THE TRUTH ABOUT BEAUTY

Katerina Jebb, Oral Portrait, 2007.

Beauty often ends in stereotypes dictated by narrow body ideals and strong market forces. The reason is the cocktail called power and beauty – a poisonous kind, but nevertheless the one we all drink from. This essay is a patchwork of reflections and conversations with pioneers, professors, feminists, supermodels and a young girl dreaming of being Miss World. 

“90% of Western girls and women would wish they could change something about their bodies. At the same time, there is a huge market for making boys and men feel just as insecure about their bodies as women,” said Susie Orbach to the media Information last year. She is the woman behind Fat is a Feminist Issue, published in 1978, which includes a description of how the body-focused beauty industry took off. How media development has transformed values and raised generations to promote, communicate, idealise, stage-manage themselves. “What’s happening, it’s dreadful. Western ideals, Western body-hate and torments such as eating disorders are now being exported to the whole world. Children learn from a very young age that the modern body is something other than what’s given; that it’s something to be sculptured and worked on,” says Orbach.

Manufacturing beauty

Venezuela’s “Miss” empire is an example of a beauty-business saturated with power in a way that seems almost dictatorial. At least, in the sense that the country’s population is bombarded with propaganda about a particular beauty idea and an expectation that all girls be raised to participate in the “Miss” industry. The country has produced six Miss Worlds and Miss Internationals, two Miss Earths and seven Miss Universes. According to the documentary To Be a Miss, the “Miss” industry has created a lucrative business due to the many different paths all leading to the competition: 70% of the country’s girls have, for example, had plastic surgery – girls as young as twelve. Parents even choose to give their eight-year-old daughters hormones so that they can live up to the ideal measurements, which allow them to be selected for a Miss competition.
Bethania Davila is the main character in To Be a Miss. She works determinedly to achieve a seat in the Miss Venezuela competition.  However, when she is asked to undergo plastic surgery she decides to immediately stop her hard work trying ‘to be a miss’:  “I think that the women chosen to be Miss Venezuela, doesn’t represent Venezuelan women. They are more natural and simple. She (Miss Venezuela ed.) represents a doll, she is manufactured.” When I watched the documentary and listened to this young woman – at 15 years old – I was curious to find out how growing up in a Miss-fixated culture had affected her? I found her in Spain about to finish her exams in biochemistry; she wrote to me in an e-mail: “beauty and power is definitely a bad cocktail! But, in my case, it affected me in a positive way: getting the best out of myself as a human being and believing in myself more every day. It made me see that beauty goes beyond the physical exterior; that a beautiful woman is not the one that looks amazing every day but that of the  intelligent woman who radiates confidence and safety. It taught me my worth is not based on how I look but on how I am”. I was surprised to see how she had transformed it into strength. She grew up in a country, a world known for ‘producing’ beautiful woman. “In Venezuela, the standards of beauty are very high from the moment you are born. So… You can imagine… I grew up seeing beauty mainly as a thin and curvy body, long and radiant hair, porcelain skin and, of course, a tall woman”.  Even so, she believes in a future of diversity: “fortunately, everyday beauty standards are changing and want to show real women to the world or, at least, more similar to reality. Today, as I see it, diversity is beauty, different skin tones, races, and body types – not necessarily thin ones. I also like that current advertising campaigns focus on a beautiful women as intelligent and prepared”. Answering the question of what beauty is, she concludes: “I will not deny that I worry about my physical appearance, like all people, I like to feel pretty and good within myself, but after going through the beauty world it changed the definition of beauty completely for me. For me, beauty is a person who believes in themselves, with goals in life and fights for them. It is to obtain the result you want after working hard for it. For me, beauty is family and friends. For me, beauty is to enjoy life! Eat, travel, laugh and love”.

Killing stereotypes

“For me, beauty is often something that doesn’t have a standard; that doesn’t belong in a category”. Lyn Slater is the “64-year-old professor” who according to Cosmopolitan has “more Instagram followers than most millennials”.  She sees power and beauty as weapons of stigmatisation and exclusion: “standardisation is oppressive, especially if it is invisible. We need categories to orient us, but not to dictate and, thereby, exclude certain people. I grew up in the ’50s, and I noticed that the women around me weren’t happy. I couldn’t understand why – but when I grew older, I realised they were burdened with expectations of what was appropriate for a woman. A lot of rules that weren’t about people but about fitting into a template. My mother, who is a very smart women, she also had to follow the rules”. In her childhood, art and literature became the key to seeing that the world could be different. Today, Lyn Slater uses fashion to rebel against stereotypes of beauty and age: “to show my grey hair and every wrinkle is my way of owning the stereotype of regaining power. We have a lot of notions that we either have to accept or fight against. I accept getting older, getting wrinkles, and so on. However, I don’t agree to being stigmatised by oppressive power structures. Stereotypes create prejudices and they are what we always have a duty to fight against”. And in that way, Lyn Slater is taking control of the stereotype. Her audience is primarily young people, which deflates a further prejudice we have oddly accepted in line with us understanding age in segments and from a consumer perspective rather than from a person-to-person perspective. And this is where such categories get messy – young people are suddenly hanging out and sharing interests with people who are at another age-stage of life: “I think they follow me, because they experience a freedom from the way in which they usually meet ideas of age and old age”. And it is certainly down to her depth and wisdom, her – intellectual aesthetic – that she attracts her vast audience. Throughout her career as a professor in social law, Lyn Slater has worked with vulnerable girls and women. For her, a connection between fashion and research is natural. “It’s in vogue for dreams and aspirations to be obvious – I feel that I can make a bigger difference using fashion as a starting point rather than the system. Here everyone is essentially equal – I know that not everyone can afford to buy an expensive bag – but fashion isn’t consumerism for me; it’s the opportunity to challenge and explore your identity. Many vulnerable girls are weighed down with stereotypes that expect them to be victims without dreams. But people are dreaming, even those who – for various reasons – have fallen to the bottom of society”.

Revolutionising the beauty industry

There is a Danish proverb that says “you have to suffer for beauty”. It comes from H.C. Andersen’s fairy tale, The Little Mermaid. The Little Mermaid had to suffer – suffer for beauty. The saying is an everyday Danish expression and is almost accepted as a norm – not only in Denmark but globally. The Little Mermaid had to suffer in pain for the rest of her life in exchange for legs to walk on land. Today, suffering – physical as well as mental – is a matter of course: surgeries, injections, eating disorders, narcissistic personality disorders and other mental disorders. Beauty has always been an ideal, but it was once connected to Truth – to the order of nature and not to physical beauty. In ancient Greece, the well-tended and proportional body was necessary because healthy citizens were in the state’s interest, but beauty was not earthly. With time, and as beauty turned into big business, we removed ourselves from that Truth and replaced it with falsity and lies. Over the course of the history of the beauty industry, every ploy and lie imaginable has been used in the attempt to sell the dream of perfection. Animal testing and chemical contamination followed, and products with potentially fatal and pathogenic ingredients are handed over the counter in massive quantities.

At the end of the beauty industry’s history of falsity and lies stand two women, who in their own way are revolutionising the beauty industry: Linda Rodin and Kirsten Kjær Weis. They are fighting to recover the Truth. “It’s hard to be natural,” says Linda Rodin over the phone from her home in Chelsea, and in whose kitchen the successful Rodin Olio de Lusso flower and plant-based products – later bought by Estee Lauder and now sold worldwide – had their modest beginning. “I would be lying if I said the wrinkles in the mirror don’t matter. But the body ageing and you growing old is a truth you can’t escape. When I see women trying to avoid it – for example, with Botox, they often look older – because it’s clear they’re trying to cheat the course of nature”. But why is it that we are seduced into believing we can artificially win back beauty? Why are we still buying into TV-shop adverts promising that we can be young again if we drink a particular juice or smother ourselves in a particular cream? “I think it’s because people want to believe it – it’s like a fantasy. I never made any claim – that wasn’t my thing. For me, it’s not about changing or improving, but about feeling natural,” Rodin says and concludes: “I love to look nice but not at the risk of health”. A philosophy that extends beyond beauty products and into Rodin’s life. She mentions a day she visited an antique dealer in Italy. Two women came in and quickly went out again; “Ugh! This is disgusting – one said to the other – there’s so much dust everywhere. They were probably used to buying things on Amazon all shiny and in new packaging. They couldn’t see the magic in this little amazing time capsule. Dust is a sign of life – it doesn’t lie; where there’s dust there’s living people. I’ve never thought about it, but in hindsight I’ve never started anything I couldn’t see the beauty of. Maybe that’s why I became an accidental beauty entrepreneur”. She loves plants, nature and shells that she finds on the world’s beaches. “I once travelled somewhere just because I wanted a particular shell. It’s like we’ve retouched the natural away – we don’t experience the world because everything is planned and organised or purchased online in advance. We have used technology to remove all dust and natural beauty, the mistakes, the bumps that often create meaning and, thereby, beauty.”

Kirsten Kjær Weis took up the fight against the poisonous beauty industry at a time when there wasn’t yet a shelf in the shops for green beauty products. “Back then it was either health or performance, luxury or sustainability”. And consumers were more focused on sustainable food and health, but only a few questioned the unclear ingredient descriptions on the products being rubbed into their skin. “Consumers didn’t know any better; they accepted due to ignorance that makeup was filled with chemicals, lipstick with lead and so on. That’s still the case – so much is kept secret from consumers”. As long as the packaging is beautiful, we seem to be happy to decorate ourselves with chemicals – often because we do not know any better. The opposite is true when it comes to health products – back when Kirsten Kjær Weis launched her products, there was a preference for them to look boring and indifferent. “As a makeup artist, I saw young girls going from one fashion show to the next, stuffed with products that destroyed their skin or gave them allergies. Their skin was not well: red-eyes, irritated skin. Now and then products were thrown out, but nobody was aware of what they contained and why they led to allergies”. Kirsten Kjær Weis decided to investigate the ingredients and spent several years researching and confirming her suspicions. “Why, I mean why? Only to sell the superficial – health and the long-term consequences were ignored,” says Kirsten Kjær Weis, for whom the superficial is such an infinitely little part of beauty: “beauty comes in so many forms. I have met so many different people within the fashion industry, the unpleasant types, too. And one thing is certain: you can be beautiful on the outside, but if you’re a superficial self-absorbed person – it will always come through”.

Fighting stigma

2017 was the year when gender and sex discrimination flooded the internet. President Trump announced a ban on transgender people serving in the military, the campaign #Metoo focused the spotlight on the blind spots but it also added fuel to the fire of the haters. Transgender discrimination reached its highest; according to the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, the total number of incidents of anti-transgender fatal violence was the highest ever recorded. Late November 2017, the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, in collaboration with the Trans People of Color Coalition, released a report detailing the epidemic of anti-transgender violence over the past five years: “the epidemic of violence against transgender people is an urgent crisis that demands the nation’s immediate attention,” said HRC President Chad Griffin. “The unique and tragic stories featured in this report reflect the obstacles that many transgender Americans — especially transwomen of color — face in their daily lives. It is crucial that we know these stories in order to combat the transphobia, misogyny and racism fuelling this violence so that we can end this epidemic before it takes any more lives.”  The transgender model May Simón Lifschitz has experienced certain oppression and enforced stigma regarding beauty stereotypes: “With my time working in the fashion industry, I have definitely experienced my type of beauty being categorised. I was considered to be this outlandish, alienesque-looking individual, which has made me very self-aware since it did not match the way I perceive myself. At 16, I was definitely not ready to be confronted with having to think about myself as looking a specific way, but it has also inspired me to find self-worth in aspects of my being that I find more meaningful”.

She perceives beauty as a sense of aesthetic pleasure; “deriving from an experience of any given object, in its most absolute form. For me, the encounter with beauty becomes a glimpse of complete silence and peace in which my mind is quiet. Whether it be an artefact, a person, animal or another type of object, I see beauty as an object revealing itself with form, colour, outline and expression in complete comfort and acceptance of its own existence as a whole. I guess it’s a sense of effortlessness. Taking artworks as an example – I feel beauty as soon as I sense that a motif has come into being without too much thought, and colours and shapes harmonise as a whole. Taking human beings as an example – I feel beauty as soon as someone expresses complete acceptance of their own self. In that way, they harmonise all by themselves”.

She describes the beauty norms of today as a reaction to the selfie era: “generally, I feel that we are still very stuck with portraying illusions of what reality is, but there is definitely a movement towards allowing a natural self. By that I mean that the era of the selfie sucked every single smartphone-owning person into having to deal with finding your angles in order to look your best. Something, which, I guess was easier to avoid in the age of the analogue. Beauty is materialised and conceptualised as a specific recipe that can be attained on the .com, through the ever-blooming industries that sell services to “improve” your exterior. I feel like the beauty standards of today are marketed as a gateway to happiness. However, for me, this means a loss of the effortlessness and inner peace, which I find essential for true beauty”.

She thinks beauty standards are in constant flux: “like everything else, I guess, there is constant action/reaction and movement/countermovement, which generates the beauty standards. There is, for instance, a whole movement of women posting pictures of armpit hair on Instagram, which I really don’t think has appeared in popular media earlier in time. This exists alongside a very polished perception of ideal beauty, so I think it’s always a flowing variety of contradistinctions”.

SOURCES: 

Orbach, Susie. Fat is a Feminist Issue London: Paddington Press, 1978.

 Skårderud, Finn. “We are beginning to see our bodies in the eyes of others” (original in Danish: “Vi er begyndt at se vores kroppe med andres øjne”), Information 12.29.16. 

Torgerson, Rachel.“This 64-Year-Old Professor Has More Instagram Followers than Most Millennials”, Cosmopolitan, 12.11.17.                 

HRC & Trans People of Color Coalition Release Report on Violence against the Transgender Community:  https://www.hrc.org/blog/hrc-trans-people-of-color-coalition-release-report-on-violence-against-the

This essay was published in Pan & The Dream Magazine #2

Katerina Jebb, Oral Portrait, 2007. Visit the website of the artist Katerina Jebb