Beauty Blogsophere 7.15.11

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

No animals were harmed in the making of this vixen:
Makeup artist Eden DiBianco (above) is giving away a cruelty-free makeover.

From Head...
It's easy being green: The lovely, talented, and insightful makeup artist Eden DiBianco (you can read our interview here—it remains one of my personal favorites) is giving away a cruelty-free makeover (New York area only). To enter, hop over to green beauty site GirlieGirl Army and comment with when you feel the most beautiful and why you or someone close to you deserves this makeover. While you're at it, read the whole post, of Eden's top 10 favorite cruelty-free products.

...To Toe... 
Yes, but how much should I tip?: Announcing the first-ever cute animal video on The Beheld! Monkey gives himself pedicure with self-made pedicure kit. I mean really.

...And Everything In Between:
Male makeup marketing: Let's put aside the clear agenda of this study about masculinity and beauty products (which was conducted by FaceLube, a men's skin care company that "uses no common beauty terms with female characteristics...FaceLube® is catered to the preferences of masculine men" OKAY BUDDY WE GOT IT YOUR PENIS IS ENORMOUS). It actually reveals something that goes to the heart of the question about whether the increase in men's skin care represents a loosening of gender roles (which I don't think it does in the grand scheme of things, but I'm open to arguments to the contrary). My hunch is that more American men would respond to a masculinization of beauty products than a metrosexual marketing. Lucky for me, I have the vigorous research of FaceLube® by my side. 

Rebel rebel: Saudi men may blame high divorce rates on women spending more time on cosmetics than the marital arts. The study was of 50 men, so hardly representative, but it's an interesting point, especially given that a new Saudi labor law mandates that cosmetics stores can only be staffed by women. Are cosmetics a refuge for women in an notoriously un-woman-friendly culture?

L'Oréal vs. eBay: The European Court of Justice ruled that online sellers like eBay must take measures to prevent the sale of counterfeit trademarked products. (Good timing for L'Oréal, whose sales are sluggish in North America and Eastern Europe.)

Body bloggin': One of my favorite bloggers, Virginia Sole-Smith, delves into the question of body-positive blogs. She focuses more on the issue of measurements and numbers than images—something I don't do myself but that I think can be helpful when done right (as she herself did on Beauty Schooled by asking people to post their weight as one of many facts about themselves)—but it's a question worth engaging in on all levels.

Liar liar: I'm a little late on this, but Stephanie Marcus's HuffPo piece on "liar-exia" raises the excellent point that using cutesy terminology like that sweeps a very real eating disorder (ED-NOS, or at least one of its many incarnations) under the rug. The symptoms of "liar-exia"—making a point of eating bountifully in public and restricting in private—mustn't be trivialized, not because it'll kill its sufferers (it probably won't, though ED-NOS sufferers actually have a higher mortality rate than anorexics and bulimics), but because it speaks to the double bind that women who are supposed to somehow "know better" are thrust into. Eating disorder advocates have done a good job of raising awareness of EDs; now we've got to dispel the many myths surrounding them.

Beauty and the brain: Fascinating study published in PLos ONE about how we process beauty. Regions of our brain light up when we experience beauty regardless of its form, pointing toward a scientific way to say that the beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The study authors also note "there must be an intimate link in the cortical processing that is linked to value, desire and beauty." I don't argue otherwise, and certainly not in this context, because it invites the question of how we turn the inherent value of beauty into monetary value if we experience beauty in the brain. That is: If we can tune into a way to manipulate mass ideas of beauty, can we create profit? Shall we ask the Magic 8-Ball?

Pink isn't just for girls: It's for "the girls" too! Full pinkwashing disclosure: I own a pink-ribbon KitchenAid, and it is the cutest thing in existence, rivaling the pedicure monkey.

Pinkwashing: This fantastic paper (full download here; Science Daily writeup here) by Amy Lubitow of Portland State University and Mia Davis of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics gets at the heart of one angle of my unease with the pink-ribboning of corporate America. Companies often "pinkwash," or pull out the pink breast cancer flag to prove that they're woman-friendly—including companies that use chemicals that have been linked to cancer. There's a lot here and it's pretty layperson-friendly. It concludes, "We would like to suggest that a critical stance on pinkwashing is the first step in addressing ongoing racial disparities in relation to breast cancer and is a necessary element in the effort [to] reduce cancer incidence and mortality rates."

Beauty "breaking points": A reminder from Allure that one way spa workers claim power is to shame their clients about their bodies. This is a part of the "upsell" that Virginia wrote about in Marie Claire, and I'm sympathetic to the financial need for the worker to do exactly what she did, even as it makes me cringe. But manalive I was hoping for some commentary from Allure on this, not a cave-in! (Not that waxing your lip is a cave-in, but doing so because you've been shamed into it? Oi!) There are some positive quotes here too, though, so not a total wash.

A "ho" is for gardening: Not exactly beauty-related, but y'all know I'm a sucker for word usage, so this piece at Good on terminology for sex workers caught my eye. Tits and Sass then asks the question: Gee, why don't you ask a sex worker what she'd like to be called? (The Good piece was talking specifically about prostitutes, and I think that having specific terminology is helpful in discussing any line of work—what I do as a writer is quite different from what I do as a copy editor—but it doesn't erase the larger question.)

Sing it, sister: Tavi on beauty privilege: "But even if I have my own reasons for [wearing makeup and contact lenses instead of glasses], I still can't help but feel a little uneasy about playing their game."  (Via Rachel Hills)

Feminist Fashion Bloggers roundup: Great collection of posts on feminism, fashion, and social class. Kate Middleton's perceived class status and how it relates to her as a fashion icon; two takes on the shifting role of class in DIY fashion; the relationship between downscale and upscale fashions, from the mirror-free Kjerstin Gruys, whose pre-academic professional background was fashion; feminism and intellectual property in fashion; the ethics of thrifting; counterfeit fashion; and honoring Betty Ford.

Necessity, luxury, and class: Krystal at PowerFemme (also a part of the FFB roundup; there are other beauty bloggers on FFB but Krystal was the only one who participated in this roundup) on the role of privilege in the beauty industry: "We often recognize that those who have extra money to hop on a plane to Europe, eat at fancy restaurants, and get weekly massages as socially and economically privileged. Yet, we sometimes forget about how privilege impacts our relationship to beauty because our purchases in the beauty industry are often framed as pure necessities, not luxuries." She makes an excellent point about how the concentration of industry power means that those companies have an overwhelming amount of cultural power, because they're dictating the bulk of the images.

The French Women Beauty Myth, or Happy Bastille Day

So French! So French.

A few months ago, a colleague walked by me and pronounced, “You look so French.” I, of course—in my navy blue draped-neckline polka-dot dress and slingbacks with red lipstick and a slightly disheveled updo—was très enchantéd by her remark, and secretly I think it’s the best compliment ever. (Oh, I know. I know! There are plenty of better compliments. Except not really.)

Of course, this is because I’m all aflutter with what Jezebel termed “our weird national girl-crush on French women,” primarily in reference to this NYTimes article about “aging gracefully, the French way.” As the ever-savvy commenters there pointed out, what the article is really talking about is less French and more generally cosmopolitan, though the French women in the thread did agree that being fat is emphatically Not Okay on their terroir.

So I don’t want to buy into stereotypes of any culture, even if those stereotypes are largely positive. I get that not every French woman has mastered nonchalant glamour; I know not every French woman possesses the elegance of simplicity from toddlerdom forward.

That said: I love the idea of French women. It’s like the best of American beach-babe natural beauty (“What? I just took a dip in the ocean and my hair magically arranged itself in these perfect waves and I have a healthy glow, what’s the big deal?”) plus a polished glamour that serves to simultaneously draw one in and intimidate. I love the appearance of effortless chic, I love the idea of jolie-laide, I love the idea of investing in quality fashions even if you can only afford the barest of bare minimum in quantity, I love the quintessential lipstick and the hair and the Gallic nose and the updo. I love macaroons.

And perhaps I love all this to my detriment. I suspect the very thing I love about my conception of French women is part of the double bind of femininity: Flat interpretations of third-wave feminism aside, I don’t think we can adhere to traditionally feminine ways as we please, reaping the benefits those ways bring us, without giving up something in return. When I heard my colleague say I looked “so French,” what I heard coded in there—and what my chosen outfit was an attempt to signal—was that my outfit had elements of glamour, but not so much glamour as to seem stiff or distant. That it seemed as though I simply had no other authentic choice in my very soul but to pour myself into that particular fitted dress and to sweep up my hair and draw on some red lips; that adhering to certain beauty standards was not being seen as an attempt to look pretty (and possibly failing) but was simply an expression of who I am, as a person—rather, as a woman.

Prompted by thoughtful reader comments on this post about applying makeup in public, I’ve been thinking a lot about my reluctance to give up the "beauty mystique." The more I think about it, I’m not actually offended that women on the subway or wherever aren’t considering me their audience for their grand performance of femininity; I’m irritated that players on my team are giving away our playbook. They're our secrets, the little things women can do with our appearance or demeanor to be alluring in a particular way that has little to do with our person and more to do with our persona. And every bit of common sense would dictate that as someone who fully believes that we should all strive for authenticity, and as a feminist who wants to remove the fog of beauty work to allow for a broader conversation on the matter, that I’d be all for a public revelation of those secrets so that we can see it for the emperor’s clothes they are.

The fact is, though, I have too much invested in that beauty mystique to genuinely let go of it. I’m working on it, and working on challenging myself to not cling to its trappings with white knuckles. But like any dual-headed social structure, a certain amount of opacity about my personal beauty labor has given me enough rewards that its severance will hurt.

Which brings us back to French women. From an L.A. Times article about how les françaises sont fantastique:

"There's an enormous amount of social pressure the moment you gain half an ounce of body fat," [Debra Ollivier, author of What French Women Know] says. "[In the U.S.] people say, 'You look great.' Anglo-Saxons say little white lies to make people feel good. The French don't give a damn what you think about them, and they will not mince words."

And yet, there's a positive side to the French tendency to not give a damn, and it's at the heart of their allure.

American women "grow up as girls with the mandate to be liked and to be like everyone," she says. "And popularity is all wrapped up in that. French culture doesn't have that. When I talk to French women who live here, one said the notion of popularity was so difficult for her to understand because it simply does not exist in France.

"Now imagine growing up in a culture where you don't have to worry about that," Ollivier says, noting that it's liberating.

I mean, what an (apparent) subversion! That because French culture doesn’t have the people-pleasing mandate for women, they somehow...wind up thinner, because others aren’t afraid to rap them on their knuckles? That it’s somehow sleekly rebellious to not gain weight? I don’t believe this is true—certainly not in American culture, anyway—but it’s intriguing, and it’s appealing as hell if you’re a woman who sometimes feels trapped in the double bind of wanting to be conventionally attractive but not wanting to feel as though she’s caving to The Man (or, worse, as though she’s betraying her own needs, and those of other women) in doing so. In other words, it’s incredibly appealing for women who want to find a comfortable place to reside within the beauty mystique. It’s incredibly appealing to me. And if I want to ne regrette rien in the grand scope of things, I’m going to have to examine this with an unflinching eye—because as comfortable as the faux French solution might seem at first glance, its eventual restrictions make it just as uncomfortable as the American beauty bind.

And with that: Happy Bastille Day!

Equalizing Power in Salons and Spas, Or Why Spa Castle Is Basically the Best Place on Earth

This is what is usually promised in spas. This post is not about that.

This post is a part of this month's Feminist Fashion Bloggers prompt: social class. You can read other FFB posts from this prompt here.


As much as I adore being pampered, I’m also uncomfortable with sitting back and letting somebody else do the dirty work. My salon/spa beauty maintenance is pretty minimal as a result—eyebrow threading, maybe ladywaxing if I’m going swimming (though my recent conversion to “skirted pants” tankini bottoms has helped in that arena—so cute, really, I swear!), the occasional mani-pedi. I just find it so awkward to sit there and let somebody tend to the parts of myself that I’m unwilling or unable to tend to myself. Then there are the socioeconomic gaps between me and the worker—taken on its face, I’m white, middle-class, a native English speaker with American citizenship; in New York, the workers are likely not any of the above.

So I was bracing myself just a tad for my visit to New York’s Spa Castle. (I wrote more about it here—stealth shampoo!) For non-New Yorkers: Spa Castle is a Korean-style spa in northern Queens where you pay $45 for access to all of the facilities, which includes seven saunas (yellow clay! LCD light! Himalayan salt!) and a number of water jet massages. You can also get individual services, and since this was a birthday treat, my gentleman friend insisted I get a body scrub-massage combo.

It turned out that this class-conscious-but-man-do-I-love-being-pampered lady needn’t have feared. At Spa Castle, the power lines are drawn much differently: There is zero question that you are a visitor—a valued one, to be sure—on the workers’ turf. The workers claim the zone through a unified language (all appear to be Korean), and through other forms of unification—they sport matching black bras and underwear, which would appear to undermine their status as professionals were they not working in a hot, wet atmosphere, dumping buckets of warm water on clients all day. Plus, without exception clients are naked, baby-like, squirming on plastic-covered tables, on the receiving end of those buckets of warm water.

So all of the people who are paying to be there are literally stripped of their social signifiers and are left in a vaguely helpless position. The message is clear: The workers are there to provide clients with a service, yes, but they are not there to be servants. The subservience that’s so coded into most spas and salons was muted—I can’t say it’s absent, for at the end of any given day, it is my choice to be there as a client, but on a day-to-day level the worker doesn’t have much choice. But the message of subservience? Not there. This was not a spa set up to cater to my whims for cucumber water; this was set up as a space in which clients are clearly guests, who may or may not be confused about protocol (I certainly was, and there’s nothing like being wet, naked, and confused with a bunch of other wet, naked, confused people to drive home the idea that though you might be the almighty consumer, you’re not necessarily going to experience any glory for merely having purchased a beauty service).

The end result was that Spa Castle created a more genuinely comfortable experience than I would have had in a place where my role as customer was designed to make me feel somehow more special than the people providing the service. Yes, fluffy white robes are fantastic, but on the occasion that I’ve been to the sort of spa where you’re asked which kind of tea you’d like as you sit there waiting for your service, I’ve felt antsy, unable to relax (which defeats the purpose of spagoing, oui?). The relative leveling of the playing field at Spa Castle means that I can dignify the professionalism of the workers by maintaining my role as customer without having that role emphasize aspects of the worker-client relationship that make me uneasy. (Certainly the feeling of equalized power was aided by the relatively low barrier to entry—while the entrance fee isn’t inexpensive, for a day’s entertainment and rejuvenation, it’s not out of reach for the huddled masses either. The number of families and students present testify to this.)

I worry that this entire post reeks of class guilt, which is closely related to class privilege. I’ve never worked in a spa, and don’t want to presume anything about the experience of being a spa worker. (I’m also curious to know what a Korean or Korean-American’s experience would be at Spa Castle; perhaps I was able to perceive the workers’ socialization as solidarity only because I couldn’t understand the words, and they correctly understood that I wouldn’t.) I’m guessing that workers’ experiences across the board are like that in most professions—some love their work, others don’t. And regardless of environment, as a consumer there are ways to help equalize the power balance; Virginia Sole-Smith gives some great pointers, and indeed much of her blog is about the experience of the beauty worker. But in my personal work experience, I thrive in environments where I’m trusted to do my work and am free to chat with my coworkers as I please, in my own terms. Having an environment that is clearly set up for me and my needs is key, as is being able to communicate fluently and independently with all of my superiors.

In essence, my visit to Spa Castle was instructive in terms of what to look for in a spa. Can the people working there likely afford to visit? Is the layout of the workers’ space designed solely for my comfort, or for theirs? (Of course clients’ comfort shouldn’t be compromised either; it is a spa, after all.) Do the workers appear at ease socializing with one another in an appropriate way? Is the vibe of the place a relaxed quiet, a jovial banter, a tense silence, does one voice—likely that of the boss—dominate?

My personal sensibility means that I’ll get everything I want from a spa out of Spa Castle, but I know a sprawling complex of hot tubs and naked people being scrubbed isn’t for everyone. Ritzier places are capable of supporting workers’ needs (though I’d argue that my loose thesis from yesterday’s post on the Jersey Shore holds true for spas as well) if they’re run well. The #1 thing I’d ask myself here is: Realistically, is this situation set up to make me feel special for having enough money to spend on a spa service—or is this situation set up to treat everyone here well, albeit in different ways? Without knowing the background of a place you can’t be sure, and I don’t think you need to do labor interviews every time you get a manicure. But paying attention—to the workers, yes, but also to how you feel, why you feel that way, and the reasons that the environment might be engineered to make you feel it—can tell you a lot too.

Body Image, Beachwear, and the Jersey Shore

We, the people, are bikini-ready.

Please believe me when I say that I mean the following without an ounce of snark: After a weekend at the Jersey Shore, I have to wonder if we've overstated the body-image crisis of American women.

For all the “bikini body” chatter thrown at women and the resulting anxiety that (justifiably) gets plenty of ink in the blogosphere, the scene at the Jersey Shore was a sort of naturalistic sphere in which “If you’ve got it, flaunt it” applied to everyone, regardless of their place on the spectrum of conventional beauty. Portly women in bikinis, teenagers with poochy bellies poking out over their bikini bottoms, fat men in Speedos (including one who had the letter “R” shaved into his back hair), discolored stretch marks snaking up people’s thighs, lesser-endowed and more-endowed women wearing the same classic triangle tops (both of which are probably a classic “Don’t” in ladymag parlance). I feel sort of weird putting traditionally negative descriptions of people’s bodies on this blog, but in a way, that’s just the point: These characteristics that we usually see as something to be erased or banished or at the very least covered up were on full display, and the atmosphere of the beach was such that nobody gave a hoot.

Because of the sort of things I write about, I spend a lot of time reading and thinking about body image. And “Hey, the ladies are feeling just fine” isn’t usually the takeaway of what I’m reading. Positive body image is either presented as a tale of triumph, or as an anomaly—and while 40% of women being unhappy with their bodies is discouraging, that means 60% of us are doing okay. I’m deeply grateful for the body-positive work that’s being done (Beauty Redefined comes to mind, but certainly everyone on my blogroll here is body-positive)—and the numbers of women who are dissatisfied with their bodies could be far lower and still warrant grave concern. But the net effect of the focus on negative body image is that I wind up missing tales of people who have average-to-positive body image, and who always have.

It’s not like I actually have any idea what was going on inside my fellow beachgoers’ minds; I don’t want to mistake wearing a bikini while fat (or cellulited, or otherwise in possession of an attribute that would be quietly airbrushed out of a fashion shoot) for having a positive body image. Certainly it’s not like our body image really even has much to do with our actual bodies in the first place. But I’d like to think that the unconcerned air at the shore signals a note of optimism—or, hell, apathy, which might still be an improvement—on body image.

I’d also like to think that while the relaxed vibe of beaches in general have the potential to counteract “bikini body” messages, that there’s something about these beaches in particular that make the case more definitively. There’s an unflagging element of democracy to the Jersey Shore, swaths of which have long been working-class resorts for Philadelphia-area families. While some communities of the Jersey Shore are more moneyed than others, nowhere do you find the exclusivity of, say, the Hamptons, the famed getaway of well-off New Yorkers. The affordability of the area’s attractions—25-cent skee-ball and a visit to Shriver's salt water taffy—means that there’s little interest in making sure that certain special people get to enjoy themselves while preserving barriers to entry for the less special people.

I don’t want to romanticize any socioeconomic class, and to do so would be erroneous anyway. (I’m thinking here of the number of non-white women—and men of all colors—whose eating disorders go undiagnosed because they’re considered white-girl problems.) But while taking in the scene at the Jersey Shore, where people were quite literally letting it all hang out, I did wonder if the democracy of the area as a vacation spot extended to body image as well. Does the idea that everyone has an inviolable right to a little R&R mean that vacationers in populist resorts more intuitively understand that we all have an inviolable right to a beer belly too? 

J.Woww and her juicehead gorillas: emblems of beauty democracy. (Work with me here, people.)

I also couldn’t help but reconsider the somewhat unfortunate totem of the area, the MTV’s Jersey Shore. I’ve only seen the pilot episode, which I found wildly hilarious for five minutes and incredibly disheartening thereafter. Part of my wincing came from the intense energy nearly all cast members devoted to their appearance—from Pauly D’s hair gel haul to J.Woww’s breast implants to the carefully bronzed skin of the entire crew, the artifice that went into their looks was staggering. And, for the record, I’m never going to endorse altering one’s appearance to fit into a preconceived notion of beauty.
 
But somewhere between hair gel and tanning beds lies an aesthetic that is, perhaps by design, more accessible to the masses than "natural beauty"—if by “natural beauty” one also happens to mean conventional beauty, which, depending on the speaker, is often the case. The Jersey Shore aesthetic takes the idea of “beautiful people”—which, as a term, is a socioeconomic descriptor, not merely a descriptor of people with classic good looks—and makes it something we can all have for $7.99. Much of the criticism of the beauty industry revolves around the ways in which it packages a possibly inherent human desire—to be beautiful—and uses it to prod us into buying products. It’s a valid criticism, of course, but I don’t want to ignore that sometimes these products just serve the purpose of allowing you to possess one aspect of elusive beauty. You can always get a spray tan, or a particular hairstyle, or darken your eyelashes; you can’t purchase your way into high cheekbones or symmetrical features unless you’re a member of a privileged class or are willing to financially prioritize those goods.

The aesthetic of Jersey Shore in some ways functions as a democratization of beauty, instead of making it a quality that only the divine, chosen few are able to easily access, or something that more holistically minded folk seek within. I’m not trying to pooh-pooh “beauty from within” or “every woman is beautiful”; certainly those lines of thought are closer to my home base than beauty in a can. But after a weekend slapping around the Jersey Shore wearing my oversized sunglasses and strapless tankini, I felt none of the anxieties of “looking the part,” unlike my experience in more moneyed spots. There may be a coveted aesthetic at the Jersey Shore—one that I do not fit, incidentally—but the idea behind it is that it just might be attainable for everyone. One step left of that, then, is that whatever you bring to the table might not be judged as harshly as trying to fit into an elite aesthetic and failing. A failure to meet a highly artificial aesthetic will largely be perceived as a lack of effort; failure to meet a “beautiful people” standard becomes a combination of not enough resources and not enough genetic luck. There are pitfalls to both, to be sure, and in a bootstrap society like America perhaps the former will forever be judged the greater sin. But there's something fundamentally unjust about the latter, and while beauty and justice are separate beasts, I'd like to see their values comfortably coexist.

Beauty Blogosphere: 7.8.11

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

From Head...
I'll tweeze when I'm dead: Postmortem makeup service allows you to choose your own cosmetics for your final performance. I actually think this is sort of brilliant, and if I'm buried in a casket I'd like some assurance that people's last visions of me won't be with, say, eyeshadow. Not that I'll be buried in a casket, for I plan on being cryogenically frozen.

Ginseng-fed snails on yer face: I suppose once you're slapping snail slime on your face it's all the same, but I'm somehow more bothered by the fact that these snails destined for face creams are fed a diet of red ginseng than the fact that they're being used at all. How did that meeting go? "Gee, Bob, how can we maximize the benefits of putting snail slime on our wives' and daughters' faces?" "Well, Bill, we can feed the snails ginseng first." "Bob, old boy, that's damned brilliant. Golf?"


...To Toe...
Trend investigation: Interesting collection at the NYTimes of mini-essays from a variety of thinkers on why wild nail polish (I prefer mine on my feet, staying classic with the manicure) has strayed from its alternative/punk roots into the mainstream.


...And Everything In Between:
Motivations behind the increase of diversity among models: Surprise—it's money, not a global handshake! Also some fascinating tidbits about global beauty habits, like urban Mexican women mixing crushed birth control pills into their shampoo to combat pollution-related hair loss. 

"You can't learn how to be elegant; you can only learn how to avoid mistakes": Great Q&A with Carine Roitfeld (former French Vogue editrix); she refers to her reign there as a "gilded cage" and has some choice bits on the globalization of fashion. (Thanks to the new spiritual geography blog Deep Map for the heads-up.)

Look chic without dead animal skin!: Makeup artist Eden DiBianco for GirlieGirl Army on a "vegan" version of the snakeskin manicure that is inexplicably popular now.

Is your shampoo making you gain weight?: You'll rarely see me contributing to any OMGZFAT! brouhaha, but the idea of endocrine disruptors in shampoo contributing to weight gain freaks me out for reasons that have nothing to do with my thighs. If a chemical is making me gain weight...what else is it doing?

This is what a feminist looks like?

Man makeup: Feminist-minded piece on men exploring fanciful dress and makeup. The piece's thesis is that it's allowing men to be more playful than in recent history; not sure how that jibes with Hugh Laurie's recent endorsement for L'Oréal, which pretty much relies on his masculinity for its success. Like most aspects of high fashion I don't see men cross-dressing in the mainstream yet, but since men's cosmetics sales are on the uptick it's not like the worlds are entirely separate either.

Shave it for cancer: Ladies, do you feel left out of Movember, the moustache growing month that somehow magically raises funds for kids with cancer? Good news: The Canadian Cancer Society has come up with Julyna, during which we're to groom our pubic hair in interesting shapes to raise money for cervical cancer. Can't I just have a bake sale instead? (I'm with About-Face in thinking this is a terrible idea, but got a kick out of their "example designs" page. The "side part"?)

I bleed red: Always dares to show a red dot in a maxipad ad. Egads! Also in menstrual news, my gym has started giving out coupons for Playtex Sport tampons, which is a good thing, because I didn't realize that I needed a special menstrual product for playing sports. All this time I've been using office-worker tampons! Watch it, Venus, I'm onto your wily ways.

Real women on "real women": Great two-part collection of thoughts from fashion and beauty bloggers (yours truly included) on the term "real woman," put together by the fantastically community-minded Beautifully Invisible. (She's also recently launched Full-Time Ford, a blog devoted to exploring the work of designer Tom Ford. I know exactly zero about Tom Ford but those of you who are fans should check it out!)

The conflicted self in body image blogging: Demoiselle's meta-examination of body image blogging and the traps it can lay for its explorers: "Many of these methods and paths that self-acceptance movements are taking are very exclusive and comparison-based."

"On Makeup": Britt Julious of Britticisms, with quiet devastation, delivers as usual in her personal history of makeup.

 From I Want to Be the One to Walk in the Sun, video, 2006

"You know you're the prettiest girl": Rob Horning at The New Inquiry on the Laurel Nakadate exhibit at P.S. 1: "...we be pushed into acknowledging the place Nakadate seems to want to reach, where the integrity of how you feel about yourself, the possibility of recognizing the sincerity of your own emotions, is sacrificed to the need to be looked at."

Race, class, and street harassment: Excellent post (that I'm late to discover) on the role of class in street harassment. "We're fond of saying that the victim's perception is the key element in determining whether or not a person has been harassed, and while I mostly agree with that sentiment, how does that square with the knowledge that some of our perceptions are a product of the values and norms we subscribe to that are determined by economic class?"

Makeover (and over and over): Hypnotic video in which a year's worth of makeup is applied to a woman's face. Some Jezebel commenters see this as a critique of the beauty industry; I just thought it was sorta nifty?

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

(Really the only way to illustrate this post.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should We Praise Little Girls For Being Pretty?

 My eighth birthday party. I am in the middle. The cake is on the table (my mom let us decorate it ourselves, per my wishes). The frosting is on our faces. Makeovers!

I didn't grow up hearing I was pretty. This was partly by design and partly by accident, or an accident of memory: My parents made a conscious decision to not emphasize the role of appearance in my life, ruling out pretty as a household word. The rest of the world? Well, perhaps I wasn’t a terribly pretty little girl, or perhaps my chubbiness became the overriding factor about my looks, or perhaps I heard it and just don’t remember.

Whatever the case, my childhood means that I’m particularly interested in this Lisa Bloom piece about how to talk to little girls without lapsing into “you’re so pretty!” The gist is that we as adults have a responsibility to girls to encourage other parts of them to shine, and to act as role models for the same, which seems like good common sense to me. Hugo Schwyzer agrees, but notes that by avoiding the subject entirely as Bloom illustrates, we set girls up for thinking that their interest in the subject is shallow, forcing a divide between brains and beauty: “Let’s lose the false choice that says we either validate little girls for their brains or for their beauty," he writes. "We need to be fearless about praising both.”

I agree with most of Bloom’s argument, though would argue that we needn’t steer the conversation away from things like appearance and pink and fashion if they come up of the girl’s own choice. That’s where Schwyzer and I agree; we disagree on one part of his remedy, which is to recommend that in addition to reinforcing the “serious” aspects of our girls, we also compliment their appearance.

We must give our girls tools to navigate a beauty-obsessed world. I don’t think praise on their looks should be one of them. It’s engagement that will help her with that navigation: Listening to her thoughts on the matter, picking up on her cues, asking questions and paying close attention to the answer. Wallpapering her self-esteem with “you’re so pretty”—even alongside “and strong and kind and you sure can draw well!”—doesn’t get at the heart of the issue.

For unlike kindness, you can’t cultivate beauty. (Rather, the things we do in adulthood to cultivate beauty—wearing makeup, dressing well, adopting certain gestures or methods of interaction that signal we wish to be seen under the light of prettiness—we find creepy and inappropriate in a child.) Hearing “you’re so pretty” every day becomes a pronouncement about something she has absolutely zero control over. And being praised on something you have no control over—or think you have no control over—can ultimately lead to a vortex of self-doubt. I’m thinking here of intellectually advanced children who don’t respond well to challenge because they see effort as a sign that they’re not really as intelligent as everyone (including themselves) presumes them to be. It’s not exactly parallel—we hardly want to encourage girls to start putting effort into beauty, though we don’t want them to neglect self-care—but the principle is the same: Being praised for something you can’t help can feel hollow or even confusing.

Certainly, much of the time we’re tempted to tell little girls that they’re pretty, it’s not because of their classic bone structure; it’s because they are making an effort—wearing a pretty dress or ribbons in their hair or doing something else to consciously raise their prettiness profile. And many people will argue that all little girls are pretty—I mean, they’re kids, and kids are cute, right? But surely I wasn’t the only one who understood in second grade that some girls fit the classic definition of pretty more than others.

I wasn’t one of those girls. In another post I’ll probably write up some long drawn-out essay about the trials of being the smart-but-chubby-and-not-pretty girl, but for now I’ll leave it at this: Until adolescence, I was not particularly bothered by not widely being considered pretty. I understood that the prettiest girl in the class—and it was clear to me, at age seven, who the prettiest girl in the class was—was such because she was fine-boned, with honey-blonde hair and blue eyes and a delicacy that chubby, weird girls like me could never attain. I understood that, I got it, and just assumed that prettiness was Jenny S’s destiny, just as mine was as the fast reader, the good speller, the one who always wanted to write on the chalkboard. That was how the world worked at age seven, and I didn’t covet her or anyone else’s beauty then. That would come later.

Here’s how I imagine things would have worked if my parents had made a consistent point of telling me how pretty I was: I would have thought it was nice. I would have pranced around in my blue ruffled Easter dress and thought I was pretty (okay, I did that anyway). I might have been better able to synthesize smart and pretty; I might have been somewhat better prepared for the enormous gap between the feminism of the Whitefield-Madrano household and the attitudes of society at large.

And I would have thought a helluva lot more about prettiness than I did, particularly about my relation to it. I mean, I already spent a decent amount of time thinking about appearance: I wanted to be a model (not because models were pretty, but because they got to make faces in front of the camera); I played with my grandmothers’ and aunts’ makeup kits anytime they’d let me; and, after all, I was secretly deeming Jenny S. the prettiest girl in the class. Despite my parents’ not introducing gendered play into the home (they made me buy my first Barbie with my own money, people), beauty was absolutely on my radar. Beauty was something I was observing as a value, and participating in as an activity. I was not participating in beauty as a value. That was a gift I returned to the universe with adolescence, and it’s a gift I may never get back.

*     *     * 

So what to do? How, without overstating its importance, do we responsibly lead our girls through the landmine of beauty so that they’re not left adrift with no guidance when they begin to enter the realm of performed femininity? How do we affirm our girls and their desire to be pretty without reinforcing the beauty standard—which, I might add, will likely be reinforced at every single turn for the rest of their lives? How do we value everything our girls bring to the table—their joys, their fears, their curiosities, their anxieties, their very selves, many of which might be filtered through prettiness—without either overvaluing beauty or denying its importance?

I’m not sure. I just know that we have a responsibility to them to listen. Rare is the girl who won’t bring her own thoughts on beauty to the table, and when that happens, we can ask questions. We can ask what she means when she says one doll is prettier than the other, or that only the pink pony can fly. We can sense her pride when she’s picked out her favorite dress and find ways to tap into that pride of self-care without lapsing into easy compliments. We can play with makeup along with her if that’s her preference, introducing silliness and fun, to model that beauty can be a place of joy, something she might remember fondly if it ever becomes to seem more like tyranny later on. And we can do all of that without placing the value of pretty upon her.

I should add that my perspective is one of someone who cares deeply about girls in the aggregate, and about a few girls in particular, but who hasn’t raised any myself. I have the luxury of being the family friend who gets to pop into a couple of girls’ lives and leave when time’s up, experiencing the joys of being with children and few of the trials. (Clever trick, eh?) So it’s easy for me to sit here from my child-free perch and proclaim that we should talk to children on their level about beauty, for when I’m with a child in afternoon-long spurts, being with her is the entirety of the activity and I can afford the attention it takes. I’m not trying to put dinner on the table, or working through my own exhaustion, or wiping snot from her nose, or changing her little brother's diaper. Parenting is a different matter, and with no intentions of ever becoming a parent myself, I’m not poised to speculate on how one can help a daughter over her lifetime develop a healthy relationship with appearance. It’s not a job I envy, and there are a zillion ways to do it well—including telling a daughter she’s pretty. Hell, maybe my insistence on this is borne from a buried resentment from not having heard it myself; I’ll never know.

What I do know is that in my limited fashion, I can offer a handful of girls in my life a safe haven from feeling like they are being examined—even positively—in any way. It’s my responsibility to offer them that space. And each parent or aunt or friend or babysitter knows the children in their lives better than some blogger yakking away in her living room; maybe the girl in your life needs to hear that she’s pretty more than she needs to engage in child-appropriate beauty talk. But I’d suggest that with creative effort, we can all offer them safe haven. I’d suggest that we should.

Independence Day: American Beauty Trivia

Happy American Independence Day!!! A few bits of trivia about the largest beauty industry in the world for you to chew on along with your tofu hot dog (or, for non-American readers, while you patiently wait for Americans to come down off this weekend's nationalist high; we apologize for our absence but can't help ourselves).

1) Estee Lauder (whose birthday was July 1, incidentally) got her start in high school, helping out at her chemist uncle's stop after classes. She worked with him to develop the Super Rich All-Purpose Cream; when the owner of the salon where she got her hair done complimented her on her skin, Estee returned with samples of the cream and gave demonstrations, and a business was born.

2) San Francisco-based BeneFit Cosmetics developed one of their most popular products, BeneTint, at the behest of a stripper who requested a potion to make her nipples look more pink.

3) Madame C.J. Walker is known for being the first self-made female millionaire in America, but her inspiration is less touted. Suffering from stress-related alopecia, she tried a variety of products to prevent her hair from falling out. Then she had a dream in which "a big Black man appeared to me and told me what to mix up for my hair. Some of the remedy was grown in Africa, but I sent for it, put it in my scalp, an din a few weeks my hair was coming in faster than it had ever fallen out."

4) Nail guru Deborah Lippman used to be a pro jazz singer. Guess that's why she knows the blues.

5) Legendary Charlie perfume was named after Charles Revson, the founder of Revlon. Why Revlon and not Revson? He partnered with a chemist, Charles Lachman, to develop the line's first product, a nail polish.

Beauty Blogsophere 7.1.11

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

I think I'll try crushing up some Zoloft to use as eyeshadow.

From Head... 
Put on a happy face: Physicians Formula bothers me for two reasons. 1) There's no apostrophe in the brand name, which—speaking as someone who has spent 12 years correcting incorrect apostrophe use for ladymags—drives me bonkers. 2) They're putting made-up antidepressants in their "Happy Booster" face powder. Harmless enough, but the clinicizing of makeup adds to the "hope in a jar" concept—and when we're talking mental health, that's a little icky to me.

Beauty on ice: Celebrity as makeup models normally make me yawn, but I'm tickled by Johnny Weir for MAC. (Via Bellasugar.)

...To Toe...
Home pedicure: 'Tis the season, after all. You can read a zillion of these in a zillion magazines. But why would you do that when the fantastic Jane Feltes will tell you in her trademark fashion?

...And Everything In Between
B.S. in beauty: Scientific breakdown of the "DNA CryoStem™ Skin Therapy System" and its ilk over at Forbes. 

Marilyn myth: Please, God, let the myth of Marilyn Monroe being a size 16 die already. It started out nicely enough but I really don't think all this size talk is helping anyone anymore, is it? 

Sunglasses made from human hair: Why is it that I think "momsicles" are hysterical and these are hideous? 

Fly fishers vs. fashionistas: "For someone to use them as a fashion statement is just sacrilegious," says a fisherman in this piece about the fly fishing feathers that are now popular as a hair accessory. I wouldn't go so far as to call it sacrilegious (it's no hipster headdress, that's for sure) but it is...odd? My mother gave me a fishing tackle box to organize my makeup when I was 13, so it seems this particular cross-section has wrestled before.

Cheryl may have been subject to a ridiculously sexist ad campaign, but at least she didn't have to stuff her beauty kit into 3-oz. bottles.

Fly me: An entire online boutique devoted to TSA-friendly beauty products. I'm happy just buying a bunch of little containers and transferring products as need be, but this store is well-curated and if I weren't as frugal as I am with my beauty products I'd be shopping here.

Smile, baby: Male participants in a study on sexist behavior were less likely to identify "benevolent sexism" even after being instructed on exactly what it was. I don't think this is because men are clueless oafs; I think it's because it can indeed be confusing for even a well-intentioned man (or woman) to navigate. There are a lot of mixed messages out there--including from many women who actively welcome instances of benevolent sexism. Including, at times, me.

Scale vs. mirror: On Day 96 without mirrors, Kjerstin Gruys asks if wanting to lose weight is at odds with feminism. Looking forward to reading her part II; in the meantime, it might be a good time to revisit this pondering over at Beauty Schooled.

Androgynous dressing: Sally at Already Pretty on her erstwhile fears about the androgynous look and body acceptance. This resonated with me; I never feared looking boyish, but I believed I was "curvy" (even when I was rather prototypical-teenage-girl-shaped, which is to say not terribly curvy but it sure felt like it) and even back then the magazines were all about "embrace your curves"! To this day I don't know if I prefer certain fashions because I have a genuine aesthetic preference for them, or if it's that I've coded certain items as "good for my figure" and have made myself like them.

Public eating disorders: Eating disorder awareness is lacking in some areas, exercise addiction among them. I try not to project my thoughts about appropriate behavior onto others, but someone who is not a professional athlete (hell, someone who is) working out 14 hours a day seems like exercise bulimia to me. Charlotte Andersen, guest blogging over at Never Say Diet, asks why we haven't questioned Heidi Montag's public eating disorder yet.

Domo arigato, Mrs. Roboto: Japanese pop star is computer-generated. It's easy to point fingers and laugh because O Japan! ("This must happen every day in Japan," snarks Gawker), but does anyone else remember the Mirabella stunt—a computer composite model on the cover, which was clearly labeled inside the magazine as a composite—which garnered representation offers for the nonexistent model?

Beautiful people: I'm far from scandalized by BeautifulPeople.com and their PR stunts, but still got a kick out of this peek into the site, courtesy a writer who submitted a picture of Ryan Reynolds and gained entry that way (his perfectly normal-looking real face was rejected). I'm particularly glad to see him point out a factor that is far too often overlooked in studies of attractiveness, even if the "study" is just one lone reporter: They rely on normative ideas of beauty, not any one individual's idea of it.

Edited to add: Hollaback has an interesting support program going; check it out and support it here. As a bonus, it "stars" the badass subway woman from this video that went viral when she called out a subway groper on his behavior.

Sherry Mills, Artist, New York City

Artist Sherry Mills wants you to know that beauty is closer than you think. Creating large-scale abstract works from her close-up photographs of unlikely beauty—the peeling paste of abandoned posters, rusted oil drums, tarred rooftops—she prompts the viewer to take an alternate perspective on the city landscape. The perspective is flipped again with another branch of her work, box art: whimsical yet concentrated dollhouse-style miniatures evoking a vibrant Joseph Cornell. Her work has shown at the Manhattan Borough President’s Office, on billboards as a part of Clear Channel Outdoor’s Local Spirit campaign, and Galapagos Art Space, and her solo show featuring her commissioned box art opens June 30 at the Rogue Gallery. You can read her blog here. We talked about walking the line between hiding and self-expression, being a woman in the art world, and ways to cry over spilled milk. In her own words:

On Beauty Being Closer Than You Think
I remember being on the subway after 9/11, and the tone was severe depression and fear. And suddenly this popped through: We have this common ground in the very streets of New York. We share this ground; we have these beautiful, normally overlooked abstract images on our streets, in this shared public space. I was so excited to be thinking in those terms, of this common ground. In a way it’s kind of like beauty being in the eye of the beholder, but it’s really more that we’re surrounded by beauty if you’re looking for it. A colleague of mine then said, “Beauty is closer than you think,” and I was like—that’s it! The idea is that perspective is everything. You can find magnificence in the simplest arrangement. Beauty is constantly available to us—the experience of beauty can always be there, because it’s just a matter of our perception.

At the same time, I feel guided to work where there’s grit or grim things that typically wouldn’t be considered beautiful. If you look at this bowl of pomegranates, it’s a still life you can imagine someone painting; it’s a little bit easier. But then—you know how sometimes you see straws on the sidewalk, where there’s a milkshake splatter? Of course you think, Eww, that’s gross, someone should clean that up. But you can also see it as a cylinder of green with this spray of white, and it becomes this beautiful arrangement. The composition sets you free, not the content. It might be more difficult to drive some sense of beauty toward that kind of thing, but that’s what I like to photograph. I have a great appreciation of classical beauty—it definitely guides us to find beauty in other territories. And that’s the beauty we need to find: Most of us are living with those other territories much more than we live with those classical forms of beauty. If you evaluate beauty differently, that way of seeing becomes more of a habit.

Green Straw

It can be the same way with people. I don’t really see the physical element of people as much as I see a compatibility, some kind of ability to connect with the world. People’s physicality is always changing for me—you know when you’re in love, that person looks different to you? You find that appreciation and the composition seems like it actually changes. Of course, when you apply it to people, the flip side is how are they looking at you, and that gets more challenging.

There’s also this odd perspective when we look at ourselves. There’s this funny thing with our bodies where we really only see it from this one close-up perspective, when we’re just looking down at our bodies so everything is out of proportion to how we actually appear. Even if we look in the mirror, we can’t really be sure of what we’re seeing. I’ll look at my body sometimes and not know how to look at it. Like, am I overweight? Am I not? Am I small? Am I average? I really don’t know.

On Hiding and Self-Expression
In seasons that require a coat, I feel more comfortable. It’s almost like I don’t want to be seen—I guess I’m like a bear! I feel kind of private. I want to be able to go out into the world and not really attract much attention. But then people say that’s a contradiction because of the clothes that I wear—tons of layers, lots of color, a lot of patterns worn together, flowing things. It does attract attention. It’s something that’s always going on in me: I don’t want a lot of attention, but I do want to express myself. So when the weather calls for a long coat, everything can go under cover. I can be totally self-expressive yet covered, and no one really knows what’s going on under there until I choose to show it to someone. It’s a private, sort of self-protective thing. I don’t want a lot of energy heading my way necessarily. Also, a coat contains me: I wear a lot of flowy weird things, and in the wind it’s annoying, so I like to be able to pull it in. I don’t want to be mentally distracted by my clothes. When I’m out in the world I want to be able to be open and present with things and people and landscapes. It’s the same reason I can’t wear heels: I can’t be present when I’m constantly focused on my physical self.

In some ways, getting myself dressed every day has been a way of keeping a muscle going, with collage and my art. If nothing else, I’ll get myself dressed so at least there is a practice with the relationship of pattern and texture and form. Some photographers take one picture a day no matter what, or a painter will at least touch the brush to the canvas every day, so getting dressed has been a way of keeping my eye going. When I’m making a collage and choosing certain things to go with other things, I might see this green fabric with this weird red-pink thing that wouldn’t normally go together. But there’s a sense in me that it does go, even if the next person might look at the combination and say it doesn’t. When something gets a little too perfect, I try to disturb it a bit. I like to challenge what it means for something to “go together.” After a while it’s become very simple—people sometimes say, “Oh, it must have taken you forever to get dressed.” I dress like this every day! It takes me just a few minutes. It’s my style. 
 

It’s a similar thing with my glasses. I got this pair of glasses for traveling during college—I’d worn contacts through high school—and I loved not having to worry about getting stuff in my eyes. They were a bold statement for me then, and getting these particular frames set an evolution of some kind for me and my style. I’ve tried many times to get rid of them. I felt like I needed to purge them, like I needed a free face, that I wanted my face to be forward to the world and not these distinctive glasses. I’m hiding behind these. I’ve gone out to try to find new frames, and at one point I did get these really crazy red frames with rhinestones. But I went back to my old black ones. Essentially it was like trading my face. These have been my face for so long, I could never feel comfortable with another pair. It’s got an emotional tie, like I’d be letting go of my image entirely. I don’t want to let them go.

On Feminine Branding in the Art World
I don’t necessarily think of myself as being in the art world; I’m finding my own way to navigate things, which I think everyone is doing now because a lot of the traditional systems aren’t working. But it does still feel a little bit like a man’s world. I don’t feel like a victim, but I do want to be taken seriously, and sometimes that doesn’t happen. I was happy to hear that people didn’t just see my box work as fluffy and whimsical without depth—I get concerned that I come off that way in every way, because I’m a playful person. I think people might see me as light, playful, emotional, non-intellectual—kind of dancing around but not focused enough. All these things are probably true in a way, but they’re also things that are associated with being a woman. It’s easy to get scattered with doing too many projects in order to sort of prove my seriousness.

Bear Face

It seems like women have a lot of hats going all the time. My partner is this competent, amazing, very focused man who I learn from and appreciate so much, and it’s almost like I want that, but I operate from a different place. It’s a different way of maneuvering in life. I think when I started dressing in my current style, I was looking to express something about myself—something more solid, even though the look I have might be seen as crazy sometimes! But I learned to be comfortable enough to break the rules and be okay with funny stares. It was like a strengthening technique, consciously or unconsciously. It was difficult to present myself like that with consistency in public, yet I felt it was true to myself. Over time it became easier, and the idea of self-expression stopped being so much of an effort—I was just being me, coming out of myself.

So now I have this look and people will say that they’re inspired by it, and I realize that in some ways, my brand is my presentation. It becomes important. It’s one of the elements of presenting myself—my photography, the video, a documentary, my blog, and the outfits. It’s kind of like giving a snippet of what my work is about. It’s all about alternate perspectives.