The commentary around British Love Island this year is really interesting, don’t you think?
All this chat about how old and ugly the female contestants look, seemingly because of how much cosmetic work they’ve had done?
A lot of people are having a lot of fun guessing their ages as double, sometimes nearly triple, what they are (even this experienced plastic surgeon went viral playing this game).
It might feel like a harmless laugh to tease women who have chosen to put themselves on a show like this, but I don’t think this is funny.
These are women who tried too hard to be beautiful, got it ‘wrong’, and are now being punished.
That’s what I want us to talk about today!
Beauty’s infernal, infuriating double bind: we must care deeply about how we look. But we must never care too much. And we must try. But we must make it look like we didn’t.
It’s so ironic that even after this vast and overdue representation revolution we’ve witnessed in the past few years - where the lens has finally begun (still a lot more progress to be made) to widen to include more forms of beauty, more types of people and faces and bodies - we’re still so tied up in this Gordian knot.
The pursuit of beauty has always been richly rewarded…
Pretty privilege isn’t just a prize bit of TikTok brainrot. It’s all too real, and always has been…as anyone who just binged S3 Bridgerton can contest.
But right here, right now, is a face frozen with filler = a face frozen with fear?
Fear of what? Oh, plenty, it seems.
Attractive people are widely perceived as being more competent (Hamermesh and Biddle, 1994), more likeable (Dion, Berscheid, and Walster, 1972), and more employable. Look at this study on facial attractiveness and higher lifetime earnings. The academics found that while “there are only weak links between facial attractiveness and…cognitive skills, and no link between facial attractiveness and mortality”, there is a “statistically significant correlation” between greater facial attractiveness and higher lifetime earnings.
Wow.
And nobody seems to be immune.
Not judges in court: attractive defendants have been seen to receive more lenient punishments (Downs and Lyons, 1991), which has alarming shades of Victorian-age physiognomy - a belief that attractive people were less likely to be a criminal.
Not teachers in schools: physical attractiveness has been linked in scientific studies to higher teacher perception of student ability (e.g. Ritts, Patterson, and Tubbs, 1992).
And we ridicule people for contorting themselves into the beauty standards of the day?
Maybe they’re not shallow, vapid, self-absorbed narcissists. Perhaps they’re strategists.
If beauty is currency, then chasing it’s an investment, right?
…but the pursuit of beauty is also harshly punished.
Like the theatre kid whose icky desperation radiates from them, wanting too badly to be beautiful is cringe.
It’s all very humbling, feeling illogical…until it suddenly doesn’t.
I mean, look at those Love Island women again for a second - all of them are and likely always have been objectively attractive young women. They all meet, even far exceed, current societal standards of beauty. Clear skin, shiny hair, straight teeth, idealised body shapes, and so on. But in seeking to raise their status further, they’ve reached for cosmetic procedures intended to make them even prettier…but seemingly overdid it a bit, reached a bit too far. So these women have seemingly not raised their status, but lowered it. They’ve become figures of fun, cautionary tales, laughing stock. Botch jobs.
Similarly, the (mostly much more respectful) commentary around whether Beyonce’s jeans unwittingly gave the game away that she’d had a BBL (click that link for the genius observation that “jeans and BBLs are like water and oil, they don’t mix”).
Just like being overdressed at a party marks you out as low-status, gauche, uninitiated, pursuing beauty too hard can have dire social consequences.
Hang on, though.
Is trying to look pretty = a bid for connection, or social acceptance? A bid for social capital by emulating biological capital (that, as we can see from those research studies, is really powerful)? If so, then shame on us for ridiculing people who want that so badly. Don’t we all?
And when the effort - the work - does ’work’ and you do indeed look even more beautiful, and you’re reaping the rewards associated with that achievement…well, don’t get too comfortable. You can’t actually think/agree that you’re beautiful. You’re supposed to be but humble about it. Be self-deprecating, point out your flaws. Otherwise, shit, The Streets were right about you weren’t they: You’re fit but my gosh don’t you know it (and therefore you aren’t actually all that fit after all). NB fit is northern UK 2000s slang for hot/gorge/beautiful. You’re welcome.
So we learn to disguise our efforts, because there’s such a high social cost for trying too hard. Or for being too pleased with ourselves.
But perpetuating the myth of effortless beauty helps nobody.
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Beauty culture as a form of control
There’s a lot of brilliant thinking about beauty as a means of controlling people. And that we don’t think critically enough about all this stuff because we are conditioned not to.
Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, in which she decries the busy-work of beauty that occupies women’s minds and time, draining their energy and confidence, and sucking up their resources, money, attention. Or Zadie Smith’s comment about the hair and make-up tax.
Or Dr Renee Engeln’s Beauty Sick, which will alter your brain chemistry. It’s about the “bewildering set of contradictions” women are presented with when it comes to beauty: “They don't want to be Barbie dolls but, like generations of women before them, are told they must look like them. They're angry about the media's treatment of women but hungrily consume the very outlets that belittle them. They mock modern culture's absurd beauty ideal and make videos exposing Photoshopping tricks, but feel pressured to emulate the same images they criticize by posing with a "skinny arm." They understand that what they see isn't real but still download apps to airbrush their selfies.”
This idea of beauty as a form of control rings true IMO, in big and small ways, every day. The beauty industry, and wider beauty culture and norms, keep us in this endless spiral of hope, self-doubt, self-loathing, disillusionment, embarrassment, pain (physical and psychological), and perhaps debt, as we reach for society’s impossible definition of beauty. Which is always subtly changing (er…soap brow vs feather brow anyone?). And contradicting themselves.
And we’re not just talking about make up that washes off, or self-tan that scrubs off, or hair dye that eventually fades. We’re talking about invasive, perhaps-irreversible, possibly-dangerous body modification. Sometimes in people whose pre-frontal cortexes are still developing.
Speaking of, did you see Kylie Jenner crying into her cornflakes this week on newly-released footage from The Kardashians? She was wounded and shocked by the avalanche of vitriol she received about the state of her face at that Schiaparelli show in Paris last year, and again at JPG’s couture show, also in Paris. People wondered, loudly, about what they saw as her weird, plasticky Uncanny Valley other-worldliness. How ‘old’ and ‘haggard’ she looked, at 26. The pillowy creases where faces don’t usually crease.
Clearly, Kylie is more often thought of as a villain of this particular scene, than a victim. Who else has perpetrated and encouraged and normalised and profited so greatly from the…aspirational-ising…of extreme, OTT cosmetic enhancement culture (and also lied through her veneered-teeth about what she’s actually had done herself…yeah no, she didn’t wake up like this)?
Like this 20-million view tweet volleyed up this week, “Kylie destroyed the body image of an entire generation of girls, srry I just can’t feel bad for her.”
As the mother of two little girls, hard agree. But, also as the mother of two little girls, sure, but not before her own body image was destroyed for her while she was still a child. Maybe there’s a scale of victimhood.
The future of all this stuff feels so unclear.
When anything trickles down to the masses, as so much everyday cosmetic intervention now has, perhaps we have to expect it to go extreme for a while (just like so many other rather visually-intense strands of recent beauty culture…brow lamination, the cut crease, the retinol scaries, Ozempic).
But I don’t think it’s as simple as learning to not shame people for caring/not caring about how they they present themselves to the world (Me? I long to not care). Or even in learning to recognise and cheer other people’s effort and skill: ‘your make-up looks great’ vs ‘you look great.’
That keeps us at the surface, and puts the onus on the individual, not the system.
The connection between beauty culture, body image and declining mental health has become area of urgent academic research, globally. Should we be thinking about beauty standards as a public health issue, as
called out a couple of years ago here on Substack?Beauty culture is troublingly associated with the noble pursuit of “self-betterment” and “self-care”. Beauty culture positions normal features as “flaws” to be “fixed”. It systematically breaks down self-esteem and installs shame, so that it can then sell “confidence” back to you in the form of products, procedures, and practices. It rewards those who adhere to the current beauty ideal and oppresses those who don’t. It normalizes self-harm and self-mutilation as a means of achieving this ideal. It frames this achievement as “empowerment.”…through positive-sounding phrases like “Everybody is beautiful!” and “Because you’re worth it!”
As she says, expectations and norms around how we should look are “all around us — it is built into our political system, our economic system, our labor system, our school system, our relationships, our media (including social media), and even ourselves.
Beauty’s double bind is baked into womanhood itself’s double bind - or straightjacket, if you prefer - the many ways women are pressured, and then punished, for trying to be and behave the way it seems that we’re expected to. For playing the game we thought we were playing.
The pressure to look good without looking like we're trying is just one of many invisible, exhausting paradoxes.
In other words…be a lady, they said.
Or as those Love Island ladies would tell us: you can’t win, babes.
Ain’t that the truth.
We aren’t allowed to be ugly or old but we also aren’t allowed to try and avoid it.
Ok I’m tired of talking about how women look. Sure you are too.
Until next time, then. Thank you for reading.
Beth x
Bit more?
Try Scott Westerfield’s fiction trilogy Uglies, set 300 years from now in a future dystopian world in which everyone’s looks are ‘perfected’ with state-mandated cosmetic surgery, and what happens when one woman rebels against the enforced conformity.
This was so well put together with great references to so much of what is happening in pop culture. As with many things, this relates back to clothes (for me) in the way that I CARE a lot about what a wear and what that says about me but I’m always chasing an “effortless” look. I would hate to look too fussy but I don’t want to be underdressed, etc. My friends and I were just commenting about the burden of caring about what you wear but what other choice do we really have?!
Thank you for writing about this! I’m obsessed with Love Island, it’s my favorite guilty pleasure — I’ve watched every season (UK not USA - that one is horrible) and just today I was bemoaning how these girls look and thinking back to earlier seasons when they were all mostly “natural” — the scariest part is how quickly it’s all progressing. How can 20 year olds feel they need to look like this? It’s insane. I’ve seen articles lately about fillers being in the decline and I hope it’s a general trend away from all of this distortion of young faces (and faces in general).