In support of Kjerstin Gruys’ new memoir detailing her year without mirrors, a call was put out for beauty bloggers to take a day off from looking at our reflections. Inspired by both Kjerstin’s book Autumn Whitefield-Madrano’s month long mirror fasts, I decided to take a week without mirrors. And here’s what I found:
1. I missed looking at myself in the mirror. It’s not that the voices in my head are always rah-rah-rah; they run the …
Less than three days into my week without mirrors (inspired by Kjerstin Gruys’ Year Without Mirrors, I noticed that I was feeling really annoyed… I was enjoying reading about Kjerstin’s journey without mirrors, but I was not enjoying my own.
It wasn’t just the inconvenience of putting my contacts in with a tiny speck of reflection, nor was it not having a visual frame of reference before I go out into the world.
I had the feeling …
What would a day be like without looking at ourselves in a mirror? The idea of seeing our own reflections – first thing in the morning, or anytime we want to check something out – is so easy and automatic that we don’t even think of it. Mirrors surround us – in our bathrooms, our bedrooms, and even on the street if we live in a city. The ubiquity of mirrors in our lives mean that we are constantly checking …
Beauty pageant contestants have long been accused of all looking alike. After all, their competition involves reaching towards an “ideal” standard of beauty. But the convergence of beauty ideals plus the ready access to cosmetic surgery may have taken the phenomenon to a new place: contestants in the Miss Korea pageant have been accused of all looking exactly alike. And no, it’s not just Westerners saying it either: in a country where one in five people go under the knife, …
In Mad Men, we’ve recently seen Peggy Olson going after the Heinz Ketchup business. Women in advertising were often in charge of accounts catering to women – dishwashing liquid, hosiery, and cosmetics.
Looking through the advertising in issues of Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and Mademoiselle from 1968, it’s fun to imagine who these magazines imagined their readers to be. Vogue, with its mix of jewelry, fashion, and travel ads obviously caters to the wealthy society set (who are …
Most of us are familiar with Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaigns, which broke cosmetic advertising ground by including more body types and ethnicities than the usual skincare ads. And women loved it – it was lauded as an antidote to unrealistic beauty standards that we’ve internalized from the big, bad world of commercialized fashion and beauty.
But something about their latest campaign bugs me, and it’s not just advertising hype. I’ve been neglecting some of my duties here at Wild …
The New York Spa and Wellness Show is a trade show featuring the latest equipment and treatment options for spas and skincare salons. From big-name salon skincare to upstart technologies, ideas abound as to what the next big thing will be.
But amidst all the laser equipment and skin imaging technologies, there are the take-home treatments: the extras salons hope will keep their clients’ skin looking its absolute best.
Salons may be the first to offer these options, …
Do you watch Vikings? I’m totally hooked, and between the violent clashes between cultures (and the costume details), I’ve been musing about Floki’s eyeliner.
Fierce is a word that’s been used – and overused – by fashionistas when describing some of their own looks, but the drag queens bringing the word into the studio aren’t that far off the mark. “Wild or menacing in appearance“, fierce describes a way of looking that’s deliberately designed to look …
As a makeup artist, I love faces – that goes without saying. But I don’t just love a pretty face with makeup on it – there are interesting faces everywhere, and all kinds of ways to look at faces, too!
Thérèse Le Prat (1895-1966) is a French photographer whose work I recently discovered. She loved faces – you could say she was obsessed by them – and for those of us who also love faces, her work is a …
A lot is made of the fashion industry’s extreme beauty standards, and how women consumers feel pressured to look like thirteen year old girls. But what about the girls themselves? Girl Model is a documentary airing on PBS March 24 (then streaming until April 23) that follows Nadya, a thirteen year old model from rural Siberia, to Tokyo, where she is expected to learn her new trade. Autumn at The Beheld gives a full review of the film, which reveals …
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