Hi friend,
Happy belated Trans Day of Visibility!
Trans, non-binary and exploring folks are precious, valid and welcome. I see you.
Also, I'm seeing progress on my hand injury since getting a steroid shot a few weeks ago, woohoo! It's not 100%, but it's the closest it's been since October.
That means I'm booking photo sessions again --
head to the site to check out my sessions and pricing.
Now for this week's letter:
Where do we learn that there is a narrow range of makeup application and technique that looks “right” and that anything outside that is wrong? Why is a dramatic cat-eye (on a person with the appropriately feminine gender presentation) admirable, where a kabuki mask of spray tan is laughable?
Why is a (young, thin, white) woman who’s been photoshopped into china-doll flawlessness #goals, but an older woman who’s put on way too much eyeshadow is a farce?
What is too little? What is too much?
These opinions are so deeply ingrained in us that, like fatphobia, they can be really uncomfortable to pull out and examine. We know “too little” and “too much” when we see it because those rules have been ingrained in us, just like rules around food and bodies, from the time we could first absorb them in:
- Makeup and skincare ads
- The media, TV, magazines, movies
- Family and friends
- The beauty regimens of people around us
- Multi-level marketing makeup companies and reps
- Makeup tutorials
- Social media influencers
The current style is for makeup and other skin-altering substances to look “natural,” which as a photographer, I find pretty funny myself.
(I assure you that flawlessly smooth skin with no acne, no wrinkles, no visible pores and no other marks is not “natural” at all for human beings.)
I can also assure you that beauty standards constantly shift, partly because it does entangle us in constant policing of ourselves and each other (and partly because it’s very, very profitable to create changing standards we must constantly buy more things to meet).
If, at some point in the future, a person or company with enough power decides that it should be fashionable (and profitable) to wear hard-edged masks of heavy makeup, suddenly the general public would be scrambling to make those edges clear-cut with whatever tool was being sold to do it with.
But why are we, especially those of us who claim to be interested in ending oppression of all kinds, so tied up in current beauty standards in the first place? Why are we doing the patriarchy’s work for it?
