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Welcome to “Standard Issues,” an op-ed column in which beauty reporter Jessica DeFino digs up the capitalist, colonialist, patriarchal foundation of the beauty industry — and attempts to rebuild something better.
Hello, my name is Jessica DeFino, and I’m a beauty reporter out to destroy the beauty industry.
Okay, fine, maybe that’s taking it a tad too far. But I would like to destroy beauty standards, a feat I’ll be attempting with “Standard Issues,” my new monthly column for Teen Vogue.
In my opinion, beauty standards are the gnarled and rotten roots of all that’s wrong with the industry and perhaps the world. They are tools of oppression that reinforce sexism, racism, colorism, classism, ableism, ageism, and gender norms. They are built into our societies and embedded into our brains. They contribute to anxiety, depression, dysmorphia, eating disorders, self-harm, and low self-esteem. Even the oxymoronic term “beauty standards” sets me off. I mean, imagine trying to contain a concept as immeasurable and incorporeal and emotional and energetic and evolving as beauty within one set standard? Why? For what reason? To serve whom?
Before I can answer those questions, I have to define “beauty standards” for the purposes of this column. Beauty standards are the individual qualifications women are expected to meet in order to embody the “feminine beauty ideal” and thus, succeed personally and professionally. (The terms “women” and “feminine” are used here because the beauty industry was deliberately built on the binary — a foundation that props up the patriarchy and negatively impacts women, men, and nonbinary people alike. But that’s a story for another column.) These qualifications are clearly and constantly communicated to us through film, television, literature, magazines, the school system, the medical system, politics, personal relationships, social media, the law, and advertising. It feels akin to brainwashing: Psychologists have argued that it may be all but impossible to separate what we inherently and individually find beautiful from what society tells us is beautiful.
Both beauty standards and the feminine beauty ideal are moving targets. They change over time and from culture to culture. However, thanks to Western colonialism (more on that in just a minute!), Eurocentric beauty standards have essentially become global beauty standards. “Through my research in Africa, I have interviewed those who are cosmetics dealers and they say Africa and Asia follow the movements of the West,” Amira Adawe, founder of the nonprofit organization The Beautywell Project, tells Teen Vogue. “What we are now seeing [in beauty trends in America], in three years, will reach Africa and Asia.”
“There is no legitimate historical or biological justification for the beauty myth,” Naomi Wolf writes in The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. She notes that anthropologists haven’t found proof of the theory that today’s ideals stemmed from the evolutionary process of mate selection. Dr. Hannah McCann, a cultural studies lecturer at the University of Melbourne, agrees: “To suggest that there are universal ideals of beauty that transcend culture … completely fails to comprehend the way that ideals of beauty have been constructed in order to be sold,” she writes.
Of course, the general concept of beauty has existed for centuries — but early on, beauty seemingly had less to do with the surface and more to do with the soul. In History of Aesthetics, author Władysław Tatarkiewicz explores the Greco-Romans idea of beauty being related to the divine and the good. There was a spiritual quality to ancient Egyptian beauty too. Makeup was a form of adornment, used to emulate and communicate with the gods.
The connection between beauty and spirituality took a more prescriptive turn in the Middle Ages with the rise of Christianity in Europe. “Now [women] were exhorted to appear pure and virginal, forever young,” writes Mark Tungate in Branded Beauty: How Marketing Changed the Way We Look. Light features, like blonde hair, blue eyes, and fair skin, were believed to be physical manifestations of “the light of God.” Starting around the 15th century, “colonizers went to Africa, Asia, and Latin America and introduced the idea that whiteness is good, that nothing is better than white,” Adawe says. “If you were white, you had better economic well-being, you had good employment and education attainment.”
Skin tone has long had class connotations. In early Egyptian, Greek, and Roman societies, lighter skin was associated with belonging to a higher class, because “a woman with fair skin clearly led a very different life to that of the bronzed laborer,” Tungate writes — but colonialism took this concept and applied it across races.
“It was the same ideology during slavery in the United States,” Adawe says. “Those with darker skin were working in the field outside. Those with lighter skin were favored, they worked in the homes. Those with lighter skin were considered beautiful, and that is still an ongoing thing within cultures and within groups.” She says that even when the colonizers left the U.S., even when slavery was abolished, the standard remained. “The colonizers left, but they left a legacy: the legacy of whiteness. It’s an ongoing colonization of the mindset.”
The colonizer mindset persists today. It’s reflected on the faces in the pages of fashion magazines, which, up until recently, were almost exclusively white. It’s there in every foundation range that features 10 choices for white women but only two for Black women; a still-too-common occurrence, despite the industry’s newfound focus on more inclusive shade selections. It’s built into the cosmetics corporations that continue to sell skin lightening creams in Asia — albeit, skin lightening creams that, in response to recent backlash, now have less overtly racist product names.
In this way, colonialism gave capitalism a brilliant business model to follow: It illustrated just how easy it is to profit off of deep-seated insecurities stemming from a lifetime of being treated as less than. And so throughout history capitalism has sowed the seeds of insecurity in all of us. Much of what we believe to be true about our bodies is nothing more than marketing, made up by beauty brands to make a buck.
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In the book War Paint, author Lindy Woodhead documents cosmetics entrepreneur Helena Rubenstein’s career, writing, “She was the first beauty specialist to classify skin as ‘dry,’ ‘normal,’ and ‘oily’” in the early 1900s, and used those classifications to sell her face cream, Valaze. It was then that women began to feel the normal functions of their skin (the formation of wrinkles and blemishes, the production of oil, the existence of dead skin cells) were somehow wrong, “and that buying creams would put it right.”
Similarly, today’s typical hair-care regimen was not prescribed by health experts but —surprise! — a marketer. When Eugène Schueller, the creator of L’Oréal, introduced the brand’s shampoo in 1938, he also introduced a new standard: “There are 43 million people in France,” he said at the time, according to Tungate. “Let’s imagine that those 43 million people washed their hair once a week. We would sell 20 times the number of units that we sell at the moment.”
Schueller summed up his marketing approach: “Tell people they’re disgusting, they don’t smell good, and they’re not attractive.” Just, you know, subtly. Psychological manipulation is the foundation upon which beauty marketing is built. This method isn’t only ideal for selling products; it’s also ideal for maintaining the patriarchy.
“Women are mere ‘beauties’ in men’s culture so that culture can be kept male,” Wolf writes in The Beauty Myth. She argues that modern beauty standards were used as “political weapon[s] against women’s advancement” in “a violent backlash against feminism,” and draws a parallel between the feminist movements of the 1960s and ’70s and the era’s increased policing of women’s looks. Feminists were stereotyped as “ugly” in an effort to undermine their message. The number of diet-related articles in women’s magazines rose 70 percent from 1968 to 1972. In 1975, Xerox withdrew a job offer based on a woman’s weight. Throughout the ‘60s and ’70s courts consistently upheld the right of employers to enforce appearance-based policies on female employees. Politically, psychologically, and legally, the message was clear: Women were only as valuable as they were beautiful, both in the world and in the workplace.
"Beauty work" became the silent second job of working women everywhere — but while aesthetic enhancement advanced their careers in some ways, it held them back in others. “We don’t consider the gender gap in time and money spent on beauty,” Renee Ebgeln, Ph.D., a professor of psychology, muses in her book Beauty Sick. “But time and money matter. They’re essential sources of power and influence and also major sources of freedom.”
The beauty industry reacted to this by rebranding the pursuit of beauty as a form of personal empowerment. Take L’Oréal’s famous “Because I’m worth it” slogan, said to be penned by a male copywriter in 1973. “It was the ideal sentiment for a period when women were demanding greater equality,” Tungate writes. It marked a major shift in industry marketing: the shift from having to perform beauty for others to wanting to perform beauty for oneself. As Ebgeln puts it, “We’ve gone from a culture that reminds you that your body is being looked at to you being the most consistent surveyor of your own body.” Or, as writer Glennon Doyle puts it, “A very effective way to control women is to convince women to control themselves.”
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This message of “self-empowerment” continues to evolve alongside the feminist movement today — but empowerment marketing still plants and preys upon insecurities. (Corporations can only “empower” consumers with products if consumers are disempowered in the first place.) Perhaps the best example of this is Dove’s 2004 Campaign For Real Beauty, which featured real women instead of models. Over the years, the ongoing series has been praised by beauty media and consumers alike for rebelling against beauty standards… and yet, Tungate says, the product tied to the initial ad was a skin-firming cream that claimed to reduce the appearance of cellulite.
Cellulite, it must be said, is natural and normal, and getting rid of it is nearly impossible. This is true of most of the things we have been conditioned to change on our bodies. We try to lighten our skin or darken our skin. We alter our hair color and hair texture. We attempt to slow, stop, and reverse aging. We remove fat from our stomachs and arms and add it to our breasts and butts. We remove hair from our legs and our armpits; we glue it to our eyelashes and tattoo it onto our brow bones.
“The bottom line is always to sell products,” Phyllis Ellis, the documentarian behind 2018’s Toxic Beauty, tells Teen Vogue. “If we think the beauty industry is about anything else, that’s a mistake. But I’m sensitive and aware about the beauty-shaming part of this. It’s not about making people feel bad because they wear mascara. What I’m interested in is leaning into the why.”
The why is what I’ll be exploring each month in “Standard Issues,” a space dedicated to unearthing and ripping up the rotten roots of the beauty industry — and rebuilding something better.
An industry that doesn’t prey on insecurities while peddling empowerment.
A definition of beauty that isn’t conveniently identical to the patriarchy’s definition.
A world where it doesn’t take the cold-blooded killing of Black women and men for Black beauty brands to make headlines.
I believe the work of subverting beauty standards is the work of liberation, equality, and wellness. It is self-care and community-care. It is spiritual. It is political. It is essential. Because when beauty standards change, the world does too.
