Beauty Bytes: October 19, 2012

Be careful taking the bus today – Barbie Flu is catching! In Odessa, Ukraine, there are now three(!) young women who’ve self-recreated themselves as the iconic doll. First it was Valeriya Lukyanova (aka”Amatue“), whose surgical modifications helped create her own fairy tale reality (she also teaches astral projection). Now two more “Barbies” have emerged: Valeriya’s friend, Olga Oleynik (“Domenika”) has also had surgeries to accentuate her otherworldliness. And 19 year-old makeup and hair artist Anastasiya Shpagina (“Anime”, pictured here), who gets up at 5 A.M. to put her look together, is making the talk show rounds and promoting her makeup skills. Seeing as these three voluntary body modifiers/cosplay enthusiasts live in a city with about a million people, it could be some time before a significant number of women begin involuntarily waking up at 5 to put on our amine eyes. Forbes.

In the growing conversation about beauty privilege, there is also talk of beauty penalty – where women suffer serious disadvantage because of their good looks. We might look at beauty penalty as womens’ intelligence or competence being maligned because of their good looks, but the unintended consequences of beauty can be much darker. Lakshmi Choudhry shares her anxieties as a mother of a beautiful girl while pondering the harassment faced by former MDLR air hostess Geetika Sharma, who committed suicide after her boss, airline chief Gopal Goyal Kanda, obsessively tracked her, harassed her, and even had her fired from a new job in Dubai. Choudhry writes: “…the prospect of raising a beautiful girl fills most hearts with terror. It promises a lifetime of fear, of countless days spent worrying that your baby’s lovely face will somehow, somewhere catch the eye of the wrong man…And she will be punished for her “good fortune,” in a way no man will ever pay for his wealth, power or status.” First Post.

It’s not just men who can be over possessive, though: as a child, Romanian Vera Renczi was so distraught at the thought of her dog being given away that she poisoned him. This behavior carried on into her love life, where she killed two husbands in the 1920′s before becoming what locals called the “Mysterious Huntress”. No one really minded that she’d show up in taverns to find handsome, young, from-out-of-town men to take home for amusement (she was a broken-hearted beauty, after all), but when one of their wives called the police to find her husband, they found thirty-two bodies in her cellar, in coffins. It is speculated that she kept these coffins, labelled with the names of her victims, so that she could visit with them – or at least keep them from visiting anyone else. Shelved Dolls @The Gloss.

Coca-Cola is launching a “Beauty Drinks” line in France. The joint venture with Sanofi, a French manufacturer of nutritional supplements for skin and hair, will sell drinks containing mineral water, fruit juices, and nutritional additives. The drinks, which will be sold in pharmacies, will tout benefits including strengthening hair and nails, “embellishing” skin, aiding in weight loss, and improving vitality. Today Beauty.

With all the attention being paid to the Photoshopping of commercial images into perfection, it’s easy to forget that images have been manipulated since, oh, the beginning of time. People like to believe that there was a time when the camera didn’t lie, but photographers have been manipulating the medium from the very beginning. And will continue to do so, to the very limit of their skills and technology. Early evidence of this is currently on display at New Yorks’ Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop“, shows what early photographers could do with splicing, collaging, tinting and double exposure. Making subjects appear slimmer and younger was part of any good portraitist’s job, of course, but the real fun is in the surrealist images. Metropolitan Museum. WSJ.

And in the modern world, perfection of beauty images is extending into the realm of video. Even 4K video (which is what super-high res cameras like the Red System shoot). This promo video from Japanese company Foton, Inc. (they also do eyelash retouch technology) took a few days to “shop”, but it’s a pretty good indicator of where the technology is headed: