Keeping Up Appearances
Mischa Anouk Smith asks if we can resist the pressure of the post-pandemic beauty boom.
You might’ve noticed your social media feed filling with calls to action, it’s time to get ready! To prep! To preen! What is it you’re supposed to be getting ready for? The makeup renaissance, apparently. Oh, and Hot Vax Summer. But after a year of readying ourselves for whatever fresh hell the pandemic brought, including such blockbusters as Lockdowns 1, 2 and 3, when it comes to putting on some slap, getting ready feels different these days.
In the last 15 months, we've reset our priorities, re-examined our relationships and abandoned and adopted new routines. I ramped up skincare, fuelled by my looming 30th, but dropped makeup entirely. I'd assumed I enjoyed wearing makeup but scrapping it on day one of lockdown made me see it was rarely something I did for myself. What I enjoyed was makeup’s transformative power, the fancy-dress feeling of clumsily sticking on glittered eyelashes, lashings of liquid liner and a brightly painted lip but these weren’t part of my normal routine.
Instead, mornings were dedicated to becoming what my nan would’ve described as “presentable” or, worse still, “clean and tidy”. Though I’d bristled against such terms and their inherent conformism, I’d complied nonetheless. The makeup products that appealed to me, that drew me in with their defiant gaudiness, weren’t appropriate for my work environment but instead of forgoing makeup entirely, I adopted a muted aesthetic that focused on concealing–moles, blemishes, bags and other “problem areas”–rather than showing off.
“There’s teeth whitening, sunspot eliminating, facial hair waxing, and appropriate moisturising...none of these tasks are one and done. They’re monthly, quarterly, yearly costs.”
Culture critic Anne Helen Peterson calls this the “quotidian maintenance of identity”, adding, “there’s teeth whitening, and sunspot eliminating, and facial hair waxing, and appropriate moisturising...none of these tasks are one and done. They’re monthly, quarterly, yearly costs.” The pandemic provided what Peterson called, “an opportunity to switch that script”, but centuries of beauty conditioning aren’t easy to shake. Early into the first lockdown, memes started circulating of unkempt women with the caption “girls coming out of lockdown like”. The memes cycled through familiar socially taboo tropes–untamed hair, weight gain, “problem skin”– and sardonically implied that natural women are not enough. Even when we’re surviving a pandemic.
The flipside of simply keeping up appearances is what the media and marketers are dubbing “the makeup renaissance”. This feels both inevitable and disappointing, like replacing one set of restrictions (lockdown) with another (impossible beauty standards). “In marketing, brands aren’t just pushing product launches, but building up this makeup renaissance,” reports Rachel Strugatz in Business of Fashion. Maybelline’s new tagline is “Makeup for Everything You Missed”, and Drew Elliot, Senior Vice President and Global Creative Director of MAC Cosmetics, doubled down on this idea; “It’s to remind people of when they go out, when they go on their first date, out to the movies...whatever it is they’re doing...to bring people back into the world of wearing makeup.”
But what about what we have gained, like a deeper understanding of ourselves and a newfound respect for what our bodies can survive? After so much isolation and wishing we could go on dates and to the movies, do we want to spend more time indoors doing our makeup? Beauty Editor Funmi Fetto, addressed this in her podcast On Reflection, saying of her first trip to the salon, “ I felt super impatient, and I just thought, gosh, I can think of a million and one things I could be doing with my time."
“The beauty industry is built on female insecurity.”
After a year of attempting to master the art of being still, I quickly found myself in a tizzy over a beauty to-do list ahead of my first social gathering. Though decidedly not life-and-death, I felt crushed by the weight of expectation. I knew being plucked and preened wouldn’t add to the night in any tangible way but what it did provide was a mask, one entirely different from the one we’ve gotten used to wearing, one that signalled to the world I had my shit together. I’d navigated a Covid-secure party and adhered to a homogenised aesthetic.
This plays to a particularly vapid idea of corporate girlboss culture, one that says you can–and should–have it all, providing you comply with social structures that are actively rigged against you. It’s a wall hanging in a corner office that reminds you to “Put on some lipstick and pull yourself together.”
In conversation with Fetto, Beauty Director Shannon Peter questioned how we rid ourselves of the beauty pressures we’ve been under for centuries. Even more so, how do we shed this conditioning when the same global conglomerates that have been promoting these pressures for centuries are still pushing that narrative today? Jean-Paul Agon, Chief Executive of L'Oréal (the world’s largest cosmetics maker) told an investor conference in February, “there will be a fiesta in makeup and fragrance. Putting on lipstick again will be a symbol of returning to life.” But the future doesn’t have to look like the past. With the global beauty industry worth around $511 billion in 2021 (up from $483 bn in 2020), there are plenty of people who stand to profit from peddling ever-changing beauty ideals. As Fetto said, “The beauty industry is built on female insecurity.”
“From the X-ray treatments of the 1920s to the 2020s botox boom, following beauty trends has always been a requisite for advancing romantically, financially or otherwise.”
The internet is abuzz with the return of the Roaring Twenties, but should we look to an era that glamourised painstaking procedures, like the Marcel wave (which would often singe the scalp and hair) and radium products, as the light at the end of the lockdown tunnel? This canny branding, which Agon addressed in his speech, plays to nostalgic ideas of a past that never was. The rose-tinted notion that following the 1918 pandemic everyone was impossibly groomed, glamorous and liberated. Even the supposedly freewheeling flappers who’d cast off their corsets in favour of looser silhouettes had to comply with beauty standards of the time that popularised whitening creams, fat-reducing soap and actual bleach blonde.
For every Tallulah Bankhead, who had the backing of familial wealth and power, there were dozens with no agency, whose entire financial future depended on their marriage prospects. As Sandra Lee Bartky writes in her 1990 book Femininity and Domination, “Knowing that her life prospects may depend on how she is seen, a woman learns to appraise herself first.” From the X-ray treatments of the 1920s to the 2020s botox boom, following beauty trends has always been a requisite for advancing romantically, financially or otherwise.
Today, it’s re-branded as self-care by the $4.5 trillion wellness industry, which promotes not only adhering to beauty ideals but enjoying them, too. In an interview with Business of Fashion, Natalie Mackey, founder of beauty brand Winky Lux said, “Right now, self-care means jade rollers and a bathtub. In a year from now, it will mean getting dolled up to go out in a sequin top.” After the last year, I think the ultimate act of self-care is self-acceptance–in all our unruly, pandemic-surviving glory–and we’re all ready for that.