Thoughts on a Word: Nappy

With a tagline like “Not your average beauty blog,” it’s hardly a surprise that I’m a fan of re: thinking beauty. Yassira L. Diggs’s experience as both a makeup artist and writer ensures her work has a candid, sharp, informed insight; in particular, her breadth of work on natural hair has heightened my understanding of the issue. After reading a piece in which she mentioned her thoughts on the word nappy, I asked her if she’d be willing to elaborate on her ideas surrounding this ever-potent word--and much to my delight, she agreed. Besides maintaining re: thinking beauty, Yassira also writes about thrifting at The Thrifted, and you can learn more about her skills as a makeup artist at carbonmade. 

Nappy is, at the very least, to be handled with caution. It may mean diaper in some parts of the world, but that’s not the case at all, in these our United States of America. Here, nappy is combustible. Not everyone can say it and come away unscathed. Say it to, or even just near, the wrong person and it might just blow up in your face. In 2007, shock jock Don Imus found that out, and reminded us all about it, when he called the Rutgers University women’s basketball team “some nappy-headed hoes.” The firestorm that ensued left him jobless in its wake. At the time, Lanita Jacobs-Huey, an associate professor of anthropology and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California, expressed a view common among many African-Americans when she said, “When I hear it from someone who doesn’t understand the depth of pain, they just don’t have the right to say it.” See, nappy is a huge snag in the idea that we live in a post-racial society, because in large parts of the African-American community, nappy is a deep, deep wound rooted in slavery and Jim Crow.

To understand the sensitivity that nappy requires, one must understand how the word went from its original meaning to this explosive place. Nappy came from nap, a noun that refers to a fuzzy raised surface on fabric. In the beginning, nappy was a texture, and that was the whole truth. During slavery in the United States, however, nappy became a tool in dismantling self-esteem in the slave population. In a world where the feminine beauty ideal revolved around long straight hair, fine features, and fair skin, slave owners, supported by so-called “scientific” claims, pathologized African people’s dark skin, broad facial features, kinky hair textures—basically, everything about them. In order to oppress people you must believe that they are inferior, somehow less human than you, and you must convince them that their (supposed) inferiority is the truth. The message—that their woolly, nappy hair was proof that they were sub-human—was naturally and tragically internalized by black people during slavery. To understand the button that nappy pushes among many African-Americans today, one must consider the overwhelming force of cultural power, and how unconsciously it is passed down through generations.

Nappy’s trauma still lingers, even now in the midst of what seems like a natural hair renaissance in the African-American community. I still hear fellow African-Americans throw around the term “good hair” to reference, compliment, and/or envy straight or loosely curled hair, as in not nappy. I have an aunt who, during one of those family moments when my choice to wear my hair in long dreadlocks was being questioned, heartily defended me with “Leave her alone, one day she’ll decide to fix her hair!”

Nappy is easily misconstrued. People who don’t understand nappy often think it’s another word for unkempt. Hence, nappy has been accused of having an unprofessional appearance, and deemed inappropriate for many a workplace.

In 1998, all hell broke loose when a New York City parent found copies of pages from the book Nappy Hair, by Carolivia Herron, in her third-grader’s folder. Alarmed by what she saw, and without reading the whole book, she made copies of the pages and passed them out to her community, with a note about the white teacher who was supposedly teaching their black and Hispanic kids racist stereotypes. Parents who didn’t even have children in Ruth Sherman’s class protested and demanded she be fired. At a public meeting they shouted over her, threatened her, and cursed her, rather than let her speak. She had to be escorted out by security. When the dust settled, Sherman, who had been ousted, was offered her position back. The shouting died down. The book had always been a celebration of nappy hair. Nappy is that loaded.

My relationship with nappy is complicated in its own way. While I didn’t grow up hearing or using the word, I can’t say I didn’t know it. It was just not used to demean me. I did, however, grow up around relaxers. I came into the world surrounded by black women who straightened their hair. I idolized my mother and aunts as a child, and joined them in the practice as soon as I could. By the time I was 12, I could do my own touch-ups. Every 6-8 weeks, from childhood to my early twenties, my roots got “relaxed.” Maybe that’s why I busted out laughing when my aunt threw her arm around me and planted a kiss on my cheek after her passionate defense of my dreadlocks: I remember what it was like, before I got curious about my own hair texture and stopped using relaxers, when fixed and relaxed meant the same thing to me. So I know how deeply she meant no harm with her words.

I suppose my semi-neutral background with nappy is why my views on the word continue to be semi-moderate (I think). I am not offended by nappy per se. At the same time, I can’t unknow what a hot potato it is in our society, so it would give me pause if someone addressed me with nappy, in reference to my hair. My reaction would ultimately depend on who was addressing me and my perception of their intent in using the word, because with nappy, context is everything. I can’t foresee it happening, though. I mean after all, nappy is the elephant in our societal room, and we, the ones who circle it, go under it, and make our way around it every day, are well versed at leaving it out of the conversation. It’s so much easier to get through the day that way. We are far from being at a point with nappy where it can slide by whimsically in a sentence, unnoticed.

Most of the time, we tip-toe around nappy, leaving it out of conversations, especially in racially mixed circles. There are those who want to see the word gone from the dictionary. To some people, nappy is the other n-word, the utterance of which is at least cause to feel offended, or even bad about themselves. Others, like natural hair crusader Linda Jones, founder of A Nappy Hair Affair, celebrate nappy. Fighting word or reason to smile, nappy has a long ways to go to find peace among us. It can, however, be an opportunity to communicate, and to learn about each other, and ourselves. That’s my favorite way to think of nappy these days.

Best in Show: Prize Dogs and the Women Who Love Them

I don’t particularly like dogs, at least not as a species. Some of them are perfectly lovely creatures I’m happy to share space with on an as-needed basis; others are sources of anything ranging from annoyance to terror.

So it wasn’t the dogs that got me into the Westminster Dog Show the other day, not exactly. I was on the treadmill at the gym, which is where I watch things I normally wouldn’t, like the news, or CSI, or the Westminster Dog Show. It was basically the only thing on that had nothing to do with Rick Santorum (shudder!) or sports (men throwing things at other things, why do I care?), so the kennel club it was.

I wound up enjoying it from a sort of removed, absurdist standpoint, made all the easier by the fact that I was watching the toy dog competition. I know next to nothing about dogs, and certainly know even less about toy dogs. (For those of you who are as clueless about dogs as I was a mere eight hours ago: Toy dogs aren’t actually toys, they’re live, just very very small.) Most looked like extravagant motorized dust ruffles to me. But of course, it’s not the dust ruffles that intrigue me; it’s the handlers behind them.

Showing animals is peculiar, sartorially speaking: You have to be dressed spiffily enough to pay proper homage to the event (teenagers showing sows at 4-H shows will put on their best cowboy boots), but comfortably enough to run, jump, chase, and otherwise wrangle potentially unpredictable creatures. You don’t dress to complement yourself; you’re dressing to complement your charge: “I never want to blend in with my dog,” says a handler in this article, which also advises dressing to distract from dogs’ flaws if necessary—the canine equivalent of wearing vertical stripes, I suppose?

In some ways it’s no different than the boardroom, if, in the boardroom, one were expected to frequently bend over and kneel, and to have liver in one’s pocket to keep a senior executive in line. The result is that the conservative look required can easily devolve into frumpiness—a fact not escaped by the Facebook group Dog Show Fashion Police, which has more than 17,000 “likes.” Shoes in particular stood out to me: Not a single woman handler was wearing heels. There may be a regulation about this, actually, in order to protect the flooring (does anyone know?). You mostly only see handlers from the knee down, and it’s rare to see images of women’s legs without them ending in either sky-high stilettos or a perfectly pedicured toe. Nothing like that here—just one pair of legs after another, revealed so matter-of-factly as to make us barely register them as women’s legs, de-eroticized as they were.

Reading the close-captioned narration onscreen cracked me up at first, these traits the announcers were attributing to dogs—docility, hospitality, even luxury-loving, all with a distinct emphasis on their impeccable breeding and their place in the social order of onceuponatime. (They didn’t need to spell out the connection of dog breeding to modern-day class systems; that part was clear.) But as I watched pair after pair of flats-clad human legs scurry alongside these moving dust ruffles, it struck me what a role reversal dogs shows are for female handlers. Here you have women displaying something to be judged on its looks, genetics, and breeding, and it is not her. She holds the dog out as an offering; we look at the floor-length hair of the Pekingese, the bouffant (hairdo?) of the shih tzu, the perfectly manicured puffs of the toy poodle, and we literally judge the animal based solely on how it appears to us. The words used to describe the dogs—affable, trusting, companionable, lively—also happen to read as a checklist of traits for the ideal woman. The dog receives the burden of absorbing the attitudes we normally direct toward women, leaving the handler oddly free to trot alongside her charge. For once, she is neither being judged nor judging. For once, she is an active participant without being looked at, and without the wallflower’s shame; she must be a wallflower in order to let the canine star shine.

I’m afraid this reads a bit like parody, the idea of the Westminster Kennel Club as fertile ground for an act of feminist visibility, and I admit it’s a little ridiculous. (Though if there’s a strain of radical feminist dog handlers out there reading this, please do let me know.) But when the narrators are saying things that we so blatantly reserve for women, how could my thoughts not wander in that direction? At one point an announcer unblinkingly proclaimed about a certain breed, “It’s not just hair and glitz—they’re actually really pretty.” Even dogs are being judged as either glamorous or “natural” beauties; as leaning on the artifice of hair and glitz or being genetically gifted enough to be “really pretty.” And given that women are compared to so many animals anyway—we’re kittenish, or have birdlike appetites; we’re foxy little vixens, unless we’re heifers or, well, dogs—suddenly it doesn’t seem terrifically far-fetched to wonder if there’s a bit of relief in establishing oneself as the mistress of another who is definitively there to be judged. Dogs may be man’s best friend, but perhaps they’re also woman’s best diversion.

Beauty Blogosphere 2.17.12

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

From Head...
Headucation: African-American hair salons have a long history of being hotbeds of activism. That thrives today, but the Beauty Is It salon in Staten Island is making it official with a news exhibit called "Black Women in American Culture and History"—including, of course, a nod to Madame CJ Walker.

...To Toe...
The pedicure of the future: When the Burgundy Girls dreamed up this galactic nail treatment they were picturing it for manicures, but I'm more apt to go wild on my toes than my hands. Am I alone on this? Either way, this look is glittery gorgeousness.

...And Everything In Between:

Girltanked: Know some young female innovators? (Of course you do.) Girltank, a new think tank of young female social entrepreneurs across the globe, wants to know about them. There are so many young women doing incredible things worldwide; Girltank aims to help them connect with one another and give them access to opportunities and resources that help shape communities and conversations across the world. This might not seem to have much to do with beauty, but it does: The public perception of young women is that they're there to be looked at, or that they need "our help." Girltank aims to change that perception by showing young women as change-makers and contributors to society. If you know of any women who fit the bill, visit Girltank's Facebook page and let them know! (There are raffle prizes too, as added incentive, including a $100 package from Lush.)

Corrupt much?: The beauty biz leads in consumer complaints in Singapore, beating out even the sleaze-ridden timeshare industry.

If you've got a problem, yo I'll solve it: I will forever get a thrill out of reading marketing analysis, as it reveals exactly how campaigns are designed to work on us. This one comes from market analysis firm NPD in regards to men's skin care: "There is a feeling that facial skin care products are not needed unless you have a specific skin problem... For men to use a product, he first must be aware that there is an underlying need that requires addressing," says industry analyst Karen Grant. That is, tell him what's wrong with him, then fix him. Sound familiar?

Sample sale: Birchbox-like cosmetics sampling services are catching on in Korea—because the sale of samples was banned last year.

Swift justice: Twenty-five years after being arrested for selling cosmetics fakes, a New Delhi man has finally been sentenced to a year of community service.

Straw feminist: I've been reading the Tumblr Pop Feminist Perblog for a while, and this screed shows why. I don't agree with every word she's saying here but she succinctly breaks down the dangers of posing the performance of traditional femininity as subversive for its own sake, and also lays out a point that's frighteningly easy to overlook in appearance-related discussions of feminism: "Show me a feminist who is saying we can't be feminine. Seriously, show me a feminist who is saying we can't be feminine."   

Meow: Intellectually, I buy the argument that Hello Kitty might contain hidden forms of cuteness-as-power in a postindustrial society. Practically, I can't stand the little bitch. Either way, this piece is interesting. "The gift under capitalism is the moment that circulation is affected by the introduction of an irreducible social aspect. As the gift of cuteness, then, Hello Kitty becomes a sort of value-analog that works by exempting itself from circuits of valorization."

Бунт Grrl: If you doubt the potential for the forcefulness of feminine motifs, check out Pussy Riot, a Russian feminist punk band protesting the current political climate under Putin. These summer-dress-clad performers are downright fierce, and the potency of their message has more weight than all too many punk bands in the U.S.

Stolen pink: I've been turned off "breast cancer kitsch" for a while, but if I hadn't been, the lede of this Anna Holmes piece in Washington Post would seal the deal. Apparently the pink ribbon was a grassroots effort from a survivor; when Self magazine and Estee Lauder asked if they could co-opt it in their campaign, she turned them down, fearing commercialization of her ordeal. But the show must go on: They tweaked the color, put pink on parade, and now we can all buy pink products (with nary an assurance a dime goes toward cancer research).

Economic models: The Economist covers the trend within the modeling industry of hiring "more aspirational young women" rather than the "very young, impressionable models" that have overwhelmingly composed the modeling workforce—think students and do-gooders. I think Sally Davies is onto something when she casually posits (and by "casually" I mean "on Twitter," where she called my attention to the piece) that "Maybe beauty's social premium has gone up everywhere, so industry trades prestige for pay and also creates more internal hierarchy."

Muslim makeup: Halal cosmetics and toiletries make up 9% of the global halal market, and demand may be growing. Halal cosmetics are basically vegan cosmetics with certification, so I'm surprised we don't see more "certified halal" branding. Oh wait, never mind. 

Prioritizing biology: The writer of this Slate piece is talking about Cynthia Nixon's statement that, for her, being gay was a choice—and that that shouldn't matter. But the larger point ties into the idea I was getting into earlier this week: Why do we prioritize biology over all else? In the gay rights movement certainly it was helpful at one point to frame sexual orientation biologically; it helped plenty of people understand that it was no more a choice than heterosexuality is for the majority of the population. But just as biology isn't what makes sexual orientation a perfectly fine way to live, neither do biological tendencies to prefer symmetrical faces or whatever mean we shouldn't question social construction of beauty. (Thanks to Rachel for the link.)

Default browser: Baby boomers buy more cosmetics online than other age groups, which makes total sense to me. I wouldn't buy makeup online unless I knew it was exactly what I wanted: exact shade, exact consistency, exact size, etc. And I'm guessing by the time I'm 50, I'll have damn well figured that out.

 What would the Venus of Urbino look like with a tummy tuck? Find out here.

Photoshopesque: We've heard ad nauseam about how classic paintings depicted fuller-figured women than what we tend to favor now—but this collection shows us, by retouching everything from Botticelli to Velazquez. Yikes! (Thanks to Meaghan for pointing me toward it.)

The loss of addiction: Medicinal Marzipan on the feeling of loss that comes with healing from emotional eating: "I miss the quick-fix, the bowl of beans and rice, the easy remedy that I could provide myself with the contents of my cupboards. Yes, I always knew this fix was fickle and short-lived, but in that moment, cheese solved most problems." It's a painful part of recovery, that sense of loss, but it's important to talk about.

What does "flattering" really mean?: "To me, flattering is another form of size policing and body fascism." I don't entirely agree with this piece at Persephone—I use the word flattering to mean I look how I want to look, and sometimes that absolutely includes concealing certain parts and highlighting others, which, you know, conforms to beauty standards. But the article is thought-provoking, and I know that I make a point to never use "flattering" as code for "It makes you look thinner" when talking to someone else. (So why use it for myself? Hmm.)

Books abound!: Congratulations to Elissa at Dress With Courage for her soon-to-be-published Thrifting 101, and to Kjerstin Gruys, who just signed with Penguin to publish a book about her year without mirrors. Excellent, excellent! 

More of me: Don't believe a word you read about me in Us magazine, the damned vultures. Instead, read these two interviews with me from two excellent organizations: Ma'yan, a research and education nonprofit examining identity issues facing Jewish girls, and Radar Productions, a literary nonprofit founded by Michelle Tea focused on giving voice to LGBTQ experiences. I don't blog much about blogging, because I gather that's not what you're here for, but if you're curious to know more about my thinking on what goes on The Beheld you may find them interesting.

Podcasting: Sally McGraw for Strong, Sexy & Stylish leads a discussion on the connection between looking great and feeling confident. She's pretty much the master of demonstrating why looking your best is a beginning, not an ending, to being your best self, so tune in, eh?

Comfort and style: Decoding Dress continues her series on discomfort and fashion by engaging with readers' comments to surge toward a thesis of fashion and comfort as social control. (Have I mentioned lately how much I think you all should be reading her?)

Have you ever seen a dermatologist?: Courtney at Those Graces asks why we're more willing to cover up our skin than to fix it. Yes, "fix" is a loaded term, but the point is that plenty of women spend money on concealers and foundations instead of going to a dermatologist, when really, if you have a genuine skin problem, that's where you should be going. Is it the paperwork? The hassle? The fact that it's less fun to visit a doctor than play at Sephora?

Like, layperson linguistics, totally: How does your voice influence the ways people think of you? A Valley girl thoughtfully shares her story.

Sister Nancy Ruth, Life-Professed Member of the Order of St. Andrew, Hudson Valley, New York

Paul Hoecker, Nonne im Laubgang von Dachau, 1897

Every time Sister Nancy Ruth turned on the television, a nun would be waiting. “Movies, TV shows—just something about nuns whenever I’d turn on the TV. Every time,” she says. She took it as a calling to become a nun, but her family responsibilities meant she couldn’t live in a convent. “So I prayed about it. I said, ‘God, you know what my situation is. I can’t go into a convent, I can’t be cloistered.’ The very next day, I opened a magazine called the Anglican Digest, and there was an ad for the Order of St. Andrew. He answered my prayer.” She’s been a nun with the Order of St. Andrew—which allows its brothers and sisters to live independently, hold jobs, and marry—for 17 years, and she became life-professed in 2000. In addition to her responsibilities within the order, she works as a pharmacy technician. We talked about the inherent femininity of a habit, the way our clothes might advertise our values, and where a gal can get a good vodka tonic. In her own words: 


On Femininity
I don’t think being a nun requires you to be unfeminine. I feel very feminine in my habit. I generally don’t dress for anyone but myself, so the idea of going out and trying to impress somebody else through what I wear just isn’t going to happen. Me in a strapless evening gown was never going to happen, whether I was a nun or not. It’s not because I don’t ever feel girly or sexy, but that form of sexiness isn’t going to be who I am.

I’m not sure if I’ve ever consciously tried to feel sexy. I’ve experimented a little bit more now that I’ve lost some weight; I’ve experimented with showing a little skin. Like, I have a dress that shows more cleavage than I’ve ever shown, and it’s a little uncomfortable to wear because it exposes more than I ever have in my entire life. But I found the right undergarment that gives the right kind of support, and I found the right necklace to go with it, one that sort of covers a lot of the area. The outfit isn’t necessarily revealing, but the effect is more intentional than anything I’ve worn before. I’ve survived! People have liked the look.

Makeup depends. Fingernail polish should be clear or very pale when you're in habit. Most of the sisters wear at least foundation. I normally wear eyeshadow, eyeliner, and mascara, but in habit I don’t wear any makeup at all. My eyes are one of my better features, so I like them to stand out. It’s just a way to feel girly, I guess. In the summertime I wear mostly dresses. They’re comfortable and cool without pantyhose, but I also wear them to feel girly. Feeling girly to me might mean a little bit of eye makeup, jewelry, perfume. My hair is short now, but I never had to cut my hair because I was a nun. I was worried about that because I had long hair when I first became a nun, but if you can keep it under the veil you can have your hair long.

Still, I don’t consider myself particularly feminine, at least not that classic Southern belle kind of feminine. I’ve always been very capable and strong, physically too, and I just couldn’t imagine acting like I wasn’t capable for any length of time. But as a nun, the first thing people see is that I am a woman. Having been mistaken for a boy on more than one occasion, it’s sort of nice to be seen as definitively female. Being a nun is a very traditional female role, and it’s an empowering role. People tend to think of nuns as being disempowered, but they’re not, not in my church. About the only thing I can’t do that a priest can is the actual mass, the different unctions, that sort of thing. But I can do sermons, I write homilies. I can counsel if someone asks me—it’s not as formal as it would be with a priest, but I don’t feel in any way limited as a nun. Women can be ordained in the Episcopal Church, but I was called to be a nun; I’m not called to be a priest. In college, a professor put the words “I am” on the board and had us finish that sentence three times as a way of defining ourselves. I don’t remember what I put then, but the answer now would be: I am a nun, I am a woman. I am an Anglican would probably be the third one.


On Wearing the Habit
The first time I put on the habit, it was like stepping into my own skin. It was wonderful. The order was probably the very first group I’ve ever felt comfortable with as quickly as I did; within two hours of meeting everybody I felt so comfortable. And it’s still comfortable to be with the order, and to wear the habit. When I put on the habit, it’s like putting on a hug. It almost feels like I’m physically being held by God at those times, more so than when I’m in my street clothes.

I used to joke that I became a nun so I didn’t have to make a choice about what to wear. And there are times when I’d really just rather live in the habit. One of the things I love when we get together as an order is that for four days, that’s all I wear. It’s interesting in those situations because someone will say “sister” and we all turn around! But it’s wonderful because we know each other’s personality more than we know each other’s looks. Depending on when each of us get up in the morning, there are some sisters I’ve never seen out of habit. So you have to look beyond the looks; you have to know the person. It’s a little different with the guys—they’re all wearing habits but they don’t cover their heads, and hair is such a distinctive feature on people. But even with them you get to know the person as opposed to the looks, and it’s a perfect example of how you can be friends with members of the opposite sex, even when you’re both heterosexual. Some of my best friends are brothers.

As a nun I represent my order, and I represent Christ, so there are things I can’t do. Like, I absolutely cannot smoke. It’s not officially written down, but when your mother [in the order] says no smoking… And we can drink, but we cannot get drunk. Our order meets twice a year, and before I moved and was closer to the order I’d fly up. We’d all go to one of the airport bars and you’d see six or seven of us, all nuns and priests, sitting around drinking. That was probably pretty funny to see—us stepping up to the bar and saying, “Can I have a vodka tonic?”

The habit has left me feeling not particularly self-conscious about my body. I’ve never hated my body or anything; I’ve been comfortable with myself for a fairly long time. But I’ve lost 80 pounds since 2009, mostly for health reasons, and it’s a nice feeling to look at old pictures of myself and see the difference. I suppose I feel more positive in that respect. If body image comes into play it’s more that I can say I look good, as opposed to just feeling comfortable. I tend to hide my body a lot, and you could say that maybe being in the habit does that as well, but it’s also like being the only pink bead in a bowl full of black beads. You stand out in a habit. So I don’t really think of it as hiding my body. When I started wearing the habit, I stopped being the fat lady. Instead I became the nun. It frees you up from a lot of society’s expectations; you’re exempt as a nun. You don’t have to be a part of a couple; you don’t have to be that certain societally defined form of sexually attractive. You can be by yourself—you’re expected to be by yourself, or with a group of nuns. So even though I stand out, I also feel less conspicuous. As a nun it’s not quite as uncomfortable to be alone.


On Modesty
Modesty is a Christian belief, in part because Christianity is about loving God and loving others as you love yourself. Being humble and not putting yourself first is probably the hardest thing a religion asks you to do. But at the same time, you have to value yourself before you can value others. So you dress in a way that shows you value your body, that your body is not out there for someone else to exploit. I see a lot of girls who dress in a way that looks a bit like they’re exploiting themselves. Sex is so much more intimate than whatever you’d wear to a bar. It’s so much more meaningful that I can’t imagine selling it that short, being that blasé about it. Your clothes are an advertisement of yourself: How do you value yourself? Are you modest? Are you for sale? The idea is that if you value yourself as a person, your clothes will reflect that. You’ll make yourself up because you want to feel good about yourself; you won’t wear makeup if you don’t really want to. And you’ll never make yourself up like a fool.

There might be some religious rules about not wearing makeup, keeping your head covered, not wearing jewelry—but that has more to do with showing off and being proud. In my case, I cover my head because it’s part of the habit, sure. But it also takes away from people looking at me as a sexual person. When I’m wearing my habit, I’m advertising that I’m a nun—I’m advertising that I’m not really supposed to be seen as a sexual person. I’m supposed to be seen as more of a religious person.

I consider myself married to God. I’m not wearing my wedding ring today; the ring has gotten too big, and my last ring guard fell off this morning and I can’t find it. Nuns in my order can be married, but your very first commitment is to God, before anything else. But I’ve never really thought about dressing for God, because God knows your heart. God knows me naked. He knows me naked physically and emotionally and spiritually. He knows all the dark secrets, even ones that I don’t want to know for myself, and the fact that he still loves me is important. When people say to take pride in yourself, what I take from that is that God created you individually as you are, and you’re a good person, and he loves you as you are. Does that mean you shouldn’t get better? I mean, God loved me when I was 265 pounds, and he doesn’t love me better now that I weigh less. My love for God helped me say, “God made something really good and I’m screwing it up”; I really wasn’t treating my body well. But when you’re talking about appearance, there’s not really any changes I would make for God. I dress in habit, okay. But living as he would want me to live—showing love to others, being humble, treating others with love and acceptance and patience even when it’s hard—I guess that’s how I dress for God.

Breaking Down Beauty: Physiognomy Revisited

 If you really want the magic decoder ring, scroll to page 61.

Just when you thought you’d read enough from me about physiognomy—the discredited pseudoscience of face-reading to determine character—for one month, here I come, wagging my charts with dimensions of bulbous foreheads and “lipless mouths” that “denote housewifery.” It’s just that in thinking more about the notion of “It” girls as a modern-day version of the science of face-reading, I realized I’d sort of fast-forwarded into that idea without looking at the more direct ways physiognomy is very much alive today.

Its rebirth isn’t called physiognomy, of course; it’s called something like "a universal conception of personality structure," which sounds much less nefarious than a discredited science based on phrases like “I have never yet seen a nose with a broad back, whether arched or rectilinear, that did not appertain to an extraordinary man.” Researchers use facial characteristics to explain things like gaydar, the trustworthiness of baby-faced adults, and women’s supposed preference for manly-men, and even conscientiousness. Even more so than with modeling, modern adaptations of physiognomy are often specifically not about beauty; they’re about classifying features in order to (supposedly) understand more about how we function. Physiognomy has its direct progeny in these areas of study. But the more I think about it, physiognomy is also a grandparent to the extraordinary attention paid to beauty by science researchers.

I’ve questioned the scientific drive behind beauty research before, and I don’t want to be redundant. In a nutshell: There’s an enormous body of research trying to pin down what exactly makes someone beautiful (rather, what makes someone conventionally attractive, I’d argue), and how/why people react to good-looking folks the way we do. I suspect it’s the very mystery of beauty that drives academic research behind beauty. There’s so much literature about how beauty leaves us powerless in its wake; why wouldn’t we want to demystify it in order to lessen its supposed power over us? (The next logical question question is gendered—why do we want so specifically to put a fine point on women’s beauty—but that’s a different post.)

Beauty science is the richest heir to physiognomy. What physiognomy attempted to do was pin down the mysteries of character and behavior, using a highly coded and essentially arbitrary system of classification. What scientists and economists are attempting to do with its glut of studies on beauty is pin down the mystery of fascination, using the highly specialized—and often subjective—tools at their disposal. When attempting to decipher what puzzles us, it’s assuring to turn to something unassailable to provide us with order. We can now look at physiognomy and see it’s ridiculous, but plenty today are happy to give credence to evolutionary psychology as it pertains to beauty without giving it a second thought. We can see the blatant racism, or at least the potential for it, in evolutionary psychology; we may not be as able to see how it enshrines subtler beauty norms, in part because there’s so much mystery, doubt, fear, and wonder about human beauty, particularly our own. (Is it possible to read any study on what determines beauty without attempting, however briefly, to figure out where you’d fall by its measure? I once actually measured the circumference of my wrist because it was supposed to tell me something about my desirability as a mate.)

I’m not trying to say that beauty researchers are as full of hocus-pocus as physiognomists. Where the father of 18th-century physiognomy Johann Kaspar Lavater said ,“Meeting eyebrows, held so beautiful by the Arabs...I can neither believe to be beautiful nor characteristic of such a quality,” the new set of beauty science at least attempts to set objective criteria. (At least, some of the time it does; much of the time it’s just as subjective as a 1794 fortune-teller. The aggregate study from Daniel Hamermesh that got a lot of ink last year examined five studies on beauty; four of them relied upon the beauty assessment of exactly one person.) I’m also not saying there’s nothing to the evolutionary science of beauty. I’m not qualified to make that statement, and it makes sense that the science of beauty, including evolutionary psychology, has a valid place in any thorough discussion of beauty. But what I’ve repeatedly found is that when people rush to bring in scientific “proof” of why we find certain features beautiful, it shuts down the conversation instead of enlivens it. It’s a way of saying, Sorry, babe, there’s nothing you can do about it, whether “it” is the incessant ogling of a woman with the desired waist-hip ratio, or someone feeling excluded from the realm of the beautiful because her features don’t match up quite right.

And that’s just a shame. I don’t think that the people behind these studies mean to shut down discourse about beauty; I think the actual researchers want to do the opposite. The most prominent researcher on the science of beauty, Nancy Etcoff, presents her work as a launching point, making it clear that she just wants the science of beauty to have a place in the conversation; her book, Survival of the Prettiest, is as much a cultural study as it is a scientific one. Actually, Etcoff’s introduction to her book makes it clear that she’s only trying to bring science back to beauty. Science had been concerned with looks at one point, she writes, until such studies became discredited as arbitrary, racist, and generally faulty. The science she was writing of, of course, was physiognomy.

Last week I wrote that it’s useful to look at a now-discredited pseudoscience in order to understand the collective cultural forces that go into taste-making, specifically in the modeling industry. But the consideration of physiognomy has a far more direct application to most of us: If we can give the science of beauty the same skepticism we now give to physiognomy, we may be able to see how little of the story evolutionary psychology really gives us when it comes to looks and attraction. Again, I’m not saying that Etcoff and the like are the equivalent of Lavater, making wild proclamations based solely on their own experience. But physiognomy’s, erm, limitations can illuminate those of the beauty sciences. More important, they can show us that there’s something more at stake than simple research. Lavater wrote Physiognomy in 1775—the early years of the Industrial Revolution, which would change the entire world more rapidly, and more radically, than any developments that came before it. The science of beauty began to see a resurgence in the 1960s, another time of blistering change. So let me ask you: What is going on now that might make scientists and economists put hard numbers on beauty? What sort of threat might a pretty face—or, for that matter, a not-pretty one—pose to social order? Why might we want to boil down beauty to a series of tables and charts, measurements and ratios, and why now? If we understand beauty in a rational way, who benefits—and whose power is curtailed?

Beauty Blogosphere 2.10.12

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

From Head...
The extravaganza: Seems that we've always liked to mock vanity, and there's none better than Sissydude's hilarious collection of antique images satirizing elaborate hairstyles of yore. (via Final Fashion)

Celebrate good times?: Mark Black History Month—with a sale on hair relaxers! Oh my. To be sure, hair relaxers have a place in black history; plenty of black women straighten their hair and they're not race traitors because of it. But couldn't Family Dollar have come up with a better way to celebrate Black History Month? Like changing their name for the month to Family Fifty-Eight Cents to mark the continuing pay disparity between black and white Americans? (Actually, I now see this was from two years ago. But the misguided idea here is unfortunately persistent, as this updated roundup shows.)


...To Toe...
I cannot believe this isn't more popular: Shoe stores offering pedicures.


...And Everything In Between:
Bad week for makeup makers: L'Oréal is closing a Cleveland-area plant because it's consolidating its shampoo and conditioner manufacturing, putting 260 out of work. And Proctor & Gamble is laying off and otherwise reducing work for several thousand employees making up 3% of its workforce. Counterintuitively, given the company's successful marketing campaigns, much of the reduction is coming from marketing and other non-manufacturing departments. (Also this week: Proctor & Gamble is responsible for killing lard. Lard! The best fat of them all!) 

Video star: I admit I don't really get the Lana Del Rey thing, meaning I understand neither the vitriol directed in her direction nor the passionate defenses of her—rather, I don't understand why her music has spurred such discourse. That said, the discourse is interesting, particularly this piece at Tiger Beatdown: "[D]udes are angry because they have been exposed to the artifice; because seeing Lana del Rey perform, they cannot claim that there is such a thing as a 'unique natural femininity.' They hate her, of course, because to acknowledge the artifice would, inevitably, lead to questioning the artifice behind their own notions of femininity and, again, inevitably, their own stereotypes of masculinity." I just sort of wish her music was as interesting as what people are saying about it. (I do like her music, for the record; I just don't how it's sparked this kind of discussion. Then again, I never understand music lyrics, ever, so maybe that's why she's lost on me? She could be singing in Cambodian for all I know.) 

Does this include Mary Janes?: What we buy when we purchase a named garment (like J.Crew's Minnie pants): "The emotional structure of a proper name sparks a relationship with pants that transcends the physical interactions that would normally occur in a store. Verbal and iconic structures confirm the pants are real, but the emotional structure connotes a person-to-person exchange. Online, the Named garment allows us to establish trusting relationships with products through action that simulates clicking personal profiles, rather than transactions devoid of humanity. That sweater? She’s Tippi. Those shoes? Mona."

 Ideally the spilling polish would also be a chocolate fountain.

Built to spill: Gimmick architecture of the year: Store designed to look like bottle of nail polish pouring onto the floor.

Ladyscience: Science writer Hillary Rosner's piece about her frustration on writing for women's magazines shows what goes on behind the scenes. I'm similarly frustrated by women's magazines and know what she says to be absolutely true (that is, I've never worked with Rosner but have seen this happen repeatedly in my career)—but I'm also a believer in what they've done for women, and what they can continue to do. Women's magazines were instrumental in women's health issues being taken seriously, and they do a good job of staying on-point with service for the reader. It's that very service—the single-minded aspiration to give readers a singular "takeaway"—that drives many of the problems Rosner is writing about here. We need the takeaway, but we also need credible science writing in women's magazines if they're to continue giving true service to women.

Cupcakes and cash: Cupcakes and Cashmere blogger Emily Schuman is signing on with Estee Lauder as social media editor, which makes sense, as she's "our ideal customer," according to the brand global president. It's an example of the crucial role of authenticity in brand marketing: Schuman has a loyal readership because they see her as speaking solely for herself, and by teaming up with Estee Lauder, that quality is transferred. (Also, and this is pure conjecture, hiring Schuman is probably cheaper than their usual promotional venues, which would make Wall Street happy instead of frowny over Estee Lauder's middling earnings.)

Shop after you've dropped: Thanks to Glamour magazine and the New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission, shoppers will be able to use their smartphones to buy luxury beauty products using special tags in a test flight of taxicabs. No word on a launch date for the "dream to shop" app that lets you buy shit in your sleep.  

Beauty at All Ages!: e.l.f. Cosmetics is having a downright revolutionary contest called "Beauty at All Ages," in which aspiring models can enter pictures of themselves in one of four categories: teens, 20s, 30s, and 40+. All ages, people, you hear that? All ages.

Oh Nicki: Clutch magazine casts a critical eye upon Nicki Minaj's embrace of the white beauty standard. "The fact that Minaj has generated so much success by merging the typical mainstream beauty standards of Barbie and Marilyn Monroe with the outlandish 'ghetto booty' that so many black men celebrate speaks volumes."  

On stand-ins: Maryam Monalisa Gharavi on the use of imagery in one of the most absurd news stories of late: the public use of a cardboard cutout of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to mark the anniversary of his post-exile return to Iran. "He who denounced immodestly dressed women as ‘coquettes’ (the Shah referred to them as ‘dolls’) has been dwarfed into a string puppet. ... I find myself more interested in what is really real in these photos than what constitutes simulacra of the real." It's an interesting story in its own right, but while reading I kept thinking: We can easily see the use of a cardboard cutout of Khomeini as patently ludicrous. But it's also an (admittedly dramatic) externalization of the way we do treat images as the real deal—worth keeping in mind with image-worship of beautiful women.

Haute hijab: Terrifically excited to see where Underwraps, a new Muslim modeling agency, goes.

The Chinese consumer: The state of cosmetics in China. Makeup was forbidden under the Cultural Revolution, paving the way for cosmetics education seminars targeting new consumers, including a "lunch and learn" program for administrative office workers.

Blue Ivy™: Did Jay-Z and Beyonce actually file a trademark claim on their daughter's name, with the intent of using it for a line of beauty products?

Easy peasy: Got acne? Put a frog on it!

Beauty Imagined: My reading list is a gazillion miles long, but this Bookslut review of Beauty Imagined: A Global History of the Beauty Industry bumps Geoffrey Jones's book farther up the list.

Gone raw: I feel pretty strongly that a raw-foods diet is way too close for comfort to eating-disorder-land, but if anyone could convince me otherwise it's Gena and her textured writings at Choosing Raw. And this piece about the dangers of pursuing a raw or vegan lifestyle as a beauty regime shows why. "There is a ton of pressure for people who eat healthy to also look 'the part.' It is assumed that healthy vegans and vegetarians will be slim, clear-skinned, and energetic at all times. ... I’ve been approached by readers when I was particularly exhausted before, and gotten worried: did I look pale? Did I have bags under my eyes? Obviously, those things indicate nothing more than the fact that I’m a full time pre-med student and blogger who doesn’t sleep enough. But the fear is that people will assume my healthy lifestyle habits are ineffectual, or a hoax."

"Appearance sports": Plenty of us are well-versed in spotting the signs of eating disorders. But this piece focuses on symptoms of eating disorders in female bodybuilders, whose symptoms may be less easily spotted because A) being thin isn't the point, and B) attention to physique is already a given in their lives.

"Repetition is the uniform": Brittany Julious, lyrical as ever, has a short prose piece "On Uniforms."

Also, owl tattoos: The Blind Hem looks at the "functionless fashion" of hipsters. "So instead of uselessly consuming the useless, as the readers of Vogue are wont to do, the readers of Vice consume—still uselessly—the useful. Hipsters pervert the traditional functionlessness of aesthetic objects by taking up, as fashionable, clothing that has as its only redeeming quality function (Carharts, Doc Martins, flannel, etc)... All this appears to constitute the kind of perversion that makes the non-hipster media not only uncomfortable but angry."

Dulce de leche: Breastfeeding glamour, courtesy Nahida at The Fatal Feminist. 

Bellies up: Danielle at Final Fashion looks at the fetishized belly throughout history, from Venus of Willendorf to Christina Aguilera. (The day I read this, I purchased my first-ever empire-waist item, a long aquamarine nightgown. Coincidence? I think not.)

Also, she's all of 53: Two differing but ultimately compatible takes on the issue of Madonna and age, spurred by her Superbowl halftime performance. Caitlin proposes a moratorium on jokes about her age, while Julie Klausner and Natasha Vargas-Cooper at The Awl ask why she insists on clinging to a girlish version of sexiness instead of a womanly version of it.

Let's get comfortable: Decoding Dress, with her ever-sharp critical eye, examines a fashion double bind: In part I, she presents the question of dressing stylishly versus dressing comfortably, and in part II, she breaks down the role societal authority has in both creating and enforcing the double bind.

Extra/ordinary: On eating disorders and the desire to be extraordinary. I don't agree with everything this piece says (and I got the feeling throughout that the writer hadn't quite liberated herself from the need to feel extraordinary, but then again, who has?). But it's a good look into the links between "impostor syndrome," eating disorders, and achievement. So many ED stories focus on the "need to be thin" from an appearance-based perspective, and I particularly like that this doesn't do that, preferring to look at that drive from the more complex place where eating disorders are actually born.

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. 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.

Thoughts on a Word: Glamour (Part I)

Glamour is an illusion, and an allusion too. Glamour is a performance, a creation, a recipe, but one with give. Glamour is elegance minus restraint, romance plus distance, sparkle sans naivete. Glamour is Grace Kelly, Harlow, Jean (picture of a beauty queen). Glamour is $3.99 on U.S. newsstands, $4.99 Canada. Glamour is artifice. Glamour is red lipstick, Marcel waves, a pause before speaking, and artfully placed yet seemingly casual references to time spent in Capri. Glamour is—let’s face it—a cigarette. Glamour is Jessica Rabbitt, and it’s Miss Piggy too. Glamour is adult. Glamour cannot be purchased, but it can’t be created out of thin air either. Glamour is both postmodern and yesterday. Glamour is an accomplishment. Glamour is magic.

In fact, glamour began quite literally with magic. Growing from the Scottish gramarye around 1720, glamer was a sort of spell that would affect the eyesight of those afflicted, so that objects appear different than they actually are. Sir Walter Scott anglicized the word and brought it into popular use in his poems (“You may bethink you of the spell / Of that sly urchin page / This to his lord did impart / And made him seem, by glamour art / A knight from Hermitage”); not long after his death in 1832 the word began to be used to describe the metaphoric spell we cast upon one another by being particularly beautiful or fascinating. It wasn’t necessarily a compliment (“There was little doubt that he meant to bring his magnetism and his glamour, and all his other diabolical properties, to market here,” from an 1878 novel) but by the 1920s—not coincidentally, the time women started developing the styles that we now recognize as glamorous—the meaning had shed much of its air of suspicion.

Not that we’re wholly unsuspicious of glamour. Female villains in films are often impossibly glamorous, for as fascinated as we are with the artifice of glamour, we’re also a tad wary of it. Glamour keeps its holder at a distance, and it needs that distance in order to work; watch the magician’s hands too closely and you’ll spoil the trick. It’s unkind to glamour to call it strictly a trick, but neither is it inaccurate: On a person, glamour is a series of reference points that form its illusory quality. We perceive red lipstick and hair cascading over one shoulder as glamorous because we understand it’s referencing something we’ve collectively decided is glamorous. The same is true of glamorous looks with less direct artifice—say, a world traveler in a pith helmet and white linen—but in becoming a reference point, anything we code as glamour becomes artifice, even if it’s not about smoke and mirrors. It’s not hard to get glamour “right,” but since glamour is a set of references—a creation instead of a state of being—you do have to get it right in order to be seen as glamorous as opposed to pretty, polished, or chic. We don’t stumble into glamour; we create it, even if we don’t realize that’s what we’re doing. Call glamour a performance if you wish. It’s equally accurate to call it an accomplishment.

In 1939, glamour—rather, Glamour—took on an additional definition. In 1932, publishing company Condé Nast launched a new series of sewing pattern books featuring cheaper garments more readily accessible to the downtrodden seamstresses of the Depression; its more elite Vogue pattern line hadn't been doing well. Seven years later, Condé Nast spun off a magazine from this Hollywood Pattern Book called Glamour of Hollywood, which promised readers the “Hollywood way to fashion, beauty, and charm.” By 1941 it had shed “of Hollywood” and had already toned down its coverage of Hollywood in order to focus on the life of the newfound career girl; by 1949 its subtitle was “For the girl with a job.” That is, Glamour wasn’t about film or Hollywood or unattainable ideals; Glamour was about you. That ethos continues to this day: Glamour might have a $12,000 bracelet on its cover but will have a $19 miniskirt inside, and its editorial tone squarely targets plucky but thoughtful young women who want to “have it all.”

It’s all too fitting that the once-downmarket* sister of Vogue is titled Glamour. To the eyes of a nation emerging from a depression, the concept of glamour might have seemed faraway—but it also seemed accessible in ways that the gilt-edged Vogue wasn’t. The “girl with a job” knew that with the right sleight-of-hand, she could purchase aspects of glamour found on the magazine’s pages, pick up a tip or two about home economy (if one must be bothered with the terribly unglamorous domestic life, why not make it economical?), and find out how to enchant her suitors or husband—and she wouldn’t necessarily need money or social status to do any of those things. She just needed the know-how of glamour. Glamour magazine doesn’t target the highest end of the market, nor does it assume that its readers have the cultural capital of the modern-day gentry (“How to do Anything Better” is one of its more popular features; readers might learn how to make a proper introduction or throw a dinner party). At first glance this might seem counterintuitive to the spirit of its namesake, yet it’s anything but: With these specific moves, Glamour reinforces the notion of glamour as something actionable. In knowing that most of its readers, however stylish, aren’t among the cultural illuminati, Glamour acknowledges that maybe they have need of casting the occasional spell—which, of course, Glamour is happy to supply.

I should say here that I worked for Glamour magazine for several years as a copy editor.** I share that not only to disclose my relationship with the magazine, but also because my specific post there—as a professional grammarian—was tethered to the concept of glamour more than I realized. For gramarye, the root word of glamour, also gave birth to the word grammar. The route is fairly straightforward: Gramarye at one time simply meant learning, including learning of the occult, and it’s this variant that went on to be glamour. Grammar stayed magic-free and pertained to the rules of learning, eventually becoming particular to the rules of language. But the two are linked more than just etymologically: Both grammar and glamour function as a set of rules that help people articulate themselves and allow us to understand one another. I understand you are telling me of the future by the use of words like will and going to; I understand you are telling me about your vision of yourself with red lipstick and a wiggle dress.

Some may argue that the rules and articulations of glamour are confining. They can be, when taken as feminine dictates, but they also make glamour democratic. It’s easy to aim for class or sophistication and miss the mark, for there are so many ways we can make unknowing missteps. But because glamour relies upon references and images, with a bit of thought and creativity almost anyone can conjure its magic—and unlike fashion, glamour doesn’t go in and out of style, so you needn’t reinvest every season. You can be fat and glamorous, bald and glamorous, poor and glamorous, short and glamorous, nerdy and glamorous, a man and glamorous. Perhaps most important, you can be old and glamorous. In fact, age helps. (Children are never glamorous; neither are the naive.) Glamour’s illusion doesn’t make old people look younger; it makes them look exactly their age, without apology. Glamour can channel the things we may attribute to youth—sex appeal, flirtation, vitality—but it also requires things that come more easily with age, like mystery and a past. Think of the trappings of adult femininity little girls reach for in play: not bras and sanitary pads, but high heels and lipstick, those two most glamorous things whose entire point is to create an illusion. A five-year-old knows that with womanhood can come glamour, if she wishes. She also knows it’s not yet hers to assume.

In case it’s not yet clear: I am a champion of glamour. That’s not to say I’m always glamorous; few can be, and certainly I’m not one of them. I like comfort far too much to be consistently glamorous. But I’m firmly in glamour’s thrall. When I am walking down the street (particularly 44th Street, in the general direction of an excellent martini) in something I feel glamorous in—say, a certain navy-blue bias-cut polka-dot dress with a draped neckline, clip-clip heels, a small hat, and the reddest lipstick I own—I feel a variety of confidence that I can’t channel using any other means. It’s not a confidence that’s superior to other forms of assurance, but it’s inherently different. It’s the feeling of prettiness, yes, and femininity and looking appropriate for the occasion. It’s all of those things, but the overriding feeling is this: When I am feeling and looking glamorous, I am slipping into an inchoate yet immensely satisfying spot between the public and private spheres. You see me in my polka-dotted ‘40s-style dress, small hat, and lipstick, and you may think I look glamorous—which is the goal. But here’s the trick of glamour: You see me, and yet you don’t. That is, you see the nods to the past, and you see how they look on my particular form; you see what I bring to the image, or how I create my own. Yet because I’m not necessarily attempting to show you my authentic self—whatever that might be—but rather a highly coded self, I control how much you’re actually witness to.

Now, that’s part of the whole problem we feminists have with the visual construction of femininity: The codes speak for us and we have to fight all that much harder to have our words heard over the din our appearance creates. But within those codes also lies a potential for relief, for our own construction, for play, for casting our own little spells. That’s true of all fashion and beauty, but it’s particularly true of the magic of glamour.

I promise not to play tricks on anyone. But forgive me if, every so often, I might want to use a little magic.
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Stay tuned for part II tomorrow, in which an author and renowned national columnist, a multidisciplinary artist and satirist, a four-time novelist with a bent toward otherworldly enchantment, and a publicist who's one of the "cultural gatekeepers in the literary world" share their own thoughts on the concept of glamour.
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*Glamour isn’t “downmarket” any longer, I don’t think; it’s more middle-market. Or, as a marketing poster once floating through the halls there read, it’s “masstige.”
**Given the dual etymology, I think it's only fair to declare all Glamour grammarians to be sorceresses.