When love goes wrong, what’s more important – how you look or how you feel? Should you “hide your crazy and act like a lady”? Or let those feelings rip, and rage on?
Miranda Lambert gives the whole “keeping appearances” thing a whirl in this awesome song and video, “Mama’s Broken Heart”, complete with good girl/bad girl crazy and lots of baby blue:
Scar Stories
Scars: we all have them, and we usually do our best to hide them – the damage makes us feel vulnerable. But there’s healing from telling others our stories. Esther Armah from Emotional Justice is inviting teens of color to share their “scar stories” as part of 30 Days of Fly, an initiative designed to help girls aged 13 to 25 recognize their individual beauty and strength. Launched on March 9, 30 Days of Fly includes a month of activities for teens to share stories, strength and inspiration, and to heal from emotional damage that is especially lavished on young women of color. Emotional Justice.
“It is inhumane to expect people to continually pull themselves up by their own ‘bootstraps’ without needing anything from anyone. That is what’s expected in a hyper-masculine culture where being needy for anything or anyone is weak, and holding emotions in is strong and righteous.” This wonderful quote is a tiny fraction of the fantastic essay on the current cultural undervaluing of women’s emotions, strengths, and abilities by Julie Daley at Unabashedly Female. Read it now. Unabashedly Female.
Dove’s Real Beauty campaign has gone interactive on Facebook, with an “app” that “allows” the user to “make over” those annoying belly fat spam ads. The “app”declares that by using it the user will send their one uplifting message to over 24 million women, displacing all those spammy diet ads. More disturbing perhaps is that the app also offers to send these messages to women thinking about certain things, such as love, beauty, careers, or travel. Maybe I’m just too small potatoes to know about Facebook’s mind reading capabilities with my $5 ad spend, but what’s going on here? I appreciate that Dove highlights diverse body types, but this overload of saccharine feel-good uselessness is a hot mess. Which is made even more unsightly by a press release stating that this “app” is being released to art directors (on Reddit!) to stop their “Photoshop abuse of women”. Dove “Ad Makeover”. Brand Channel.
Are you dressing appropriately for work? Of course, appropriate dress is dependent on the “culture” of your workplace. Cassie Goodwin from The Reluctant Femme shares her experience on dress code and office politics in the sex industry at The Beheld. Working as a receptionist at various brothels and massage parlors, Cassie found that acting as gatekeeper within the sex industry created a certain space of power and freedom, as she was unequivocally “off the menu”. And on her own site she reveals that this place in the, um, pecking order was in some ways more powerful that her current administrative job, where she has to be way more polite at every level. The Beheld. The Reluctant Femme.
You say you want a tattoo, but you’re worried about the high cost? Why not do it yourself? It’s easier than you think to give yourself a (bad) tattoo – Hannah at XOJane shows you how it’s done by giving herself two of them. XOJane.
Makeup Museum Sweet Tooth
Pretty enough to eat: the Makeup Museum has a new exhibition, “Sweet Tooth: Confections in Cosmetics and Beauty”. Tracing the history of confection inspired and flavored makeup and other cosmetics, the post includes vintage ads and displays of sweets-themed products. Hey, when is MAD or FIT going to give MM a show? We want this show in real life! Makeup Museum.
Hedy Lamarr
She was called “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World” – and as a Hollywood movie star, Hedy Lamarr was certainly one of the most stunningly beautiful women of the twentieth century. But while she was famous for lighting up the big screen, in private Hedy Lamarr was working on an invention designed to help save the free world.
As a child in Vienna, the young Hedwig Kiesler dreamed of being in the movies – and at sixteen, she dropped out of school to pursue her acting career. Which went swimmingly well: one of her early breaks was a nude swim in the racy Czech film Extase.
But young Hedy, as she was now called, would briefly retire from acting. She married a wealthy arms dealer at nineteen, and what seemed like commanding authority in courtship was actually controlling domination in marriage – her husband, Friedrich Mandl, was an extremely jealous man. He tried to obtain and destroy every copy of Extase, and refused to allow Hedy to act, or to even go out on her own without spying on her.
This was not a happy marriage for an intelligent and ambitious young woman: Friedrich basically expected Hedy to act as arm candy while he hosted business dinners. But there was another problem: the prospect of another great war was looming over Europe, and even wealthy Viennese arms dealers were at risk: while Friedrich was opportunistically selling munition components to whoever wanted to buy, as a Jew he could be conveniently discredited (or worse) by the rising Nazi party. And being half-Jewish, Hedy must have felt the pressure herself as she and her husband entertained German military bigwigs. Finally, not wanting to be trapped in her marriage or in war, Hedy packed up her jewels and sneaked off to London.
Luckily she met Louis B. Mayer in London, and while sailing on the same ship with him and his wife to America, she managed to get a favorable contract. Signed to MGM Studios, she changed her last name to Lamarr, and her career took off. She played a typically glamorous woman of unknown origin in most of her films, and worked steadily. But Hedy didn’t drink, or party hard, and even required social appearances were something of a bore to her.
What Hedy liked to do was invent. She had a special corner set up in her house, with a drafting table. And like many inventors, some of the things she invented seem nonsensical to us: with a couple chemists lent to her by Howard Hughes, she invented a bouillon cube that would flavor water into a cola-like beverage. She also invented a tissue-box attachment to dispose of used tissue.
But when German submarines torpedoed and sank a ship evacuating British schoolchildren from London, Hedy realized that her interests – and her past – could be useful in saving lives. She first offered her overheard knowledge of German torpedo technology to the National Inventors Council, but she also decided to work on inventions of her own.
Her partner in this was a new friend, George Antheil, a modern composer whose most famous symphony, the Ballet Mécanique, had caused riots at its performances in Paris and New York. In staging these outrageous concerts, George had tried to automate the synchronizing of player pianos – his score called for sixteen of them, as well as several bass drums, a siren, and three different airplane propellers. He had not succeeded in this, as the cost and logistics were too prohibitive, but he had succeeded in laying out the fundamentals well enough to apply for a French patent.
At the time, American torpedoes were massively unreliable: 60 percent of them were duds, and most of them missed their targets completely. Hedy had likely overheard German munitions experts discussing torpedo technology over dinners in Vienna, and in her talks with George they came up with an idea: to use radio frequencies to communicate with the torpedoes. Hedy also came up with her best idea yet: if the transmitter and receiver can be coordinated change their frequency randomly, the radio signal cannot be jammed, either by other torpedoes or by enemy interference.
This “frequency-hopping”, as it was dubbed, may have been inspired by George and Hedy’s impromptu piano playing as well as by her knowledge of German defense technology. We’ll never know. But while she was working on Ziegfield Girl with Lana Turner and Judy Garland, she and George were working out the practical details of this idea, utilizing George’s knowledge of player piano rolls to come up with the final schematics. They succeeded in making their ideas clear: they were awarded Patent No. 2,292,387 in 1942. Here are the schematics:
Schematics for the Secret Communication System
Unfortunately, the U.S. Navy didn’t use the technology – the official reason was that the technology was too heavy. George Antheil later stated that it may have been the comparison to player pianos that gave them that idea – as the idea was for radio control, the mechanism could have been miniaturized to the size of a wristwatch! But the rejection dispirited Hedy, and she pursued other means to help with the Allied war effort. Since she was on strike against MGM over a pay dispute, she headed East to sell war bonds, selling over $25 million worth in about two weeks.
The frequency-hopping technology was filed away as Top Secret by the U.S. Navy, so it languished until the mid 1950′s, when it was revealed to defense contractors to assist them in developing new weapons systems. As Hedy had signed the documents “Hedy Kiesler-Markey” (after her second husband), the innovation wasn’t attributed to her for years. But the technology outlined in the patent was an essential development in modern communications technology. It came to be called spread spectrum, and was released to consumer developers for commercial use. Today, it’s an essential technology behind remote controls, wireless phones, and WiFi.
Hedy watched all these developments from afar, but wasn’t credited for a long time. And as the patent had expired, engineers utilizing it weren’t required to pay her any fees – though she wished they would have: her Hollywood money had dried up. Ironically, it was the increased communication of the Internet that finally enabled her to get some of the credit she deserved. A retired U.S. Army colonel named David Hughes had fallen in love with Hedy when he was a boy – and as an adult, discovered her invention as he was researching a grant to provide wireless access for rural schools. He started a campaign on her behalf on the early Internet community the Well, eventually winning her (and George Antheil) an award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1997.
Hedy Lamarr was not content to be just a pretty face – she famously said: “Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.” That she managed to create a space for her own intellect in the space of Hollywood stardom is a remarkable achievement; that her co-invention continues to be a basic technology for wireless communication is a marvel.
Source: Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World (Vintage)
Quite often when I tell another woman that I’m a makeup artist, she’ll respond with an immediate confession about her makeup habits. “I don’t wear much makeup,” she’ll say, somewhat timidly, before detailing her routine. Or “I love makeup! …of course, I don’t wear too much.” Or my favorite: “I don’t wear makeup.”
This last comment is usually delivered with a whiff of moral certitude – that makeup is a triviality – or an oppression of women that I’m just not educated enough to understand.
I’m intrigued by these impromptu confessions, and not just because I aspired to be a Catholic priest when I was younger (yeah, that was gonna work). This immediate self-justification of makeup practice is a clue to a question we have about makeup – a question that is not about how to rock a smokey eye.
The equation these women seem to be working out is this: Is makeup unvirtuous? Is spending a few minutes a day applying paint to our faces wrong in some sense? Are we allowed to have a little – but not too much! – interest in these things?
The answer, it seems, depends on where you’re coming from. In the Western world, we have quite a tradition regarding vanity as sinful. Christianity has always regarded modesty and purity of women as virtues, from the Virgin Mary onward. And the tract pictured above, by Protestant reformer Thomas Tuke in 1616, goes even further, railing against the deceit that women practice when they use cosmetics. “What a contempt of God is this, to preferre the worke of thine own finger to the worke of God?” he writes, before promising women that sure hellfire and brimstone await those who deceive men into marrying them by practicing cosmetic witchcraft.
The witchcraft connection is a sure way to put the fear of God – and His enforcers on Earth – securely into any good woman’s heart. And when some of the more extreme Puritans left Europe for America, they brought their distaste for frivolity with them.
But that’s the United States, with its history of Puritans and Pioneers. And that’s not everywhere. I don’t really get the “makeup confession” from Asian women the way I do with my American sisters. And why not?
Here’s an image of Saraswati – the Hindu Goddess of arts, music, learning, and science. And she is decked out. It’s not just for vanity, though – her beauty is symbolic of the allure of knowledge. And she’s not the only one – religious artists depict the entire Hindu pantheon as beautiful, handsome, strong, and even fearsome – and all with visible face paint as part of their symbolism.
I’m not going to pretend that Asian, and Indian women in particular, don’t have their own feminist battles to fight, but when your religious iconography includes eyeliner, you’re not so likely to worry that a little blush is going to send you straight to hell.
In the United States, our imagery of glamorous women tends toward the profane: movie stars and swimsuit models aren’t generally enticing the kids into studying harder for their exams. Maybe this is one reason our preachers – both religious and political – rail against them?
What do you think? Is makeup a moral issue for you?
Thomas Tuke tract from the New York Public Library.
Image of Saraswati from HareKrishna108.tumblr.com.
“I’m into creativity in all its forms – writing, painting, dance, movement, and music. So I love makeup – I love all the colors.” Zaza‘s multi-instrumentalist Jennifer Fraser brings elegance to her craft: “I was raised by beautiful, elegant women, and was not let out of the house without lipstick. My mother was always beautiful and well-dressed.”
As half of one of Brooklyn’s up-and-coming dark wave acts, Jennifer enjoys the act of self-presentation. “There was a saying around my house: ‘Ladies of quality always look presentable.’ Fashion, beauty, and makeup are all part of that. But I love adornment in general. For most days I like to have some blush and lipstick on – it’s nice to have color, it feels more feminine. For shows I’ll do a Sophia Loren cat-eye, or a bright lip and a bronzer.”
Jennifer keeps her makeup stash in a drawer of an antique dresser in her bathroom. “There’s some organization,” she laughs. “I have a section for red lipsticks and a section for neutrals. I take my makeup off with coconut oil, and use it as as a body moisturizer. And I love fragrances too. I tend to wear fragrances I get compliments on. That way I know it’s working with my skin. Lately it’s a lighter one, which is unusual, because I usually go for more exotic scents.”
Having grown up in California’s Orange County, Jennifer’s adapted her routines to harsher New York winters: “I’ll wear a tinted moisturizer in the summer, but now I’m using RMS Beauty “un” cover up. I’ll use it where I need it. In the summer I wear a lot of rings and bracelets, but in the winter they get caught in all the layers. So in the winter I’ll wear brighter nails.”
And as a lifelong creative, Jennifer also has advice to share about the creative path: “I’ve found things I enjoy doing and pursued them as hobbies, then as careers. One thing’s led to another. You have to love what you’re doing – life is too short to dread anything!”
Three Favorites:
Hourglass Femme Rouge Lipstick in Icon.
RMS BEAUTY “Un” Cover-Up
Yves Saint Laurent ‘Rouge Pur Couture’ Lip Color SPF 15 in 001 Le Rouge.
Follow Zaza on Facebook here.
File under “It took me hours to look this casual”: Los Angeles carpenter Johnny Harrington had been growing his beard on-and-off-again for years, but since the 32 year old was spotted by a modelling agency, his “urban woodsman” look has gone viral. Now that he’s been chosen as the face of U.K. department store John Lewis, he’s admitted that the “hobo-chic” look isn’t as easy to keep up as it seems. He tells the London Evening Standard: “I absolutely love my beard and I try to take good care of it, wash it, condition it and always brush before bedtime. And I try to watch out when eating soup in public.” London Evening Standard.
The Oscars are coming! Which means loads of Oscar-themed beauty articles. But there’s also a beauty treatment up for an Academy Award. Mondays at Racine is a documentary film that follows cancer patients who are treated to free beauty treatments at a Long Island salon. Cynthia Sansone and Rachel DeMolfetto – the two sisters who own the salon – started this once a month service after their mother had passed away from breast cancer. As one of the more startling effects of cancer treatment (and, as the filmmakers discover, one of the most feared) is hair loss, the sisters find that their services are a vital part of increasing not just comfort, but also openness and dialogue among the cancer patients they see. ABC News.
Ok, now for the Oscar beauty trash talk: as part of the “swag”, Academy Award nominees are “offered” various weird beauty treatments, and since news outlets can throw a photo of Angelina Jolie up there with what”s been “offered”, there’s lot’s of publicity available to innovators of spurious beauty treatments. On offer this year? Wrinkle fillers mixed with the patient’s own blood, bull’s testicles incorporated into hair conditioning treatments, and carats and carats worth of black diamond bits blended into nail polish. After all, you needed your glitter nails to incorporate the blood of small boys, didn’t you? USA Today.
I’m big enough to admit that I’ve learned a thing or two from amateur beauty videos, but sometimes aspiring beauty gurus should practice before they preach. Tori Locklear demonstrates why you don’t want to hold the curl for 20 seconds or longer by burning a section of her hair off…on video. Telegraph.
Glamour‘s Girls in the Beauty Department are far more successful on Pinterest, where they find ingenious solutions to beauty organizing problems. A bobby-pin magnet inside the makeup drawer? Why didn’t I think of that? Glamour.
Emboldened by her one-month foray into wearing red lipstick, Courtney at Those Graces is going to attempt wearing it for a full year. We red lipstick wearers have enticed another into our coven, muahahaha! Those Graces.
In Pictures: Beyond Buckskin is going beyond e-commerce: they’re publishing a lookbook to highlight the range of Native American artists and apparel designers working today. The book, which is Native produced, designed, photographed and modelled, will be available on March 12, but you can preview pictures (and preorder the book) on their site. Beyond Buckskin.
We’re all familiar with the articles and books about French women’s beauty secrets. The secret moisturizers, the insouciance, the je ne sais quas - we in America are held in thrall waiting for the next magical secrets of French Beauty. But there’s another secret you won’t read about in the books or magazines, one that great French Beauties will take to their graves.
French women lie. They lie about their diets, their visits to the dermatologist and what goes on there, their surgeries, and even their undergarments.
The gorgeous ex-model who swears she never wears foundation? The famous movie star d’un certain age who tells reporters she wouldn’t dream of having a face lift? Once in a while they’re telling the truth, but those of us behind the scenes know they’re usually lying – they’ve done all those things and more.
Why lie? Well, certainly it’s better for actresses to talk about their craft and directors than their upkeep. After all, if we had to listen to movie stars talk about their surgeries, what a big crushing bore that would be. There’s also a French (maybe European?) desire to keep one’s mystery. Our American forthrightness can be very useful, but our tabloid blabbing about who’s had what surgeries is not very elegant.
That French insouciance isn’t entirely natural – that perfectly imperfect bun may have been practiced for years. Certainly the classic Parisian Frenchwoman cultivates her look over time, so that today it may be thrown together in an instant. But the assumption that French women (especially the super-beauties we read about) do so little upkeep creates an expectation that beauty is somehow effortless – at least for those lucky enough to be French, that it is.
There is another side to this, however: aside from being a big bore, talk about the work involved in looking good can feel accusatory to those who don’t want to do it. Certainly we all have our friends with whom we share our latest efforts – those friends are usually on a similar beauty/fitness path as us. But when my non-exercising relatives ask me about my yoga or sometimes-organic diet, we end up in an odd metaconversation that ends with their justification of their current practices.
That could just be my family, but I’m beginning to think there’s more to this. There’s a bi-polar aspect to beauty work – on one hand, advertising tells us we could all be effortlessly gorgeous if we just try this one diet or that cream. On the other, it most often takes real work to look good. There’s a certain amount of defensiveness people feel when confronted with a woman who admits to the work involved in keeping beautiful – maybe they’re not trying hard enough?
Great beauty is unfair: it starts with genes and luck – and for models and actresses, grows startlingly from work and knowledge – both from the beauties themselves and the teams around them. But when those secrets are too numerous to relate, too complex to parse, sometimes it’s just easier to say, “the Fates have been kind.” With an accent, of course.
Photo: Isabelle Adjani on the cover of Elle, 1976. From a collection at ACiDPoP!
Any of us who are into fashion and beauty watch Downton Abbey with an eye for the details: the clothes and jewelry, and of course, the hair and (imperceptible) makeup. But I’m also struck by all the beauty and dress rituals going on in the background: the starching of collars, removing of stains, the help bathing and doing hair. Those of us behind the scenes in photography know how much labor goes into a “flawless” look, and that the series provides these details gives a glimpse into the glamour of wealth and title.
Looking at these rituals, we have this modern wish that we could also have this help in looking good. After all, with a house full of servants working at furnishing a graceful life, who wouldn’t look her most exquisite? But there’s more to that than personal vanity: yes, the Ladies of Downton Abbey have lots of help in looking their best. But when there’s a team behind your beauty, there are more egos than your own to consider: looking good becomes obligatory.
We assume that beauty is a personal possession, but in this context, it’s not: family propriety and the skill of servants combine with natural assets and taste to form a surprisingly communal creation. A Lady simply can’t let everyone down by appearing sloppy, or spilling food on herself at dinner. The servants take pride in keeping their employers looking good as well – it’s a matter of professionalism. And it’s not just the Ladies of Downton who must look their best for the sake of the House, either: whenever there’s a wardrobe crisis concerning one of the men, there’s a flurry of frenzied activity behind the scenes.
Modern identity may have individualized the concept of self, and beauty along with it, but there is still a relationship between how we present ourselves and who we want to impress. Whether it’s “looking fabulous” or “not trying too hard”, we all have social expectations on our looks – from our peers at work, play, or in romance. Our appearance never exists in a vacuum.
And while most of us don’t have servants, our good looks still depend on the labor of others. That labor is far more invisible – most of our beauty products come off a factory line, and we don’t often meet the people who sew our clothes for us. When most our beauty relationships aren’t so personal, obvious moral labor and environmental issues arise, but the obligation to support a cosmetic company is far more diffuse than keeping a personal maid employed, so we’re freer to say “no” when we’ve had enough.
Do we in modern, affluent society have a duty to look good? For those we know? For those who help us be pretty? It’s a question far too complex for me to answer. What do you think?
I’ll just say it outright: Wild Beauty is slowly becoming monetized. For the past few months, I’ve been looking at ways to step up the game here, and many of those ways involve capital expenditure. So I’ll be experimenting with some ways to make a little money, whether it’s through advertising, affiliate links, or sponsorship.
My first catch is an affiliate relationship with Space NK Apothecary, which I’m very happy about. They sell some of the best beauty brands on the planet, many of them niche brands that those of us in the industry have been privately raving about for years. I’ve got a few other lines in the works as well.
What does this mean for you? Mostly it means that links from reviews and Other People’s Makeup stories will be more “shop-able”, and that I’ll be getting a small commission from anything you buy from affiliated sites.
I’m also working on new story ideas that incorporate products and color. I hope to come up with features that are fun, honest, and in tune with my personal beauty philosophy, which is finding its voice here at Wild Beauty.
Some of this will be experimental – I hope you’ll be patient with me if I go overboard, or if something just doesn’t work. Mostly I hope that you’ll continue to enjoy the site!
Yo Dawg, I heard you like lookin’ good: the hottest new male model is here, and he’s a 3 year old shiba inu. His site is blowing up, and why not? It’s not just cats that rule the Internet. I just wish I’d thought of it first…Menswear Dog.
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