S
The Student Voice of St. Joseph’s Academy • Established 1930
tudent Prints September Issue
St. Joseph’s Academy • Baton Rouge, Louisiana 2017-2018 Volume 87, Number 1 September 25, 2017
The Beauty Limitation Why Should You Care? by Lara Nicholson
It is prom night. You have been planning the night for weeks, everything from the date to the dress to even the shade of color on your nails. As it nears time to head to your photos with friends, you start the lengthy process of getting ready. You pull up the picture you found of some model-esque girl, with makeup that glows like an angel against her perfectly curled hair, and you try to emulate that same style in order to complete your look for the evening. And then . . . you set a fifteen-minute timer. Fifteen minutes, and then you must stop wherever you are and move on to the next portion of the evening. Such a concept was proposed by author Zadie
Smith on August 19 at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, in which Smith stated, “I decided to spontaneously decide on a principle: that if it takes longer than 15 minutes, don’t do it.” However, the real question from her proposal is this: could this be the solution to battling Zadie Smith, English novelist and societal expectations of proposer of the 15-minute rule photo by Dominique Nabokov beauty for women, or could it restrict women from a form of personal expression of femininity? In her speech, Smith described her reasoning to her daughter: “you are wasting time, your brother is not going to waste any time doing this. Every day of his life he will put a shirt on, he’s out the door and he doesn’t [care] if you waste an hour and a half doing your makeup.” Smith said after observing her daughter gazing into mirrors quite frequently, she “decided to spontaneously decide on a principle: that if it takes longer than 15 minutes, don’t do it.” Many may be shocked by her choice to create rules for makeup so early in her daughter’s life; however, considering the presence of hundreds of beauty vloggers on YouTube, some with millions of subscribers like Michelle Phan and Bethany Mota, exposure to beauty standards and makeup are coming at an earlier age for the new generation of girls. Smith’s suggestion to limit dependency on makeup holds the potential to assist women in developing
Lipstick: Radiant or Restricting? photo by Lara Nicholson
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