Beauty Blogsophere 11.11.11*

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

From Head...
Thin Mint lips: Girl Scout Cookie Lip Smackers! But what's with this "Coconut Caramel Stripes" flavor? You already yanked the rug out from under me with that "Samoa" jazz. Caramel Delight 4-eva!

...To Toe...
This little piggy went to fashion week: Fashionista's slideshow of models' feet on the runway is a lightly grody reminder that fashion ain't always glamorous (and that you're not alone in having fit problems).

Pediprank: Indiana governor Mitch Daniels went in for surgery on a torn meniscus and wound up with a pink pedicure. Dr. Kunkel, you old dog you!


...And Everything In Between:
"It's angled, like a diamond baguette": The rise of the $60 lipstick in the midst of a recession. Not sure about the "pragmatic" part of the term "pragmatic luxury," but what do I know? I just drink red wine, smack my lips together, and hope for the best.

Dishy: The flap surrounding the Panera Bread district manager who told the Pittsburgh-area store manager to staff the counter with "pretty young girls" was reported as a racist incident, since the cashier he wanted replaced was an African American man. But as Partial Objects points out, it may have been more motivated by sexism. To that I'd add that it's not just sexism and racism, but the notion of the "pretty young girl" that's at the heart of the matter here.

Give 'em some lip: American Apparel is launching a lip gloss line, with colors that will be "evoking an array of facets of the American Apparel experience." Names include "Legalize L.A.," which references the company's dedication to immigration reform, and "Intimate," an echo of the company's racy advertising aesthetic. Other shades on tap include "Topless," "Pantytime," "In the Red," "Jackoff Frost" and "Sexual Harassment in Violation of the Fair Employment and Housing Act Govt. Code 12940(k) Shimmer."

Music makers: Boots cosmetics line 17 commissions up-and-coming musicians to write and perform songs that align with the ethos of 17 products. As in, "You Might Get Stuck on Me" for their magnetic nail polish.

"Let women of sixty use 'beautifiers,' if they think they need them. But you, who are young, pretty, and have a complexion like a rose-leaf—you should avoid such things as you would a pestilence." 

99% marketing: For its 132nd birthday, Ivory soap is unrolling a new ad campaign, which hinges upon it being A) nongendered, and B) soap. Revolución!

Baby fangs: Intellectually I should be against about the practice of yaeba, in which dentists in Japan artificially enlarge their lady patients' incisors to create a childlike appearance. But as someone who is genetically blessed with noticeably sharp and semi-crooked incisors, I'm basically all, I am gonna be huge in Japan.

Vaniqua'd: The active ingredient in Vaniqua—you know, the drug you're supposed to take if you have an unladylike amount of facial hair—is also an effective treatment for African sleeping sickness. Of course, the places where African sleeping sickness strikes can't afford to buy it. But hey, our upper lip is so smooth! (via Fit and Feminist) 

La Giaconda: The Mona Lisa, retouched.

Beauty survey: Allure's massive beauty survey reveals that 93% of American women think the pressure to look young is greater than ever before. Am I a spoilsport by pointing out that every person who answered that question is also older than they ever were before? (Of course, the "hottest age" for women according to men surveyed is now 28, compared with 31 in 1991, so there may be something to it.) Other findings: Black women are three times as likely as white women to self-report as hot, and everyone hates their belly.

Gay old time: Jenelle Hutcherson will be the first openly lesbian contestant of Miss Long Beach—and she's going to wear a royal purple tux for the eveningwear competition. The director of the pageant encouraged her to sign up, and Hutcherson has been vocal about how she's reflecting the long tradition of diversity and acceptance in Long Beach. (Thanks to Caitlin for the tipoff!)

Miss World: In more urgent beauty pageant news, British women protest Miss World, and somehow the reporter neglects to make a crack about bra burning.

The freshman 2.5: Virginia debunks the "freshman 15," and then Jezebel reveals that the whole thing was an invention of Seventeen magazine, along with the notion that every single New Kid on the Block was supposed to be cute.

Ballerina body: Darlene at Hourglassy examines the push-pull between embracing and dressing large breasts (which she does beautifully with her button-front shirts designed for busty women) and her love of ballet. "By the end of the performance I wasn’t paying attention to anything but the movements. There was nothing to distract me from the dancers’ grace and athleticism. Would I have been distracted by large breasts on one of the dancers? Definitely."

(Still taken from SOMArts promotional video)

Subject/object: Prompted by this intriguing Man as Object exhibition in San Francisco, Hugo Schwyzer looks at the possibilities for desiring male imperfection. He's the expert here, both because of his research and his male-ness, but I can't help but wonder how much men have internalized the notion of male perfection. I have zero doubt that the focus on the body beautiful has impacted men, and certainly the tropes of masculinity are a reasonable parallel to the tropes of femininity. But there's always been more room—literal and metaphorical—for men of all varieties to be considered sex symbols. Everyone gawked when Julia Roberts paired up with Lyle Lovett, but even then there was talk of how he had "a certain quality." Save someone like Tilda Swinton—who, while odd-looking, isn't un-pretty either—when have we ever spoken of women in that way?

Am I the only one who thinks gigolo should be pronounced like it's spelled?: Tits and Sass has been looking for voices of male escorts, and lo and behold, Vin Armani to the rescue!

"Did my son inherit my eating disorder?": There's been some talk about how a mother with food issues can transfer that to her daughters—but Pauline wonders if she's passed down her eating disorder to her son. A potent reminder that boys internalize ED factors as well.

What you can't tell by looking: And along those same lines, Tori at Anytime Yoga reminds us shortly and sweetly that eating disorders of all forms come in a variety of sizes. This is enormously important: I'm certain that there are many women with eating disorders who don't recognize it because they don't think they fit the profile.

In/visible: Always glad to see celebrities acknowledge that looking they way they look actually takes work, à la Jessica Biel here: "My signature style is a 'no-make-up make-up' look, which is much harder than people think." Well, probably not most women who do no-makeup makeup, but whatevs.

Touchdown: This BellaSugar slideshow of creative makeup and hairstyle from NFL fans in homage to their favorite teams is a delight. I could care less about football itself (I finally understand "downs," I think) but I think it's awesome that these people are showing that there are plenty of ways to be a football fan, including girly-girl stuff like makeup. (IMHO, football fans could use a PR boost right about now. Seriously, Penn State? Rioting? You do realize your coach failed to protect multiple children from sexual assault, right?)

Face wash 101: Also from BellaSugar: There were college courses on grooming in the 1940s?! 

She walks in beauty like the night: A goth ode to black lipstick, from XOJane.com. 

Muppets take Sephora: Afrobella gives a rundown of the spate of Muppet makeup. Turns out Miss Piggy isn't the first Muppet to go glam.

Love handle: The usual story is that we gain weight when we're stressed or unhappy because we're eating junk food to smother our sorrows—but Sally asks about "happy body changes," like when you gain weight within a new relationship.

Locks of love: Courtney at Those Graces on how long hair can be just as self-defining as short.

_____________________________________

*Numerology field day! More significantly, Veterans' Day. Please take a moment to thank or at least think of the veterans in your life—you don't have to support the war to support soldiers. It's also a good time to remember that not all veterans who return alive return well: The Huffington Post collection "Beyond the Battlefield" is a reminder of this, particularly the story of Marine widow Karie Fugett, who also writes compellingly at Being the Wife of a Wounded Marine of caring for her husband after his return from Iraq; he later died from a drug overdose.

While most combat roles are still barred to women, there are plenty of female veterans—combat, support, and medical staff alike. Click here to listen to a collection of interviews from female veterans of recent wars, including Staff Sergeant Jamie Rogers, who, in When Janey Comes Marching Home, gives us this reminder of the healing potential of the beauty industry: "I went [to the bazaar near Camp Liberty in Baghdad] often to get my hair cut. They had a barber shop and then they had a beauty salon. It was nice to go in and it was a female atmosphere. It was all girls. You could put your hair down, instead of having it in a bun all the time, get it washed. It was just something to escape for a while, get away from everything. And it was nice to interact, and the girls were always dressed nice and always very complimentary: 'You have such beautiful...' and I don't know if it was BS, but it felt good that day. That was a good escape."

Welcome to the Dollhouse: Men, Cosmetics, and the Beauty Myth

Back when pretty much the only men wearing makeup were either rock lords or Boy George, I privately came up with the guideline that if any particular piece of grooming was something women generally performed while men generally didn’t, I could safely consider it “beauty work.” Nail polish and leg-shaving? Beauty work. Nail-trimming and hair-combing? Grooming. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a useful guide in helping me determine what parts of my morning routine I might want to examine with a particularly feminist—and mascaraed—eye.

That rule has begun to crumble. Americans spent $4.8 billion on men’s grooming products in 2009, doubling the figure from 1997, according to market research firm Euromonitor. Skin care—not including shaving materials—is one of the faster-growing segments of the market, growing 500% over the same period. It’s unclear how much of the market is color products (you know, makeup), but the appearance of little-known but stable men’s cosmetics companies like 4V00, KenMen, The Men Pen, and Menaji suggests that the presence is niche but growing. Since examining the beauty myth and questioning beauty work has been such an essential part of feminism, these numbers raise the question: What is the increase in men’s grooming products saying about how our culture views men?

The flashier subset of these products—color cosmetics—has received some feminist attention. Both Naomi Wolf of The Beauty Myth fame and Feministe’s own Jill Filipovic were quoted in this Style List piece on the high-fashion trend of men exploring feminine appearance, complete with an arresting photo of a bewigged, stilettoed Marc Jacobs on the cover of Industrie. Both Wolf and Filipovic astutely indicate that the shift may signal a loosening of gender roles: “I love it, it is all good,” said Wolf. “It's all about play...and play is almost always good for gender politics.” Filipovic adds, “I think gender-bending in fashion is great, and I hope it's more than a flash-in-the-pan trend.”

Yet however much I’d like to sign on with these two writers and thinkers whose work I’ve admired for years, I’m resistant. I’m wary of men’s beauty products being heralded as a means of gender subversion for two major reasons: 1) I don’t think that men’s cosmetics use in the aggregate is actually any sort of statement on or attempt at gender play; rather, it’s a repackaging and reinforcement of conventional masculinity, and 2) warmly welcoming (well, re-welcoming, as we’ll see) men into the arena where they’ll be judged for their appearance efforts is a victory for nobody—except the companies doing the product shill. 

Let’s look at the first concern: It’s not like the men mentioned in this article are your run-of-the-mill dudes; they’re specific people with a specific cultural capital. (Which is what I think Wolf and Filipovic were responding to, incidentally, not some larger movement.) Men might be buying more lotion than they did a decade ago, but outside of the occasional attempt at zit-covering through tinted Clearasil, I’ve seen very few men wearing color cosmetics who were not a part of a subculture with a history of gender play. Outside that realm, the men who are wearing bona fide makeup, for the most part, seem to be the type described in this New York Times article: the dude’s dude who just wants to do something about those undereye circles, not someone who’s eager to swipe a girlfriend’s lipstick case unless it’s haze week on fraternity row.

“Men use cosmetic products in order to cover up or correct imperfections, not to enhance beauty,” said Marek Hewryk, founder of men’s cosmetics line 4V00. Sound familiar, ladies? The idea of correcting yourself instead of enhancing? Male cosmetic behavior seems more like the pursuit of “relief from self-dissatisfaction” that drives makeup use among women rather than a space that encourages a gender-role shakeup. Outside of that handful of men who are publicly experimenting with gender play—which I do think is good for all of us—the uptick in men’s cosmetics doesn’t signify any more of a cultural shift than David Bowie’s lightning bolts did on the cover of Aladdin Sane.

Subcultures can worm their way into the mainstream, of course, but the direction I see men’s products taking is less along the lines of subversive gender play and more along the lines of products that promise a hypermasculinity (think Axe or the unfortunately named FaceLube), or a sort of updated version of the “metrosexual” epitomized by Hugh Laurie’s endorsement of L’Oréal.

The ads themselves have yet to be released, but the popular video showing the prep for the ad’s photo shoot reveals what L’Oréal is aiming for by choosing the rangy Englishman as its new spokesperson (joining Gerard Butler, who certainly falls under the hypermasculine category). He appears both stymied and lackadaisically controlling while he answers questions from an offscreen interviewer as a young woman gives him a manicure. “That’s an interesting question to pose—’because you’re worth it,’” he says about the company’s tagline. “We’re all of us struggling with the idea that we’re worth something. What are we worth?” he says. Which, I mean, yay! Talking about self-worth! Rock on, Dr. House! But in actuality, the message teeters on mockery: The quirky, chirpy background music lends the entire video a winking edge of self-ridicule. When he’s joking with the manicurist, it seems in sync; when he starts talking about self-worth one has to wonder if L’Oréal is cleverly mocking the ways we’ve come to associate cosmetics use with self-worth, even as it benefits from that association through its slogan. “Because you’re worth it” has a different meaning when directed to women—for whom the self-care of beauty work is frequently dwarfed by the insecurities it invites—than when directed to men, for whom the slogan may seem a reinforcement of identity, not a glib self-esteem boost. The entire campaign relies upon a jocular take on masculinity. Without the understanding that men don’t “really” need this stuff, the ad falls flat.

We often joke about how men showing their “feminine side” signals a security in their masculine role—which it does. But that masculinity is often also assured by class privilege. Hugh Laurie and Gerard Butler can use stuff originally developed for the ladies because they’ve transcended the working-class world where heteronormativity is, well, normative; they can still demand respect even with a manicure. Your average construction worker, or even IT guy, doesn’t have that luxury. It’s also not a coincidence that both are British while the campaigns are aimed at Americans. The “gay or British?” line shows that Americans tend to see British men as being able to occupy a slightly feminized space, even as we recognize their masculinity, making them perfect candidates for telling men to start exfoliating already. L’Oréal is selling a distinctive space to men who might be worried about their class status: They’re not “metrosexualized” (Hugh Laurie?), but neither are they working-class heroes. And if numbers are any indication, the company’s reliance upon masculine tropes is a thriving success: L’Oréal posted a 5% sales increase in the first half of 2011.

Still, I don’t want to discount the possibility that this shift might enable men to explore the joys of a full palette. L’Oréal’s vaguely cynical ads aside, if Joe Six-Pack can be induced to paint his fingernails and experience the pleasures of self-ornamentation, everyone wins, right?

Well—not exactly. In the past, men have experienced a degree of personal liberalization and freedom through the eradication of—not the promotion of—the peacocking self-display of the aristocracy. With what fashion historians call “the great masculine renunciation” of the 19th century, Western men’s self-presentation changed dramatically. In a relatively short period, men went from sporting lacy cuffs, rouged cheeks, and high-heeled shoes to the sober suits and hairstyles that weren’t seriously challenged until the 1960s (and that haven’t really changed much even today). The great masculine renunciation was an effort to display democratic ideals: By having men across classes adopt simpler, humbler clothes that could be mimicked more easily than lace collars by poor men, populist leaders could physically demonstrate their brotherhood-of-man ideals.

Whether or not the great masculine renunciation achieved its goal is questionable (witness the 20th-century development of terms like white-collar and blue-collar, which indicate that we’d merely learned different ways to judge men’s class via appearance). But what it did do was take a giant step toward eradicating the 19th-century equivalent of the beauty myth for men. At its best, the movement liberated men from the shackles of aristocratic peacocking so that their energies could be better spent in the rapidly developing business world, where their efforts, not their lineage, were rewarded. Today we’re quick to see a plethora of appearance choices as a sign of individual freedom—and, to be sure, it can be. But it’s also far from a neutral freedom, and it’s a freedom that comes with a cost. By reducing the amount of appearance options available to men, the great masculine renunciation also reduced both the burden of choice and the judgments one faces when one’s efforts fall short of the ideal.

Regardless of the success of the renunciation, it’s not hard to see how men flashing their cash on their bodies serves as a handy class marker; indeed, it’s the very backbone of conspicuous consumption. And it’s happening already in the playground of men’s cosmetics: The men publicly modeling the “individual freedom” of makeup—while supposedly subverting beauty and gender ideals—already enjoy a certain class privilege. While James Franco has an easygoing rebellion that wouldn’t get him kicked out of the he-man bars on my block in Queens, his conceptual-artist persona grants him access to a cultural cachet that’s barred to the median man. (Certainly not all makeup-wearing men enjoy such privilege, as many a tale from a transgender person will reveal, but the kind of man who is posited as a potential challenge to gender ideals by being both the typical “man’s man” and a makeup wearer does have a relative amount of privilege.)

Of course, it wasn’t just men who were affected by the great masculine renunciation. When men stripped down from lace cuffs to business suits, the household responsibility for conspicuous consumption fell to women. The showiness of the original “trophy wives” inflated in direct proportion to the newly conservative dress style of their husbands, whose somber clothes let the world know they were serious men of import, not one of those dandy fops who trounced about in fashionable wares—leave that to the ladies, thanks. It’s easy, then, to view the return of men’s bodily conspicuous consumption as the end of an era in which women were consigned to this particular consumerist ghetto—welcome to the dollhouse, boys. But much as we’d like to think that re-opening the doors of playful, showy fashions to men could serve as a liberation for them—and, eventually, for women—we may wish to be hesitant to rush into it with open arms. The benefits of relaxed gender roles indicated by men’s cosmetics could easily be trumped by the expansion of beauty work’s traditional role of signaling one’s social status. The more we expand the beauty toolkit of men, the more they too will be judged on their compliance to both class markers and the beauty standard. We’re all working to see how women can be relieved of the added burden of beauty labor—the “third shift,” if you will—but getting men to play along isn’t the answer.

The Beauty Myth gave voice to the unease so many women feel about that situation—but at its heart it wasn’t about women at all. It was about power. And this is why I’m hesitant to herald men spending more time, effort, and energy on their appearance as any sort of victory for women or men, even as I think that rigid gender roles—boys wear blue, girls wear makeup—isn’t a comfortable place for anyone. For the very idea of the beauty myth was that restrictions placed upon women’s appearance became only more stringent (while, at the same time, appealing to the newly liberated woman’s idea of “choice”) in reaction to women’s growing power. I can’t help but wonder what this means for men in a time when we’re still recoiling from a recession in which men disproportionately suffered job losses, and in which the changes prompted in large part by feminism are allowing men a different public and private role. It’s a positive change, just as feminism itself was clearly positive for women—yet the backlash of the beauty myth solidified to counter women’s gains.

As a group, men’s power is hardly shrinking, but it is shifting—and if entertainment like Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and the Apatow canon are any indication, that dynamic is being examined in ways it hasn’t been before. As our mothers may know even better than us, one way our culture harnesses anxiety-inducing questions of gender identity is to offer us easy, packaged solutions that simultaneously affirm and undermine the questions we’re asking ourselves. If “hope in a jar” doesn’t cut it for women, we can’t repackage it to men and just claim that hope is for the best.


This essay was originally posted at Feministe.

Beauty Blogsophere 4.22.11

Before I get into the roundup, I just want to do a little self-promotion: If you're on Facebook and enjoy what you're reading here, please "like" The Beheld if you haven't already. And, of course, there's always Twitter. I'm really trying to make The Beheld grow, and the more ways that people (that's you) can share stuff going on here, all the better to help that happen. Thank you!

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

From Head...

Wake-up (Cocoa) recall: Clairol Natural Instincts is recalling a dozen shades that have mismatched sachets that "may result in unwanted color." You wouldn't want to buy Wake-up Cocoa and wind up with Raspberry Creme, now, would you?

Just in case the revolution is televised: The Middle Eastern hair care market is expected to swell in demand because of the burgeoning youth population—to the point where hair care will outperform all other cosmetics and toiletries. (Skin care takes that honor in the States; see next item.) Want to know more? Hit up next week's International Exhibition for Cosmetics and Beauty Products in sunny Damascus, Syria! Should be relaxing.

So why is skin care so enormous in the States? Nice business-eye view as to why. In a word: growth. Growth of men's markets, of Asian markets, and technology, which means that what seemed revolutionary a decade ago now seems quaint. (Remember ceramides?)

...to Toe...
High heel history: Anthropology in Practice examines the meaning of high heels. It's fashion, not beauty, but it's the fashion thing I struggle with the most so I'm including it here. It is impossible for me to feel dressed up in flats. I'm working to get over this because OUCH but damn do I love the way my spirit feels in heels.

...and Everything in Between:
Avon's calling: Avon became the first major cosmetics player to commit to using sustainable palm oil in its products. Sustainability is a growing (and under-reported) concern in the booming natural cosmetics market--it's great that consumers are more aware of what goes into their cosmetics, but biodiversity and labor concerns can get shoved under the rug, especially when you're dealing with companies whose commitment to green beauty goes little further than throwing in a little aloe and calling it "natural." Let's hope that this pays off for Avon, whose stock has been sagging.

Trouble He-brewing: An Israeli teen beauty queen is kicked out of public (but religious) school for participating in the beauty pageant. The blogger here questions the failure of the system--not that the young woman was expelled, but that entering the beauty contest was her goal in the first place. 

The "lipstick effect": Time to trot out those econ pieces about "the lipstick effect," in which markets for small luxuries soar during economic downturns. Why this week of all weeks, when this isn't really news, I have no idea. 

"Evocative, but provocative": Fascinating early-'60s fragrance ad, in case your Mad Men jonesing is giving you the shakes.  

Eco-luxe: I'm all for companies making green products seem luxurious to up its social cache. But are $19 eco-friendly gluten-free lipsticks going to do much to massage the prevalent image of "latte liberals"?   

Soap cartels: Procter & Gamble (Clairol, CoverGirl, Fekkai, Olay, Vidal Sassoon, etc.) and Unilever (Dove, Pond's, Vaseline, Tigi) fined for price fixing. The more you read about these companies, the shadier they get, I tell you! P&G gets extra credit for developing small-size "no-frills" products as a part of its Africa strategy. You know, Africa, the world's poorest continent. (Though in all fairness, P&G, along with Johnson & Johnson, did make the National Association of Female Executives' 2011 list of top companies for women.) 

Shiseido goes e-commerce: Japan's Shiseido finally launches online U.S. sales in an effort to keep the brand afloat in light of the Japanese crisis.

Curve ball: Fascinating graph roundup on attitudes toward sex by weird demographic breakdowns (did you know that vegetarians are more inclined to report enjoying giving oral sex than meat-eaters?), but what's relevant here is charts #7 and #8, which chart sex drive and self-confidence by women's self-reported body type. In OK Cupid's words: "It's particularly interesting to isolate skinny—a deprecating way to say something generally considered positive (being thin)—and curvy—an empowering way to say something generally considered negative (being heavy)."

"Magazine goggles": I love Verging on Serious's phrase for what happens when you start to see yourself through the filter of spending days on vacation reading ladymags. (No comment from me—yet—on what 12 years of working in them does to you...) 

Monopoly money: The brains behind the always excellent Beauty Redefined are based in Salt Lake City, which was named by Forbes as the "Vainest City in the U.S." Lindsay and Lexie dissect this here; the whole thing is worth a read, but of special note is this trivia: The American Medical Association banned advertising for plastic surgery procedures until 1982, when the FTC demanded more competition between providers to decrease costs. 

Sex or makeup? This study about how women would rather give up sex, chocolate, and coffee than makeup is making the rounds. I don't like the tone that reporting on it has taken, like women are all these cyphers who would do anything--ANYTHING!!!--for our moisturizer. Note that A) the study was commissioned by a cosmetics company, and B) it asked if women would give up those items for a week, not their entire lives (haven't we all gone a week without all three of those? Um, except coffee, criminy that is a toss-up), and C) it's ridiculous in the first place, because they are so not equivalent, right? As my boyfriend said over coffee and chocolate the other day, "It's like asking, Would you rather not eat an apple or have your baby killed?"

Thoughts on Three Words: Obese, Anorexic, Fat

My eyes are so keen on eating disorder talk that I mistakenly thought our culture had been talking about eating disorders with increased frequency. Oxford English Dictionary proves me wrong: Mentions of the word anorexia in the English canon have stayed fairly steady over the past decade. Unsurprisingly, though, we've been talking about obesity more than we used to:

The entire entry at OED is worth reading, and it prompts a few thoughts on my end:

1) We love anorexia riffs. Obesity, not so much.

OED notes that even though anorexia was dwarfed in mentions by obesity, during this time period the number of "spinoff" words based on anorexia was manifold. Obesity gave us diabesity and globesity (which I'd never heard of until this article); anorexia, on the other hand, gave us orthorexia, tanorexia, manorexia, permorexia, bleachorexia, bigorexia, and bridorexia. Some of these are terms that may be adopted into legitimate medical language; orthorexia (obsession with a healthy diet) and permorexia (chronic dieting), though not widely used by the medical community, would both fall under the umbrella of ED-NOS, or eating disorder not otherwise specified. Some are a misunderstanding of eating disorders: Men can be anorexics, making manorexia superfluous, even a mockery of men who wrestle with an eating disorder. Others co-opt medical language to create a problem where there isn't any: I'm sure there are people who are obsessed with whitening their teeth, but it's not a disorder, is it?

Why the casual co-opting of anorexia while leaving obesity alone? It's not like we as a culture shy away from poking fun at fat people. I think it's because even as our culture pities the anorexic, we're also more eager to identify with her—and diminish her. Developing an acute case of "bridorexia" sounds better than developing "bridesity," though certainly it's not unheard of for women to gain weight before their wedding from stress-related overeating. We may cluck at the former, but we ignore or shame the latter; we can't glamourize it with a sweet little suffix. A better term for tanorexia might be willful path to melanoma, but tanorexia is adorable and sort of harmless. As seriously as we take anorexia, we're also eager to belittle it by making it seem as optional as teeth-whitening. We affix the -orexia because that signals that it's a compulsion—but a cute, girlish compulsion. It's the -ette, -ina, and -trix of disease suffixes.

2) Our bodily attentions are fickle.

Notice when mentions of both obesity and anorexia dropped? Right around when the stock market did. This makes sense, of course—the economy was in crisis, and frankly it felt more important to focus on what was happening with the S&P 500 than with our bodies. (In an oddly refreshing twist, I remember losing my job in October 2008 and suddenly realizing that after a week of mourning, freaking out, and drinking, for the first time since 1983 I'd gone seven days without giving the size of my body a single thought.) But it also points to how much "obesity crisis" reporting boils down to a trend piece. I'd wager that, ironically, eating disordered behavior—both the kind that results in obesity, and the kind that results in anorexia—increased during this time, as stress of any kind is a primary trigger for eating disorders.

3) Obesity comes in His & Hers colors.

The Oxford English Dictionary graph got me thinking about the relatively sudden shift from fat as an appearance issue to obesity as a health issue. I see the relatively recent emphasis on body size as a marker of health—as opposed to simply a marker of hot-or-not—as being designed in part to create a fact-based path to reprimand heavy people for their size. There's no doubt in my mind that this is gendered: We as a culture love to examine women's bodies, and having a "legitimate" reason to do so—I'm just worried about your health, honey—gives us carte blanche. Look at the incidence of the term "fat women" and "obese women" as opposed to "fat men" and "obese men", as charted through uses in all Google Books published between 1950 and 2008:

If this were truly a case of reconsidering the term fat, or of the heightened cases of the medical term obesity (which only means "excessively fat," after all), or of a shift in the way that we report and record these terms, the charts would look roughly similar for both sexes. But they don't: We suddenly found a lot more "obese" women to write about (she-besity?) compared to steady numbers of "fat" women, whereas in the mid-'80s, we started writing about "fat men" and "obese men" as if they were one and the same.

Regardless of how you feel about the term fat—or obese, big, heavy, plus, zaftig, or slender, trim, thin, or skinny—data like this points to how what we're describing with these terms often isn't really a body at all. We're judging our fears and desires alongside the target's shape and size; we're evaluating our cultural attachments to bodies, not the bodies themselves. Once we're able to step back and see that, I'm guessing we'll be one step closer to not judging one another's bodies at all.

Beautiful People Are Happier, Finds a Sort of Weird Study

How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?

We already know that pretty people make more money, get better jobs, and are more likely to be conservative. The newest study making the rounds says that pretty people are happier, too. (Full text here.) Compiling data from five different studies, some of them longitudinal, researchers Daniel Hamermesh and Jason Abrevaya found that people rated as more attractive also fared better on happiness as reported through a variety of measures. “These effects are not huge,” they write, “but by the standards of the labor, education and health literatures they are not tiny.”

I could comment on the findings of the study, but really, what would I say? They’re unsurprising, if for no other reason than the domino effect: Happy people are more likely to engage in self-care, making them appear more attractive. And, yes, we’re drawn to symmetrical features and proportional bodies and all sorts of things that science loves to quantify and that I, as a non-scientist, am left feeling sort of hapless about. What I can comment on is the methodology—which isn’t terrible, but which raises some questions worth asking.

1) Of the five studies used in this aggregate study, four relied upon the attractiveness opinion of one person. That is, the bulk of the data of what constitutes beauty in these studies was decided by one person alone. In the fifth study, a panel of 12 people looked at high school graduation photographs and rated them, and the people in the photographs answered questions relating to their happiness...35 and 42 years after the photos were taken. In one of the single-rater studies, people doing the rating were elementary schoolteachers rating their own 7- and 11-year-old students. 

I’m not saying the study is flawed from a scientific point of view; in fact, the study tried to control for these factors. But to call this an aggregate study that actually reports on objective measures of beauty is deeply flawed. (My own recent experience of inadvertently having AOL users essentially rate my face showed just that—same face, same picture, called everything from gorgeous to ugly.) Even if interviewers were instructed on not skewing results based on their own personal taste preferences, when asked to put a person on a five-point scale (“Strikingly handsome or beautiful” to “Quite plain” and then “Homely”), how could anyone not use their discretion?

2) Even if there were such a thing as objective beauty, and there were a uniquely qualified person who could rate each and every one of us, most of us don’t perceive beauty as a static quality. It’s interesting to note that only one of the studies used photographs as the rating tool. Others were all in person; in three of the studies, interviewers were rating subjects they presumably had only met in this clinical setting. (And then there’s the bizarro teachers-rating-kids angle—this before teachers were investigated for publicly mocking their students’ hairstyles.) One of the interviewer/subject studies had raters assign a number to the subject both before and after the interview, an astute acknowledgment of the ways in which we naturally adjust our perception of beauty according to how much we like the person.

So given this, the researchers’ note about the shortfalls of their sample studies is puzzling: ”The best possible measure would average the ratings by large numbers of individuals who have no physical contact with a set of subjects who are dressed the same way and have the same standard facial expression.”

I see their point here, sure, and my own perverse curiosity makes me yearn to see that hypothetical data. But to call this the “best possible measure” is troubling. Setting aside the question of why we’re all so eager to quantify beauty, having such a depersonalized measure would ensure that we’re essentially looking at genes, not at people—that we’re measuring beauty by who has the largest eyes, or the daintiest nose, or the fullest (but not too full!) lips, instead of whose intense magnetism makes those around them feel as though they’re gazing upon a beautiful person. I’m not talking inner beauty here—I’m talking pheromones, and presence, and gaze, and the kind of personality that reveals itself when not even a word is spoken. I’m talking the sort of beauty that is sensed through a shot to the limbic system, not the filter of one’s eyes: That kind of beauty is always going to draw attention. To focus only on genes—and what else are we observing, under the proposed “best possible measure”?—comes uncomfortably close to eugenics, and lest you think I’m being dramatic, take a look at the eerie 1852 Classification of Noses, which links physical characteristics with personality traits, and which happens to have been a favorite of major players of the Third Reich.

3) More subjects were grouped as being above-average in attractiveness than as below-average. (Canadians in particular were less willing to call out subjects as being less than average in looks. They really are more polite than Americans, aren’t they?) Obviously it’s statistically impossible for more than half of the subjects to be above-average in attractiveness, which just points to how unquantifiable beauty is. The numbers here tell their own lie. What we mean by “average” is not the average of the ugliest and the most beautiful; it’s an absence of the remarkable. And yet we can't get enough of the idea that beauty exists on a 1-10 scale, à la Hot or Not or just the mythical strut down fraternity row. 

4) Women were more likely than men to reap more happiness from their good looks alone, as opposed to reaping happiness from the second-hand benefits that looks bring according to this study and others (higher income, better job prospects, happier marriages). This is unsurprising, given the premium placed on women’s looks—and it’s also being reported, so yay for that. But what’s not being reported is that there wasn’t a consistent gender difference in happiness levels. Isn’t the story here, then, that women receive less satisfaction from supposedly gender-neutral happiness factors—money, job, relationship—than men?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bottom Line:

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

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

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

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

Our Very Well-Moisturized Chinese Future

To be frank, I don't usually pay much attention to the whole China-and-or-India-is-going-to-take-us-over-soon stream of news. I want my country to be a global presence and global protector, but given that we've failed so miserably in the latter I often just take a que sera, sera mindset and just hope that my new Chinese-and-or-Indian global emperor will give me health insurance already.

Seeing the numbers here, though, made my eyes pop. In 2010, high-end beauty product sales increased 4% in the U.S., 3% in France, 2% in Italy, and TWENTY-SIX PERCENT in China. Twenty-six percent! The future not only speaks Mandarin, the future is armed with Chanel.

Also interesting in the report is that "prestige beauty" posted the biggest increase in skin care, whereas the mass market saw its biggest increase in cosmetics. Are poor women sticking to the maxim of the lipstick economy while better-off women make a longer-term investment in their body's largest organ? (Not that most of it works anyway.)