does online beauty culture help or harm?

does online beauty culture help or harm? an analysis of the gender divide in beauty

“Taught from infancy that beauty is a woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.” Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’, 1792

I remember watching makeup videos 3 or 4 years ago when I started to feel like my eyebrows were wrong, so I went out and I bought an eyebrow pencil and it was a bit of a mess. I’d watch these beauty videos on youtube and almost without fail, all of these beautiful women with gorgeous, flawless skin and beautiful bold eyebrows and i felt really insecure. Day to day i think i have quite a minimal beauty routine, I use moisturizer, concealer, mascara, highlighter and maybe some lip-gloss. I think about how many times i have gone out without makeup and people say that i look tired or sick, and that makes me feel like i need to put on makeup.

Over the past few years, research shows that more and more women are saying that they feel beautiful. But at the same time, the vast majority of women say they feel pressure to be beautiful. What effect is this online beauty culture having on us? The State of Gender Equality for U.S. Adolescents Full Research Findings from a National Survey of Adolescents on Belief in gender equality (September 12, 2018) by PerryUndem commissioned by Plan International USA found that the vast majority of adolescents (92 percent) says they believe in gender equality, but some uncertainty exists beneath the surface. For example, over half of adolescents (54%) strongly or somewhat agrees that they are “more comfortable with women having traditional roles in society, such as caring for children and family”. Several of their findings illuminate why most girls perceive sexism as a problem and why they say gender equality does not exist. By far, girls perceive physical attractiveness as the most common trait or characteristic our society values in girls and about half of girls (53 percent) look in the mirror at least once a day and imagine how others might see them. About one in three older girls (31 percent) does so “many times a day.” Nearly two-thirds of girls (64 percent) say they are 14

exposed everyday to women and girls in the media who have unrealistic bodies and seven in ten girls ages 14 to 19 (69 percent) feel judged as a sexual object in their daily life at least once in awhile – significantly more than the proportion of adult women who says the same (58 percent). A study from the Pew Research Center from November 2017 confirms this as “Honesty tops list of traits that people say society values most in men; physical attractiveness top trait for women”, over 35% said that they value physical attractiveness most in women.

The data shows that people interact with influencers’ videos and posts more often than they do on brands. Tiffany Gill, a professor and an author who writes about the history of beauty culture stated in a Vox interview “I think the digital aspect is what really has changed. What it has done is really democratized what beauty and beauty culture is, so that the people who are consumers now have a lot more control over what constitutes beauty and beauty culture.” The reason why I think we’re beginning to see more women sort of defining themselves as beautiful, is because they’re able to find these micro communities online that affirm their brand of beauty. And as much as selfies get a bad rap, there’s something very libratory about being able to show yourself to the world publicly. Historically, at every level in these magazines, somebody was making a specific decision about who gets to be there and who was considered beautiful. Not just the editors and the gatekeepers at these institutions, but the agents of the models. Whereas now, it’s not as though somebody’s making a decision about who gets to make a video, everyone has access to posting. I follow a lot of people on Instagram that align with my ideals of beauty and match my style of beauty and makeup.

Consumers are more informed than they’ve ever been. They can take these tools and change the way they present themselves to the world. But if you look at it another way, then it’s this constant cycle that ultimately is costing women big chunks of their paycheck but also something that’s more valuable, which is the space in their mind. Renee Engeln, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University discussed the idea of ‘beauty sickness’ in her book “Beauty Sick - How the Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls and Women”. She explored beauty sickness as what happens when women’s 15

comes harder for them to see other aspects of their lives, beauty sickness is emotional energy gets so bound up with what they see in the mirror that it befed by a culture that focuses on women’s appearance over anything else they might do or say or be. Engeln stated in an interview with Vox Media that social media culture “never misses a moment to comment on a woman’s appearance, to criticize it. … To keep drawing our attention over and over again to how we look. … And the minute your focus shifts to thinking about how you look, it did shift away from something else.”

If you’re like me, you’re spending hours on your phone every day. Last week I spent nine and a half hours on Instagram. Which means we’re constantly faced with images of other people to compare ourselves to and a lot of the time, with the advent of apps like face-tune and filters, those images are full of subtle changes And if everyone around you is making subtle tweaks to their face, it can warp your understanding of yourself and how you fit in. One study found it made women feel worse when they compared themselves to beautiful peers on social media as opposed to beautiful celebrities in traditional media like magazines and in movies. Researchers think that’s because our peers on social media feel like more relevant comparisons. They feel more like us. And then there’s all the likes and comments. Another study found that seeing someone leave a compliment on a pretty woman’s photo on Instagram, made the viewer less happy with their own body. It makes sense that the more we compare ourselves to good-looking people, the more dissatisfied we are, and the more beauty work it feels like we have to do to keep up.

Recently, a group of computer scientists figured out a way to analyze the language that writers use when they describe men and women in three and a half million books in English, both nonfiction and fiction books. So what they did is they pulled out the adjectives that were most uniquely used to describe men and women. They found that the words used to describe women were twice as likely to be about their physical appearance or their bodies, ‘Pretty, fair, beautiful, lovely, charming’.

The American Association of University Women found that women working full-time in the U.S. were only paid 80 percent of what men were paid. Worse, 16

not only are women paid less at work, they also pay more for the same items and services as men—about $1,351 more annually. Further, there’s a lot of research that shows that they way a woman looks can affect things like her earnings, and how her personality is perceived. every aspect of your life you’re getting stared at and judged. And I think this all comes from this cultural context that I’ve been telling you guys about that dates back centuries, which is a world that cares a lot about the insides of men and the outsides of women.

An article by Nadra Nittle titled “Brands once used elitism to market themselves. Now inclusion sells - Millennials value authenticity, so businesses are embracing inclusion like never before” examines the change in marketing from exclusivity to brands are making inclusion the entire focus of their product lines. Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty won widespread praise, including being named one of Time magazine’s best 2017 inventions, for its 40-shade foundation range. Nittle states that “In reality, of course, no brand can be all things to all people, but it’s in the best interest of socially conscious shoppers to distinguish the companies genuinely invested in inclusion from the ones that view it as a means to financial gain.” Makeup artist Zarielle Washington stated that “We have millennials and a society that’s more interested in putting their money into brands that resonate with them personally,” Washington said. “It’s not just about the product; it’s all about people and their personal choices and their lifestyles. I do feel like the industry is being more receptive to inclusion, and that’s also translating into dollars.”

Anna North’s 2018 article titled “What the rise of men’s makeup means for masculinity - As cosmetics for men become more mainstream, they could give men more opportunities for self-expression — and more pressure to live up to unrealistic beauty standards” highlights the growing trend and ‘mainstreamification’ of makeup for men as a result of the expansive attitude toward masculinity among Gen Z. Makeup and skincare for men are now not just accepted, but seen as tools men should use “to practice self-care, but also just to look and feel better,” (David Yi, founder of the men’s beauty site Very Good Light). Men’s makeup is far from a new phenomenon, male courtiers in 18th-century Europe wore it, and as Yi points out, cosmetics are already fore 17

popular among men in South Korea but in the West, men have traditionally shunned makeup. He stated in the article that “Generation Z is now at the front of culture ... They’re so much more progressive and open, sexually fluid and gender fluid than millennials are. … They’re now rethinking what masculinity means, what it means to be a guy, and painting your face or using skincare doesn’t make you any less manly” he said. Lisa Wade, a sociology professor at Occidental College and the author of the textbook Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions, stated; “Somehow gender ideology beat capitalism in this competition. … Gender is all about maintaining the idea that men and women are different. Anything that we do that undermines distinction is a real threat to male superiority. For me, this becomes not a question about gender but a question about capitalism. [Contemporary capitalism] thrives on making us feel like we’re not good enough”. However, If men’s makeup becomes mainstream, they may find themselves facing some of the same pressures women feel and, perhaps, gaining some of the same opportunities for expression. But Yi argues that men already have a lot of the same insecurities as women, “it’s just that they have been conditioned not to talk about it.”

So, it seems like we’re being presented this endless list of things that we can do now to beautify ourselves. It doesn’t seem like we can build a society that expects women to be young and beautiful above all else, then flood society with products that promise just that, and then judge them for buying them. It’s the inequality between what women are expected to do and what men are expected to do that really makes me angry. Beauty standards become more open and welcoming, but it also is still true that beauty is still the point, at which we are judging people, it is still the metric of value. Women have long debated the politics of makeup for women, the opportunities for experimentation and self-expression may come at the cost of the pressure to conform to a certain standard of beauty. However, beauty culture is so much more interesting and approachable and diverse than it’s ever been before but maybe it can make it seem like we’ve made more progress than we have. i think we’re beginning to see some changes, but our definitions of beauty are connected to other systems of power in our society and culture. They’re connected to ideas about class, to ideas about what race is. It really will take the dismantling of systems of power for beauty to be truly democratized. 18