don’t match our self-image in some way. Sometimes it can feel like there’s not even a reason to take a photo unless it’s going to be shared, making the act of sharing transcend the details of any given photo.

If sharing a photograph can transcend the photograph itself, sometimes the photo can transcend reality, something we recognized long before we could all easily create, discard, and share photographic evidence of our lives. “It is common now for people to insist about their experience of a violent event in which they were caught up—a plane crash, a shoot-out, a terrorist bombing—that ‘it seemed like a movie,’” writes Susan Sontag in On Photography, 1977. “This is said, other descriptions seeming insufficient, in order to explain how real it was.” We allow photographs to supplant memory, in part because they are static and reliable, and can be referred back to, where our memories become muddled. In the same way, portraits of ourselves become static, reliable externalizations of who we think we are, where our identity can become muddled. Beyond the awareness that everyone from our siblings to our employers to our exes might be able to see whatever images we put online, the most important recipient of the self-image telegraph we send through sharing photographs is ourselves. Photos become proxies for what we believe to be true of ourselves, and seeing a photograph of ourselves can serve as assurance that we are who we think we are—or, as anyone who has ever felt their heart fall a little upon seeing an unflattering photo of themselves knows, that we aren’t who we think we are.

But because photographs are often shared beyond our most important audience—ourselves—it feels important to “keep it real” and not put forth unrealistically beautiful images of ourselves either. If, as Tina Fey put it, feminist Photoshopping is retouching that makes you look “as if you were caught on your best day,” then social-media photo curation is making sure we’re shown in what appears to be a somewhat-but-not-remarkably-better-than-average day. The idea is that we’re captured as-is (even when we’re not); it’s part of the seamless sharing of self Facebook is designed for. And because of the supposed seamlessnes of our online and offline lives, if I put forth only my most luminous, well-styled, color-corrected portraits, the people who know the real-life non-color-corrected me can privately call bullshit on me, and I know they can. We each become our own photo editor, striving to make sure we look good but not too good in the photos we put into the world. (For the record, I have done the math and my public photos have a 12% bias toward being flattering. Those of you who haven’t met me, please adjust your mental image accordingly.)

Yet the question of how pretty or not pretty we look in the images we release to the world has become secondary to the question of self-curation. I don’t mean to say that we’re all anxiously poring over our photographs with a constant eye on our public image—but I’ve gotta say that when I looked at the photographs that I’ve actively shared of myself on Facebook, they don’t really resemble my actual life. (Arguably the photos others have posted and tagged me in are more realistic—but then, of course, I’m out on the town or in another situation that calls for a camera.) The pictures I’ve posted of myself reflect a side that I’d like to shine more brightly than it actually does: a seasoned traveler who’s up for anything, whether that be eating a horse burger in Slovenia, pouring a tray of mojitos for my coworkers, or riding a mechanical bull in midtown. (Ahem.)

In fact, my very favorite photo of myself—and yes, it’s on Facebook, and indeed is my profile photo on The Beheld—was taken toward the end of a trip I took to Vietnam. I was sitting alongside Hoan Kiem Lake in Hanoi, and a small boy started playing peekaboo with me. He seemed interested in my camera, so I took a couple of photographs of him, but he was less curious about that and more interested in operating it himself. He snapped this photograph of me:

It’s a good portrait of me because I am smiling the way I’d smile at a child with whom I’m having a delightful exchange; it reminds me of an adventuresome time in my personal history. It also happens to be a superbly, perhaps unrealistically, flattering photo. Who am I to say why I love the photo so much? Is it the memory, the light, the smile? Whatever it is, it’s become a talisman for what I would like to be true of myself: that I am not annoyed when a four-year-old wants to play with me, that I have unlimited time to lounge about southeast Asia, and, yes, that I’m constantly illuminated by a subtropical glow that emphasizes my suntan. I can’t claim that image is an accurate representation of me, but it’s what I offer myself. And it’s what, today, I offer to you.

Photoshop, Values, and the Rabbit Hole

"Feminists do the best Photoshop." —Tina Fey

Reading Rebekah’s “photo philosophy” made me consider my own. For a feminist beauty blog, I’ve barely touched on airbrushing here, and there’s a reason for that: It doesn't really faze me. It’s not that I don’t value what feminist scholars like the wonderful Beauty Redefined have to say about retouching; it’s that when you’re steeped in it all day, as I was when working in ladymags, you begin to see it as relatively benign. I tend to agree with Tina Fey’s assessment in Bossypants: “Photoshop is just like makeup.... If you’re going to expend energy being mad about Photoshop, you’ll also have to be mad about earrings. No one’s ears are that sparkly!... I for one and furious that people are allowed to turn sideways in photographs! I won’t rest until people are only allowed to be photographed facing front under a fluorescent light.”

I see the dangers of taking retouching for granted, but I’m more concerned with the number of images we’re faced with every day than what is done to any particular image. I’m thrilled that people are now educated on the preponderance of retouching, but done well, I don’t see it as particularly different than photographers using good lighting. 

More to the point here: On my own photos, I’m thrilled to have it. I’m glad to darken the eyes a little, take out a hint of shine, fix a blemish here or there. I agree with what Rebekah said in the post that inspired this one: “I want my photos to reflect the history of my life, not the history of how I wish my life had looked.” But I also agree with Fey, who wrote of her cover shoot with Bust: “Feminists do the best Photoshop… They leave in your disgusting knuckles, but they may take out some armpit stubble. Not because they’re denying its existence, but because they understand that it’s okay to make a photo look as if you were caught on your best day in the best light.”

I don’t need every photo to make me look like it’s my best day in the best light (and even if I did, I don’t have the skills do make that happen). But if there’s something I can alter digitally that I’d be able to fix with makeup or a lighting change, I’ll do it. I’ll blot out shine, smooth out lipstick, add a little mascara. I’ll take out acne, but not my (colorless) mole; I’ll play with the color balance to make me look more luminous, but I won’t alter the image to make me look lit like a movie star.

In the name of transparency, I’ll show you what I do:

The photo on the left is the original. The middle one is what I’d do if I were posting it to this blog: I put on a warm color filter and toned down the shine; it took about two minutes. The one on the right is what I’d do if I were supplying my photo to an outlet I thought might have a broad circulation—a writer pic in a print magazine, for example. (For that I’d probably try to take out the background too, but my powers are limited.) I refined the color balance, including darkening my neck so that my face doesn’t look quite as peachy. I took out the stray loop of hair and cleaned up the flyaways. I evened out the lipstick and further blotted the shine, though I left some in because I'm usually pretty shiny (you may call it dewy if you wish). I darkened the eye area to make it jump a bit more.

I also did something questionable on the last photo that I wouldn’t have done if this were a “real” situation: I ever so slightly trimmed my jawline on the right side of the picture (left side of my face). I’d like to say I purposefully did this as an illustration of how slippery the slope can be, but to be frank, that slippery slope was accidental. I’m justifying it by saying that my head was tilted so the flesh of my face was arranged a little oddly, but I know that’s a justification. I altered it because I could; I altered it because once I’d done all the other stuff—the stuff that could be fixed by a makeup application—I wanted to take it a step beyond. I wanted to see the jawline I had 10 pounds ago. I wanted to share that image with myself. And now—not in the name of beauty, but in the name of transparency and perhaps a hint of shame—I share it with you.

In the same way a photograph of an event can become a primary memory of the event, photographs can become extensions of our self-image; it’s why we can feel nearly affronted upon seeing a less-than-flattering photo of ourselves. And, for a moment, my self-image felt pretty good when I saw this brighter, more luminous version of myself. But I’m not about to argue that altering images to closer align with an imposed beauty standard should be any sort of stand-in for a healthy self-image. (I've got more thinking to do on this, clearly.) It was alarming to find myself going down the Photoshop rabbit hole: I thought I’d spend five minutes blotting my shine, and twenty minutes later I’d lost 10 pounds and had combed my hair. Perhaps that’s where the problem with Photoshop truly is: Not in the fact that it’s done, but in the fact that it can be difficult to know where the line should be drawn.

Like I said, I wouldn’t have shaved millimeters off my jaw if I were using this photo in another situation—if for no other reason because it would be disingenuous for a writer who covers women and imagery to do so. But if a retoucher took my raw photo and did the same, I probably wouldn’t even notice—it's barely perceptible, and more important, the altered photo matches my mental image of how I look at my best. I’d just be chuffed that it turned out so nicely, not knowing that the retoucher took my face into her hands and imposed her own ideas onto it. For that’s what we’re getting with retouching: Not just an unreal image, but craftsmanship, which reflects the aesthetics and values of the craftsman. My values allow for shine blotting and more luminous eyes; they don’t allow for jaw shaving. Someone else’s values might not allow for the eye touchup; another wouldn’t hesitate to do even more. Our cultural values have spoken pretty loudly about not wanting out-of-control airbrushing, but neither do we necessarily want raw images either—and even if we did, as per basic photographic theory (the photographer "retouches" merely by deciding where to point her camera), we’d be out of luck anyway.

What are your photographic values? Or, as Rebekah put it, what is your photo philosophy? Is it in line with how you’d alter or not alter your photographs? 

Edited to add: There's a poll on the right-hand sidebar of The Beheld. Where do you draw the photo retouching line? Please answer!

Beauty Blogosphere 10.7.11

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

From Head...
Beauty shy: If you're among the women (or men) who feel intimidated by makeup but are curious to try it, keep an eye on BeautyShy, a new site from Courtney of Those Graces. I'm eager to see how this develops—Courtney was one of the first feminist beauty bloggers I found when I started The Beheld, and while BeautyShy isn't explicitly feminist, the idea of makeup as a democratic form of beauty is. And when I think back to my makeover with makeup artist Eden DiBianco—and how it made me think about the power of dictating one's own image through cosmetics—it's clear that makeup itself can be a tool to examine beauty through a distinctly feminist lens.


...To Toe...
"Surely corns are the least of your problems": Interesting to see when our culture turns the tables on men and shames them for their moments of vanity/relaxation. Much like the great haircut debate of "Breck Girl" John Edwards (remember when that was the most inflammatory thing about him?), Michael Jackson doctor Conrad Murray makes headlines simply by getting a pedicure. Not sure how we'd handle this if the doctor were a woman.


...And Everything In Between
Makeup medium: Financial Times looks at artists using cosmetics as their medium, making me want to see the work of Karla Black, who sculpts with Lush bath bombs. 

Airborne: Charles Revson (founder of Revlon) was on the PanAm board of directors back in the day? No wonder flight attendants had to wear Revlon's Persian Melon lipstick as a part of their dress code, as some former stewardesses recall here.

Are women driving the luxury economy? This Motley Fool entry on thriving high-end markets makes me wonder: Lululemon, Estee Lauder, and Whole Foods are outvaluing their mid-market buddies (Nike, Revlon, Safeway). And don't even try to tell me that Whole Foods isn't squarely aimed at women.

Clean green fraud machine: The natural cosmetics market in Asia is plagued by fraudulent labeling, as it lacks even the private standards of North American and European markets. Not that we Americans are drowning in open information on what's in our cosmetics, as No More Dirty Looks' insight on the "Safe Cosmetics Alliance" shows.

A Map of the Open Country of a Woman's Heart, at American Antiquarian

Antique beauty: Investigate the history of women and appearance in America with this thoroughly fascinating online exhibit of women in 19th-century prints. Whether it's looking at the ways America's first women were depicted, examining how images formed early ideas of "erotic capital," proffering evidence of how women's bodies have pretty much always been used in advertising (sheet music!), or showing "A Map of the Open Country of a Woman's Heart," the collection is worth your time.

Tool kit: So it's official, per an evolutionary psychologist and a major cosmetics producer: Makeup makes you seem more likeable. I'm certain I'll have more to say on this study soon (thank you to everyone who sent it my way! I love it when people see something and think, That's Beheld material...) but for now I'll just point you to nice commentary on it over at The Gloss and The Look.

Pulchronomics: Harvard sociologist Hilary Levey Friedman reviews Beauty Pays by Daniel Hamermesh. In looking at the body of work surrounding academic study of beauty, I've found Hamermesh's work to be more solid than most—but I'm a writer, not an academic. To have Levey Friedman point out how dated the research Hamermesh is drawing on—and why that matters when talking about beauty in the labor market—illustrates the difficulty of "proving" the role of beauty. (Also, new word! Pulchronomics, from Latin pulcher, meaning beauty, and economics: the economics of beauty.)

Kooky but true: Why you shouldn't wear nail polish before surgery.

In scientia veritas: A take on a Burt's Bees ad that calls the scientific name of ingredients "ugly": "[The applied chemistry] system has a complex-sounding name for just about every component of milk and honey, too. But it’s impossible for anyone to know that without having a certain background in the naming system. Take glucose, one of the pieces of ordinary table sugar and something that can be found in both milk and honey. Its IUPAC name is something like (2R,3R,4S,5R,6R) -6- (hydroxymethyl)tetrahydro-2H-pyran-2,3,4,5-tetraol."

Eating disorders in Indian country: American Indian women report higher incidences of binge eating than white women but are no more likely to have ever been diagnosed with an eating disorder. But the real story is that eating disorders are virtually unmentioned in either tribal health care or urban Indian clinics. I'm saddened that eating disorders in Indian country have flown under the radar—but proud to play my small role in starting the conversation. Please read my piece in Indian Country Today about Native American women and eating disorders.

From Every Playboy Centerfold, the Decades (normalized), Jason Salavon, Digital C-prints

Heffed up: Composite images of Playboy centerfolds, by decade. Ladies got blonder!

Je ne sais quoi: I can deconstruct the French-girl mystique all I want—fact remains I'm still going to keep looking at them with les étoiles in my eyes, and Dead Fleurette does a nice job here of talking with les françaises on style and showing us exactly why that is. 

What exactly constitutes street harassment? Well, I'm not sure, and neither is Decoding Dress, but this searching post explores the duality of dressing to be looked at, the various consequences that can have, and why one comment can feel like a compliment and another like an attack. Tavi at Rookie touches on unwanted comments this week too, particularly interesting given that as a teenager, she's in the early stages of getting that sort of unasked-for attention. Of course, it's not so early after all: "I want these guys to know that they’re able to be so cavalier because they don’t hear unsolicited opinions on their bodies and alleged sex lives all the time."

I'll have what she's having: Elissa at Dress With Courage looks at a new study about how low body image might make us less likely to buy an outfit we see looking good on someone else. Particularly interesting in light of her post from the previous week about the intimacy of shopping—are we sometimes shooting ourselves in the foot by shopping with particularly attractive friends? I'd hate to think so!

He'll be her mirror: Congrats to Mirror Mirror Off the Wall's Kjerstin Gruys, who got married last weekend and had what seems like an incredible wedding. Click through to find out if she looked in the mirror on her wedding day!

Beardcake: Thanks to Rebekah at Jaunty Dame for pointing me toward the work of Rion Sabean, who does "men-ups" of men in traditional cheesecake poses. I'm digging 'em, aided along by what he has to say over at Jezebel. (Edited to add: Feministe pairs Sabean's work with that of Yolanda Dominguez, who has women re-create poses in public from fashion shoots.)

"Diversity isn’t just that one gorgeous silver-haired model": Why is the fashion industry not getting that the demand really is growing to see true diversity? I used to think it was a feminist thing, but I see complaints about this everywhere—and I'm pretty sure that fashion bloggers are showing the industry that "aspirational" isn't the only route to powerful imagery. Is that wishful thinking on my part? Maybe, but I'm with Sally that the industry is due for a strategic revamp.

"It wasn't a contradiction for me": Rachel Hills on being a feminist and writing for women's magazines. I haven't touched this question publicly yet but much of what she says here resonates with me as well (I think I have more inner conflict about it than she writes about here, as exemplified by the night I crumpled into the backseat of a cab and cried all the way home because I had to communicate to the art department that an editor wanted an actress who had been public with her anorexia battle slimmed, but let's not dwell!).

Too Close for Comfort: Plus-Size Satire

(via)

Nancy Upton and Shannon Skloss knew something not-so-inclusive was going on when American Apparel suddenly decided to create clothes for a larger size range and launched it with a “model search” contest. The Dallas duo was bothered by the pandering language used in the ad (the headline: “Think You Are the Next BIG Thing?”) and also knew that after years of refuting the need to include larger women among their clientele, chances were the company was only reversing its position because it was teetering on the edge of bankrupcy. Upton, a performer, staged a shoot with friend and photographer Skloss in which Upton posed with food: submerged in a bathtub of ranch dressing; holding a cherry pie between her legs; kneeling on hands and knees with an apple in her mouth, suckling-pig-style. And, of course, she won the contest.

Now, once you know that Upton was intending this as a subversion of both American Apparel and our culture’s ideas about fat women (as a size 12 Upton qualifies as “fat” in the eyes of the fashion world), it certainly seems a whole lot cooler than it does when you see it as a straight-up representation of AA. But I have to wonder how subversive something can be when it meets every criteria of the very thing that it’s mocking. The photos are beautifully, suggestively styled (a credit to Skloss); her makeup and hair look fantastic; she’s doing weirdo things just like in any other weirdo fashion shoot. And then the point of the whole thing: Upton is gorging on or surrounded by food in every shot, the idea being that women of size “just can’t stop eating” (Upton’s tagline on the AA contest site).

Upton and Skloss’s intent was subversive, but in fact it looks pretty much exactly like a straight-up plus-size photo shoot—specifically, this Crystal Renn shoot in French Vogue, in which she’s dipping her hands into spaghetti and wielding a carving knife over a slab of meat that just happens to be placed at her crotch.

It’s particularly questionable when linked to American Apparel, even if the entire idea is to mock the company. AA’s advertising ethos appears to be non-models who look like they’re exploiting themselves. (Emphasis on “appears to be” and “look like”—the disturbing stories of questionable circumstances surrounding these photo shoots taints all of their ads, not that much more is needed to taint the AA name.) The people in American Apparel ads are store employees, not professional models; they’re shot and presumably doctored in a way that makes them seem like the outcome of a druggy evening during which some dude gets all, “Hey, I’ve got a camera, baby”; and the models are often splayed out in positions even more awkward than your average haute couture shoot.

In short: Upton’s collection resembles what American Apparel might very well do in a plus-size photo shoot if left to their own devices. I’ve no doubt that if Upton had submitted the exact same photos but had sincere, not subversive, intent, her photos would be featured in their advertisements. When I first saw the shots, I recognized the nod to performance art but since it was presumably aimed toward getting a contract with American Apparel, I didn’t consider the notion that it was satire. (Thanks to reader Anna, who pointed me toward Jezebel’s interview with Upton and better informed me on the matter than when I mentioned it in my roundup last week.)

These provocative photos beg questions larger than I’m qualified to tackle: How much does the creator’s intent matter in art? If you have to know the background in order to spot the subversion, can it be effective? If the goal is to raise awareness of an issue and the only people who get the joke are already informed, have you succeeded in your goal?

Upton and Skloss have gotten a good amount of press on this—including broad audience sites like The Daily Beast and Yahoo News, cluing more people into the joke, and perhaps presenting the question in the first place to readers of the general interest publications. (Presumably Jezebel readers are already pretty aware that plus-size women get the short end of the stick.) In interviews Upton is clear-minded, acknowledging both her detractors and supporters with grace, repeatedly insisting that she’s just aiming to be a part of the conversation—and she’s succeeding. (For the record, Upton seems pretty kick-ass, and has made it clear that even if American Apparel does actually approach her to model for them since she did, after all, win the contest, she'll refuse.) But the method being used here too closely mimics the very thing that’s being critiqued. That’s how satire works, but in order for satire to be effective there needs to be an element of the ludicrous. The trouble Upton and Skloss ran into was that both American Apparel and the treatment of plus-size women are both already so ludicrous that nothing they could do could out-outrage their target.

Body-Positive Images: Not the Best Way to Body Positivity

(Really the only way to illustrate this post.)

Interesting article at Refinery 29 about how body-positive “body positive” blogs actually are, with a particular focus on photo blogs like Stop Hating Your Body and Curve Appeal. The idea of many of these blogs is that users post photos of themselves, often with a story about their journey toward body acceptance, which may be in its infancy; the question posed at Refinery 29 is whether these photos represent progress toward self-acceptance for either the posters or the readers.

...health-care experts are concerned that some body-positive websites send mixed messages to their constituency—particularly by allowing girls to post their specific measurements (which many do), or fixate on certain body parts.

“These websites represent a ground-flow of young women who want to find peace with their bodies, but the messages—‘I love myself, but please accept me’—can be confusing,” said Elizabeth Scott, psychotherapist and Co-Founder of The Body Positive, a national body-image program for women. “These girls want community, and they want to be told they’re beautiful, which makes sense, but focusing on measurements or specific body types is troubling.”

There’s a lot to be said about the usefulness of posting one’s measurements and weight in an effort to be body positive. (In short: I think numbers transparency is good, but I also know that my first instinct whenever I see a “what real women weigh!” story in a ladymag is to look at their numbers and compare them to mine. The failure is definitely on my end here, but I also doubt I’m alone in this. So I applaud those who put specifics out there, but I won’t, as it’s just not how I personally best operate. Anyway.) But what I’m primarily interested in here is the essence of posting an image of one’s self to begin with.

We as a culture like to blame the images surrounding us for our negative feelings about our bodies—and I don’t think we’re entirely off-base in doing so. But I wonder whether creating and reproducing images of ourselves is the solution. It’s as though because manipulated images created a special category of special (nonexistent) people, we then needed to disambiguate “real” women—and we used images to do so. I think it’s worthwhile to play with and examine images, including self-portraits, when working one’s way toward body peace. I also think it’s worthwhile to remember Audre Lorde’s words here: The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

As tempting as it may be to turn to imagery to boost our self-esteem, we need to do so with caution. Images are powerful because they’re visceral; we see them both as a deeper truth and as something unreal. “It is common now for people to insist about their experience of a violent event in which they were caught up....that ‘it seemed like a movie,’” writes Susan Sontag in On Photography. “This is said, other descriptions seeming insufficient, in order to explain how real it was.” Turning to images—rather, turning ourselves into images—as a primary form of developing bodily self-esteem separates us from our bodies. It forces us to view our bodies in the same light under which we view the images of unreal bodies we’re trying to wrest ourselves from. Certainly, as these blog owners hope, we can emerge from that light feeling proud instead of dejected by comparison (look at our hips! our bellies! our stretch marks! our curves!). But we are still letting imagery dictate how we feel about our bodies, because imagery seems more real than ourselves.

I think of what writer and recovered binge eater Sunny Sea Gold said in our interview: “Our bodies are a very convenient, tangible place to place our angst, our disgust, whatever else.” She was speaking specifically about women with eating disorders, which is a distinct psychological condition and not something every woman who groans about her thighs suffers from. But I think her point holds for many of us: We heap a helluva lot upon our bodies, and sometimes the bodily loathing we in feminist circles bemoan isn’t about our bodies at all—or the models, or the images. It’s about larger circumstances that vary widely from individual to individual, but it’s safe to say it’s usually a mix of family and personal history, an economic system that puts a good deal of labor value on display over production, systemic sexism, and good old-fashioned existentialism.

That’s a lot to tackle. So we find an identifiable entry point—imagery—and begin there. My worry is that the prevalence of these blogs allows us to think we can stop there too.

I don’t mean to pick on body-positive photo blogs. I’m sure they can be helpful to some readers and creators, and their mere existence signals that people are working to override the status quo, which I applaud. But body positivity needs to be much more comprehensive in order for it to be effective—something that body image writers like Rosie Molinary and Medicinal Marzipan intuitively understand, with their multipronged approach to body image. They understand that body image cannot begin and end with surveillance, even surveillance of the nurturing kind.

“When the notion of reality changes, so does that of the image, and vice versa,” writes Sontag. “‘Our era’ does not prefer images to real things out of perversity but partly in response to the ways in which the notion of what is real has been progressively complicated and weakened.” When our bodies are the reality in question, and the progressive complication and weakening has been at a fever pitch for a while, we must take care not to allow our notion of the image to override reality. There’s been some excellent critique of the term “real woman” lately; our challenge from here is to make sure we don’t use the master’s tools—imagery of our corporeal selves—in order to define what those “real women” might be.

Anthony Weiner and Self-Objectification

Before I say anything about Anthony Weiner, let me say this: I like the male body. I don’t think we should treat men’s bodies comically, and I think doing so can send negative messages to boys and men. I want men to not feel ashamed of their bodies, and to be able to have positive experiences of feeling desired. Okay? Okay.

In looking at some of the feminist discourse surrounding Weinergate, however, reinforcement of the above points has seemed to almost champion Weiner’s predilection for sending out suggestive photos of himself. (Which, as a resident of the state he represents, I don't care about in the least.) Hugo Schwyzer, who consistently writes interesting feminist work, thinks Weiner’s urges came from “a desperate hunger for a very specific kind of validation.” Meanwhile, Amanda Marcotte, another outstanding feminist writer, is “Personally...glad that we're entering an era where men are toying with the idea that their bodies might have some aesthetic value that women may appreciate.”

I’m left puzzled by these reactions, even as I see their larger points. Both seem to overlook that while men and women are both capable of objectifying themselves, men doing so isn’t just a neat reverse of women doing so. A dirty picture of a man and a dirty picture of a woman send different signals, arguing that men just want to be sometimes seen as pretty playthings discounts the centuries of sexism that have gone into establishing the dominance of the male gaze.
 
Show me a society in which women and men are equal on every level—politically, socially, academically, economically, domestically—and I’ll show you a society in which the objectified gaze is a charming relic. The gaze is powerful to the viewer because it reinforces the dynamic we witness on a more pedestrian level every day. There are all sorts of ways to play with and subvert that, but at its heart the objectified gaze “works” because it’s directed toward women. So we can treat men in the exact same way we would an objectified woman—as Weiner did to himself when he sent a fragmented shot of his underwear-covered erection to a Twitter follower—and we wind up with a totally different result, in ways that have nothing to do with men's bodies being considered comical or worthy of derision.
 

Anthony Weiner's "real-life bachelor" spread in a 1996 Cosmopolitan, speaking of objectification.

Here we have Anthony Weiner (and legions of late-night Craigslist users) sending photographs of himself into the ether, and whatever his personal motivation was, the act did not signal to me that we’re breaking through to some sort of desirability free-for-all in which men can look at women and women can look at men and we're all happily desired and experiencing aesthetic appreciation and damn those pecs are fine! Instead, what I see is a man wanting to opt into the male gaze because he was sad, or lonely, or power-drunk, or bored, or horny, or whatever he was. I see nothing resembling progress toward reconciling men’s views of their own bodies with a true space of joyous desirability. I see a co-opting of ways of looking at the female body, which might have a little more heft behind it if the male gaze were something women could opt out of as easily as men.

How fun for men to get to play in the sandbox of objectification! It must be particularly fun when you can stand up, brush yourself off, and go back into the real world in which you’re not being viewed as an object. Do I sound bitter? I’m not, at least not toward individual men. Many men yearn to feel desired simply for one's essence, and there shouldn't be shame surrounding this wish. Ironically, women may have an easier time accessing this; as many problems as there are with being evaluated for one’s face and body, at least I know that I am being looked at for something that resembles my essence. My face and body communicate something that can't be communicated on paper. I’m not being looked at for my job, my income, my family, my successes, my failures, my cleverness, my social status. That’s one of the problems women have with this whole beauty myth dealio in the first place, right? I imagine Anthony Weiner’s professional success might indeed have something to do with his longing to be recognized in another fashion. I want men to be recognized for their whole, essential selves, just as I wish for women to have the same. Indeed, I consider it one of feminism’s myriad responsibilities.

But, yeah, I’m a little bitter about the idea that poor Anthony Weiner just wants to be told he’s a hottie. I think of this fantastic cartoon on street harassment and the similar conversations I’ve had. “When men look at you, there’s nothing to worry about,” I remember being told when I protested one fellow’s assertion that women were basically potted plants. “It’s when they stop looking that you should worry.” I’ve been told that any concerns I have on this matter will be handily alleviated when I hit a certain age, and that I should “enjoy it while you can.” Championing the idea that men who send crotch shots of themselves are just after validation of their desirability seems like somehow we should be endorsing the whole idea of self-objectification—like maybe I should just shut up and enjoy being whistled at because, hey, it’s a compliment, right? I’ve written before about my complex reaction to street encounters, so it’s not like I’m entirely inured against this iffy line of thinking, and neither Schwyzer nor Marcotte is making this argument. But ignoring the different ways in which women and men are looked at—and then giving a thumbs-up to men who turn the objectifying gaze upon themselves instead of challenging the notion of that gaze in the first place—is unhelpful at best.
 

I mean, does Chris Lee look like he's remotely enjoying himself?

The Jezebel piece that prompted Schwyzer’s response posits that male politician sex scandals are rooted in the narcissism that made them seek out public office in the first place. It's an astute point, but I’m not entirely ready to sign onto that either. I’d suggest that the motivations lie somewhere between the peculiar narcissism of public figures and the peculiar narcissism of taking erotic photographs of yourself in the first place. Part of the pleasure of taking and sending such a photograph lies in seeing a distinct image of yourself. It’s like the narcissism of the mirror, but with the added bonus of bringing something tangible that can then be circulated, proof of your desirability. I wonder which gave him more pleasure: seeing the photograph himself, or knowing that someone else would see it. I’m guessing that without the first, the second would have lost much of its allure.

We can’t treat looking at men and looking at women as parallel tracks along the same path toward desirability. We can’t allow for men’s lockstep with the male gaze to be treated as something potentially beneficial for all of us, because objectifying any one of us has the potential to hurt all of us. I know better than to think dudes don’t care about their sexual appeal, but I do know that whatever feelings men might have about their erotic pull, it’s often less schizophrenic than women’s. Can’t we start there and work forward instead of backward?

Beauty Blogosphere 5.20.11

The latest beauty news, from head to toe and everything in between.

From Head... 

Who's buying color cosmetics? The buried lede on this piece about makeup purchases is that women ages 35 to 44 buy more color cosmetics than other groups. Still, the only product you see specifically targeted to that group is skin care, usually anti-aging skin care. 

Women, fear, and makeup: Courtney at Those Graces (a most excellent feminist beauty blog) has a knack for seamlessly integrating her love of the pretty with her love of the fuller self—and in this illustrative post on how you can subvert cosmetic companies' goals for you and your money, she shows how you can take private joy in the face of the beauty industry.

Not worth killing for, folks!

Lock 'em up: One of the hazards of the human hair industry is that it's a prime target for thievery. It's such a bizarre industry to begin with that this made me giggle when I saw that it was a new theft trend, but a beauty supply store owner was killed over $10,000 worth of dead skin cells, which is no trivial matter.


...To Toe...
Just in case leg makeup isn't enough for you: I try and try to remember what the ever-wise Virginia Sole-Smith says on beauty work: "You don’t have to buy into anything you don’t want—you can pick and choose. But we have to respect women who pick and choose differently." It changed my attitude toward plastic surgery and I no longer make assumptions about women who make that choice. But. Mud masks for your legs? WhohastheTIME, people? (Maybe if "Uh-Oh!" weren't in the headline I'd feel better.)  

Yes, it is a terrible idea, but that's not the point I'm making here.

...And Everything in Between: 

Jane, where's the sass? Listen, I think it's great when women can be frank about their beauty concerns. I also think it's great that Jane Pratt has a new project at XOJane.com. But there is ZERO self-examination in her heralding note of why an erroneous comment about how old she looks left her "shaking and crying," which is troubling. Teen girls don't always know that we all have appearance anxiety, so they need to hear it. XOJane's audience is presumably older and presumably past the shock of knowing that other women may be troubled by looking older and probably wants a little more introspection/insight as to why an overheard comment might send one into paroxysms. C'mon, Jane! We know you can do better!
   
The Benefit twins: Interesting profile on the twin sisters behind Benefit Cosmetics. Apparently they developed BeneTint for a stripper who wanted something to make her nipples appear pinker. 

If a tree falls in the forest but it can't look into the mirror...: My west coast no-mirror compatriot Kjerstin's blog is always a great read, and I particularly enjoyed this take on the existential issues that not seeing your own reflection brings. I'm sure I'll be referencing it later as well, but you should read it now!

The ghosts at Estee Lauder: Not the grande dame's ghost, but rather the cemetery that the company agreed to care for when it acquired its operations base on Long Island. A bit of local cemetery lore.
 

Hey there, dollface! Apparently Revlon made (or at least lent its name to) dolls in the 1950s: "So beautiful her name just had to be Revlon." And...they're back! 

Beauty culture exhibit: So jealous of L.A. folk who get to go to this "Beauty Culture" exhibition. (via Beauty Schooled, another East Coaster who is going waah about its distance from us...)

Yet another reason to love Amy Poehler: Her "retouch" markings on this photo of herself for New York magazine.

Mother's Day Guest Post: Deborah Whitefield, Homemaker, Texas

Today I'm turning over The Beheld to Deborah Whitefield, my mother, in honor of Mother's Day. This blog is largely about the personal intersection of beauty and feminism; while my mother made a point of not teaching me much about makeup, hair or fashion (as you'll read below), her feminist teachings were with me literally from birth. (My last name is hyphenated because she didn't change her name upon marrying my father, and while being the only hyphenated kid was a mouthful growing up, it ensured I grew up thinking about gender assumptions and the power of words.) Given that "playing with Mommy's makeup" was strictly limited to mascara and Vaseline, I was curious to learn what she'd have to say about her own attitudes toward beauty. Here, her essay on her own beauty ritual, aging, and on rearing a daughter who was enamoured with playing pretty.

 

I have lovely red hair. While it was an embarrassment in my youth—along with the accompanying freckles—from age 17 on I reveled in it. Years ago I realized that I am indifferent to beauty, thanks to my cloak of hair. As a teen I used foundation and rouge, eyeshadow, liner, and mascara—mostly because it was popular to look "all eyes," like Twiggy. Over time, as I discarded those items from my face, I felt I still looked the same because I had my hair. And I didn't pay much attention to the hair, just washed and let it dry. The compliments on my hair continued, so I figured it didn't matter how I looked—no matter how much I weighed or what I slathered on my face.

The result is that most of my life, I haven't put much work into the way my face appears to others. I look in the mirror, see no food lodged in my teeth or milk above my lip, and I'm set...as long as I have on my brown-black Maybelline mascara. This has been my sole must-have since the days when mascara came in little red drawers with a compartment for the pigment and one for the brush. The idea was that one moistened the bristles, rubbed it in the mascara, then applied it. Often the user would be without water, so one would do what my mom did—use spit. Today it's a scary thought, given what we know about the susceptibility eyes have for germinating bacteria.

How do teenagers learn to "need" beauty products? From observation. In our household there were few beauty products, other than that red box, and red lipstick—which, of course, clashed with my hair. We had the cheapest shampoo money could buy and no conditioners. The point is: There wasn't much to learn from my mother.

I learned what not to do from a friend of mine who was cute when natural but was rarely not made up with heavy foundation; watching her beauty routine must have been the most boring thing I did with her. However, I read two teen magazines, Teen and Ingenue, that instructed me on the positives. From those I learned how to get that Twiggy look by lining under my eyes. Both my sister and I pored over those issues looking for tips on how to accentuate the eyes by making our lips and the rest of our face invisible. I recall a visit from an aunt who lived in California; she complimented us and asked how we learned to apply makeup. This was the Ultimate Flattery for two Oklahoma girls! An older woman liked our look—and one from L.A. who must have seen gorgeous eyes everywhere. Our work was finished; we were perfect.

Moisturizers weren't part of my routine until I was in my late 30s. Even then, as now, it was a seasonal thing. Here's what I know: At age 60, I am now the age my grandmother was when I first clearly recall looking at her wrinkles. Those wrinkles stay with me to this day—they looked like tic-tac-toe forms on her cheeks. I used to wish I had the nerve to make little Xs and Os on them as she napped on our sofa. The face powder she used only seemed to exaggerate the lines, making them look cavernous and permanent. I resolved then and there never to use face powder. I couldn't even tell you if they still make the stuff.

I look a darned sight less wrinkled than my grandmother—but she led a hard life. She spent over 50 years planting acres of gardens, canning the family's foods, tending livestock, ironing, cooking with a wood stove, and so on, all of which I have avoided. I've seen how people age and I feel I'm in good stead, so why sweat it? Wrinkles fascinate me, even on myself. Sometimes I think this is one reason the idea of human-concocted beauty holds no charm. If we are lucky, we all end up in the same place.

The upshot is that most of my life I haven't put much thought into the way my face appears to others. When a daughter and active feminism entered my life around the same time, I began to wonder what to teach—what were values, and what were a culture I didn't want her to overengage with? The only thing I recall consciously stressing was cleanliness. When the Prince fell for Cinderella it was because she was so clean, not because she was beautiful. Yes, I did.



Mother and daughter during Manhattanhenge 2010

By the time Autumn was 3 only the mascara remained, as I came fully into both my feminist thinking and a time crunch. Still, her fascination with beauty can clearly by marked (at least to my way of thinking) with a visit to our house by my husband's sister and mother: Aunt Marsha (an Army captain) and grandmother Mimi (a full-time homemaker and perfectionist). When the lovely Aunt Marsha arrived, eager to bond with her niece, no bars were held. By the time the Make-Up Duo left town Autumn had a box of makeup, a new haircut and her first manicure.

To my eyes, I never interfered with her desire to learn and use beauty products. However, I made sure that I informed her of my opinion that beauty products were a waste of money and time. Together we had a phrase for commercials: "Trick Cameras!" Whenever any ad illustrated astounding "proof" that a product worked, she'd point it out and I'd inform her that it was done with photography tricks. In an age of computers and Star Wars, there was little need for further persuasion.

Beauty. There are so many aspects. I haven't even mentioned health and food; exercise and sunshine; fashion and style. What did I pass on to Autumn? What did my mom pass on to me? I believe Autumn is perfect as she is—all beauty and smiles. My mother told me I was a beauty, just the way I was. Even as she applied lemon juice to my freckles to bleach them. Yes, she did.

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.

Thoughts Upon Reading 122 Comments About My Face, Courtesy America Online

"Your story is being considered to be featured on AOL Welcome Screen!" my editor at MyDaily wrote me in regards to the piece I wrote about my makeover. "If it happens, you will get TONS of traffic. Yay! But be ready for crazy comments."

I wouldn't say that the comments were crazy (with the exception of "I would eat her with a spoon"). But when I was notified that it had gone into rotation and saw more than 100 comments within mere hours, I was both thankful to my editor for her prescience (word up, Ellen!) and interested in what this sample of people might illuminate about our culture's attitudes toward beauty. I sometimes fall into the pop-feminist bubble (I remember being shocked when a friend told me he hadn't read much discussion of Natalie Portman's ballerina-fied body in Black Swan, whereas that was pretty much the only thing I read about the film), so I was curious to see what a cross-section of Americans who are Online might have to say about my piece. And, of course, I never found out: They were too busy talking about my face instead.

What I learned from 122 comments about my face:

1) People overwhelmingly preferred the "before" me: “I agree with everyone else the before picture is better than the bombshell photo. ; )”

I prefer the "natural" me too, for that matter—I loved the bombshell look and found it fun, and thought Eden did a fantastic job of creating the look. But I wasn’t doing the makeover to look better; I was doing it to look different, and both my makeover guru and I approached it with that mind-set. And, sure, it's nice to hear that Online Americans don’t think I need a pile of false eyelashes to look nice. (You like me! You really like me!) I admit it's also a relief. (Still, I stand by certain tricks I learned. Eyebrow pencil! Lipstick!)

Aside from that—and aside from the unfortunate difference in lighting between the two photos, which ensured that my “before” has a naturally-lit quality that the “after” couldn’t achieve—I found it interesting that, in fact, only four commenters flat-out said that I looked better afterward. Is it only a straw man who prefers artifice? And was there an element of self-congratulation among some commenters? It’s easy to be drawn to certain signals of beauty: red lipstick, emphasized eyes, long curls. Therefore, it’s easier to reject those signals as false, vain, trying too hard. Yet we all know what those signals mean, so I wonder if some commenters thought that they were seeing beyond the surface by preferring the more low-key look presented in the “before” picture. To reject my utterly normal-looking, friendly-seeming “before” picture would be more akin to rejecting a person, not the symbols presented in the “after”—and while anonymous online commenters aren’t known for their social graces, neither are people usually out to merely be mean. (Of course, plenty of commenters were just that, but they’re easy enough to discount.)

2) The catch-all insult: “got 2 mention nose job.”

A handful of commenters indicated that I needed a nose job. Whaaaa? I have the most average nose in North America. I mean, am I deluding myself here in that there is absolutely nothing remarkable about my nose? (Okay, I do have a bump from a reconstruction after a car wreck when I was 16, but you can only see it from the side.) What this indicates to me is that “you need a nose job” is a grab bag of ways to put a woman in her place. It makes me think of the time a random man on the subway suddenly started yelling at me about how fat I was. It wasn’t that I was fat (I’ve got a medium build), nor was it even that he thought I was fat, I’m guessing—it was that he was putting me in my place for not encouraging his advances. You can’t see my body in the shot that was on the page, and telling a woman she needs a nose job is vaguely the facial equivalent of “fat”: It’s a catch-all way of saying, There is something wrong with you, even if there isn’t. (And not that being fat or having a nose that is the stuff of magnificence is “wrong,” but some people treat it that way.) I’m not everyone’s cup of tea, but neither is there an odd-looking feature about me that’s so outstanding as to become the butt of commenters' jokes. So: nose job it is.

3) Total strangers could tell I'm uncomfortable in front of a camera: “She would be prettier in each picture if she had actually smiled rather than pursed her lips.”

It’s humbling to be called out on your “photo face” by total strangers. (A number of people commented that I looked pinched, uncomfortable, or “like she’s sucking a lemon.”) After interviewing photographer Sophie Elgort, I had to own up to the fact that if I’m trying to “look pretty” in a photograph, it will kill any chance I have of looking pretty. As Sophie said, “How can you expect to look like your best self in a photo if you’re putting on a ridiculous face?” To see that total strangers could pick up on my discomfort was an official notice that I’m not fooling anyone when I pout-smile in front of the camera. Smile and breathe. Smile and breathe.

4) People were quick to point out that, no, I didn't look like a bombshell: “We have very different definitions of 'bombshell'”

Some commenters meant this is a put-down (“More dud than bombshell,” courtesy icebull), but others just seemed mildly perplexed. I realize that a look that’s over-the-top to me is tame by many standards ("I'd like for you to visit Tuscaloosa on a nice fall Saturday—chances are there's more bombshells walking around there than where you're from,” writes DC). Perhaps the word conjures something that I didn’t intend; I forget that not everybody scrutinizes words the way I do. But from my perspective, the whole point of the bombshell is that it’s a creation, not a God-given quality. (Norma Jeane, anyone?) So when commenters wrote along the lines of, "She's just wearing lipstick and eyeliner! Where's the bombshell?" I wondered what they were hoping to see. Did they expect something more over-the-top? A different look entirely? A professional-level photo? Someone who is flat-out more beautiful than I could ever be?

Or was it that the term is so loaded that it can’t help but disappoint? We’re saturated with images of professional beauties everywhere, and those images are always digitally manipulated. I wonder if some users who saw the “bombshell” promise on their welcome screens, upon scrolling over my “before” picture and then finding a non-airbrushed, non-professional picture of a non-model—that is, an average woman who has been promoted as a “bombshell”—simply felt ripped off.

Listen, I don’t think I’m some exquisite orchid, but I can look in the mirror and see that I’m not “horrifying,” as one commenter wrote. I’m guessing that the people who were eager to put me down were doing so because through the construction of the headline, the “grand reveal” drag-and-scroll rollover of my before and after, and the very idea of the piece, I was claiming “bombshell” status for myself, however temporarily. It was that claim that provoked a response, not how I actually looked. In the days following Elizabeth Taylor’s death, I had a handful of conversations with friends who said something along the lines of “She’s pretty, sure, but why was she known as a great beauty?” None of the people who said this to me are the type to just randomly detract from someone’s looks: They were saying it in response to the sudden hyperconsciousness of a woman who has readily been called the most beautiful woman in the world. Of course they were going to look at that claim critically—and when you're using that rubric, Elizabeth freakin’ Taylor can fall short. Once I asked readers to take me in as a bombshell, how could I stand a chance of escaping the same?


5) Few people read a single word I wrote: “She was so excellent at playing Cleopatra that the world later really thought that Cleopatra was actually white. God Bless and Rest in Peace.”

Which is to say: Few appeared to have read the piece itself. The grand total of people who referenced anything other than my photo? Thirteen. (That’s excluding friends and readers of The Beheld who commented to help promote the piece—thank you!) Of those, maybe five actually addressed the points I was attempting to make. I can’t really get up in arms about this: It is a piece about my appearance, after all; referencing my looks in the comments isn't irrelevant. But nowhere did I say in the piece that I thought I looked better in either photo, and for a piece about getting a makeover, it was as far away from “which is better?” as you could get.

But none of that matters, because nobody was reading. I'm recalling an anecdote I didn't have room for in my interview with artist and writer Lisa Ferber: She was nervous while preparing to share one of her short stories at a reading. "My mother asked me if I was nervous about the piece, and I said, 'No, I'm nervous that I just won't be a good reader.' And she said, 'Lisa, you are a beautiful woman—nobody is going to listen to a word you say anyway.'" We both laughed when she shared the story, but it stuck with me. I’ve seen plenty of women be underestimated because they’re pretty, but I’ve always assumed that because I’m neither glorious nor hideous, it didn’t apply to me.

What I learned with this piece was that being objectified isn’t about whether a woman is pretty. It’s about her being an object—which is mighty hard to escape if you’re a woman, regardless of your appearance. In this case, the subject matter served as an ersatz carte blanche for people to openly discuss my looks, but it’s not hard to think of examples where the subject matter was entirely incongruent with a woman’s looks and people took aim anyway. (The 2008 elections come to mind.) I can’t imagine that people would have read the piece any more closely if I’d been outrageously weird-looking, or that fewer people would have read it if I were more conventionally beautiful. It was that I was a woman, and that I was there.

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.

Sophie Elgort, New York City, Photographer

Sophie Elgort’s client list reads like a New York City fashion girl’s dream: Bloomingdale’s, Theory/Helmut Lang, Alice + Olivia, Women’s Wear Daily—and the list goes on. Her backstage and front-of-house work for lead designers at New York Fashion Week has helped her develop her personal style, which matches her low-key but composed voice. We chatted about what makes someone photogenic, the importance of letting the individual shine through, and why you’ll probably be wearing sparkly nail polish soon enough. In her own words:

On Being Photogenic
If somebody’s not comfortable—in person or in a photo—it’s pretty obvious. It’s a little awkward, and the feeling that’s going to come off in the photo is that this person is not comfortable with themselves, and I don’t think that’s ever an attractive quality.

Certain people are obviously more photogenic than others, and that helps me get a nice photo faster. I’ll be able to get 10 great shots of her in 10 minutes, whereas somebody else I might only be able to get one great shot in an hour. But the difference between somebody who’s photogenic and somebody who’s not is that people who aren’t photogenic are sometimes nervous in front of a camera. They make weird twitches, or they’ll sort of crane their neck or purse their lips or do something that’s obviously not them, because they’re nervous. A lot of times I’ll see photos and think, “Why is that person doing that? In person she never does that!” If you keep shooting, you can get them more into their natural element and you can get a good photo from people who say, “Oh, I’m not photogenic.” You’re not unphotogenic; it’s that you’re usually posing, putting on this ridiculous face that’s not you. How can you expect to look like your best self in a photo if you’re putting on a ridiculous face?

Certain people are always changing their expression, or they gesticulate a lot, and those people are hard to get a good photo of sometimes. But that doesn’t mean that not in a photo, they’re not stunning—they can be extremely charismatic and beautiful. That’s why I think video is interesting; it’s sort of like a photo but it has more movement to it, so you have more of a chance to see more sides of a person. I definitely think charisma can show in a photograph as well. But in a video, you wouldn’t have somebody just sitting there posed, and I think it should be the same thing for a photo. And there’s no way you can show your charisma if you’re not acting like yourself.
 

For vintage, custom, and DIY boutique ALIOMI.

This is a stylist and a friend of mine—she’s not a model. And this is what I mean in terms of capturing someone in the moment, actually showing their personality. Her boyfriend has asked me for that photo of her; he’s like, “I love this photo of her, she looks amazing.” And that’s because her personality is shining through; she wasn’t posed, she wasn’t pretending to laugh.


On Self-Portraiture
I started doing self-portraits recently—it’s an interesting project, and I think it would benefit a lot of people to do try it, if they have a camera with a self-timer. Because then they can start to realize what they’re not comfortable with when looking at the camera. Like, what am I doing that looks weird to me? What are my insecurities that are coming through in that photograph?

The first batch that I did, I was like, I look self-conscious in all of these photos. I was doing all these things that weren’t myself; I was putting my body in these weird positions. I was like, What? These are so not me! So I redid them—I went back in front of the camera, found an angle that made me look the best. I grew up in front of the camera—my dad’s a photographer—so I never thought twice about being in photos until I tried taking them of myself. It was just the tripod and camera aimed at me, but nobody was behind the camera so nobody was talking to me. I was really awkward because I was waiting for the timer to go off! It’s like if you’re in a room with someone and you’re sitting there and they’re staring at you and not talking, you’re going to fidget and look ridiculous. So my self-portraits came out awkward in the beginning because there’s no one on the other end to naturalize the process. I tried to do silly poses—I couldn’t just do natural, beautiful photographs straight-on without making funny faces, because I felt comfortable doing that even though I was by myself in my apartment. 

On Being Put-Together

If you can figure out your own unique style and how to put yourself together accordingly, it doesn’t matter how conventionally beautiful you are. I spent six months in Argentina, and before I went everyone told me, “The women in Argentina are so beautiful—they’re so gorgeous, they’re more gorgeous than any women anywhere.” And I went and was like...welllll, they’re really pretty, but just as pretty as a lot of other people. Then some of my guy friends who’d been saying this came to meet me at the end of my time there. I said, “I don’t really see that they’re that much more beautiful than other women of the world—what do you mean?” And they’d point out individual women, and I realized it was because they were totally put-together, flawlessly, each in her own way. Somebody who was very natural would have just black jeans, boots, t-shirt, perfectly straight hair, and a manicure. Somebody who was very done-up would have this dress and heels and styled hair—there wasn’t anybody who looked like she didn’t have her own sense of style. Each woman looked how she wanted to look. So my guy friends were all, “Most beautiful women in the world!” and I’m just like, “They just take a little extra time putting themselves together.” Or maybe they don’t take a little extra time but they know what they like and what they want to look like, so it’s easy for them.


On Reality and Lack Thereof
I was shot years ago for Glamour, a mother-daughter story. We had amazing hair and makeup people—they brought in the best. They put fake eyelashes on me, but it looked really beautiful and natural—it wasn’t supposed to be overdone. It was funny, the time they spent actually prepping me to look natural. I went out that night after the shoot and left the makeup on and hair as it had been done, and a friend of mine saw me and was like, “Oh my God, I’ve never seen you look so amazing.” I was sort of like, “Yay!” But in my head I was like, It’s because I was shot for Glamour and they did me up—of course I look better than ever! I had the best professionals in the world doing me up! People see this “norm” of models in magazines, and they’re like, “Wow, that model’s so beautiful.” And yes, she is. But you also have to realize that not only is it her job to be beautiful and perfect and amazing in photos, but that’s not what she’d look like if she were photographed before she was done up. It was interesting to have it done myself—there’s no way I could look like that all the time. Who has the time?
 

Backstage at the New York Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2011 Alexander Berardi show.

The images you see in an editorial are supposed to be unrealistic. By the time you see the model on the page, she’s become a work of art, she’s unreal—people have worked on her as a surface. It’s like a painting. If you look at pictures of actresses who are on a lot of the covers and in the stories—not all actresses are tall, or model-skinny, or whatever. But I think it’s a response to criticisms about unrealistic images, because while they’re not normal people, they’re not working as a model. If you went to a black tie dinner and had the glamour hair and makeup, you’re also going to look amazing that night. But it’s a little different between actresses and models—actresses have to look like that all the time, they have to uphold their image. Whereas models, they don’t have to look like that when they’re not modeling. A model can be off-duty—they’re obviously still beautiful, but they’re not going to look like they do in front of a camera—they'll probably have their own sense of style and will be way less done up. Whereas I feel like with actresses, they’re so often done up even in their everyday life. And when I see normal people who say, “I need to be a size 0,” I’m like, “Really? Who’s paying you the money to be a size 0?”  

On Working With Models
I feel very short, and I’m not short—I’m 5’6”! And I also start to think of myself as plain. Someone who’s assisting me might take a backstage shot, and I’m like, “Don’t photograph me!” You start to feel a sort of warped perception, that the models are the ones who are supposed to be beautiful, and I’m just behind the scenes. You start to feel like a non-entity, like, I don’t exist as a woman right now. But then you go back to your normal life and go out at night with your girlfriends and you’re like, “Oh, we all look so pretty!”—someone will take a photo of you, and those are the photos that go on Facebook, and you’re a normal person again. Whereas at a shoot you’re more worried about how the model looks, like—You drank last night, I can tell, you’re all puffy.

I would probably doubt myself more in a regular situation than on a photo shoot, around normal people. Not that I usually do—I don’t have a complex about that. But if you’re out at a restaurant and you see this stunning “normal” girl who’s 5’4” and really well-dressed, you’re like, Oh my God, she looks amazing! I’ve gotta step it up! She’s, like, a banker—she’s not being paid to look great, but she looks great. Then I just have to think about what I’m insecure about: Do I want to make a change? A lot of time for me it’ll be a weight thing—if I’m upset with my body image I want to figure out what I would rather have my body image be, and then maybe I’ll go to the gym or make a conscious effort to eat healthier for a few weeks. I think of it pretty practically rather than getting upset about it; I’ll think of a reasonable plan. Faces are things you can’t really change. And faces look different, so you’re not going to be like, “Oh, that girl’s face is so much prettier than my face.” Because it doesn’t make sense. You could be like, “Oh, she has such nice lips,” but if those lips were on my face I’d look really weird!
 

On Trends
Sometimes I’ll wear something and my friends will be like [wince] “Ew!” I’m like, “Trust me, they were just on all the runways—you'll probably like them in six months once all the new collections and trends hit the stores!" I’ll see them months later and they’ll be wearing that—I’ll point it out and they’ll say, “No, I never said that!” They actually have forgotten. Sparkly nail polish is coming back; for a while it was all matte. I said to my friend the other day, “You’re going to like it in a few months.” She said, “I hate it! And I don’t look at fashion like that.” I’m like, “Look, you do.” You might not think that you do, but even if you don’t read fashion magazines, you see it in Us magazine or on the street, and sooner or later you’re going to think, “Oh, she looks so pretty—what nail polish is she wearing?” Fashion has that underlying trend-setting tone that’s almost subconscious. It’s like the first time you hear a song, maybe you don’t love it. But then you hear it again and again and soon you’re like, “Wow, I love this song!” People don’t realize that that’s somehow how they’re forming their perception of beauty—but we are.