"
I remember going to a totally boring party for the magazine one night and thinking nobody is dancing because their heels are too high. Nobody is eating because in order to look like the women in the magazine, you have to eat next to nothing. And no one is actually drinking the cocktail in their hand because those are fattening, too. Nobody was really even talking to each other because they were too self conscious and painfully busy standing in the corner trying to look beautiful and important. It was not long after that party that I decided to try and resurrect my soul and work for a magazine that focused on something other than beauty and fashion. " [
Linda Wells Would Be Horrified] (
via)
posted by vidur
on Jun 27, 2011 -
54 comments
Whitefield-Madrano is regarding mirrors in the same role that I often give to social media. (Social-media sites seem to me to be self-consciousness machines, encouraging that one maintain a directorial distance from one’s own life experience in order to strategize how to present it in update broadcasts.) But the realities of patriarchy complicate matters considerably; as much as believe we are collectively compelling one another to route our social life through commercial social-media sites, that seems like nothing compared with the coercion involved with fulfilling gendered expectations of self-presentation.
Marginal Utility dissects Mirror Fasting. A goal that
blogger Whitefield-Madrano recently took up and called a
Month Without Mirrors. The initial reason behind her project:
"Sometimes I look in the mirror and see myself, or whatever I understand myself to be. Other times, I distinctly see an image of myself."
posted by P.o.B.
on Jun 20, 2011 -
25 comments
The miniskirts, hotpants, bellbottoms, boots, sunglasses, and hairdos of the
Sixties Seventies as worn by the famous and anonymous beauties of the time.
(some images NSFW)
posted by Joe Beese
on Jan 2, 2011 -
60 comments
From the
NYT Economix blog: Are good-looking people more likely to get jobs? That depends whether you’re talking about men or women, according to a new
working paper.
Job applicants in Europe and in Israel increasingly imbed a headshot of themselves in the top corner of their CVs. We sent 5,312 CVs in pairs to 2,656 advertised job openings. In each pair, one CV was without a picture while the second, otherwise almost identical CV contained a picture of either an attractive male/female or a plain-looking male/female. Employer callbacks to attractive men are significantly higher than to men with no picture and to plain-looking men, nearly doubling the latter group. Strikingly, attractive women do not enjoy the same beauty premium. In fact, women with no picture have a significantly higher rate of callbacks than attractive or plain-looking women. We explore a number of explanations and provide evidence that female jealousy of attractive women in the workplace is a primary reason for the punishment of attractive women.
posted by krautland
on Nov 24, 2010 -
75 comments
80s supermodel
Paulina Porizkova (images may be NSFW) on
aging:
Beauty, unlike the rest of the gifts handed out at birth, does not require dedication, patience and hard work to pay off. But it's also the only gift that does NOT keep on giving. It usually blossoms at an age where you're least equipped to handle its benefits and rewards and instead take it all for granted, and by the time you start understanding the value of it, it slowly trickles away. How's that for revenge of the ugly ones? (related)
posted by Joe Beese
on Oct 21, 2010 -
121 comments
"Make-up is great. It is a powerful tool, a way to express yourself, your mood and interior life. But, when you can’t go without something, it loses its spark." We are two days into Rabbit Write's
NO MAKE-UP WEEK.
posted by hermitosis
on Sep 21, 2010 -
227 comments
Belleza sobrenatural (supernatural beauty) is a project from Elle Spain magazine featuring twelve (Spanish) beautiful women completely without makeup and without Photoshop enhancement; four of them appear on the covers. It's being picked up by
other websites, but so far only in Spanish; I couldn't find any coverage in English. Meanwhile, the
US version of Elle has the usual makeup/photoshop enhanced cover models.
[more inside]
posted by math
on Sep 18, 2010 -
33 comments
Vogue Italia relaunched their website last week
(in Italian and English / pictures on the site may be NSFW,) with three new subsites catering to specific fashion industry demographics: Vogue
Curvy (focusing on plus-sized models, actresses and celebrities,) Vogue
Black (men and women of color,) and Vogue
Talents (veteran and up-and-coming designers. "Talents" also encourages hopeful designers to submit their work for review.) "Curvy" and "Black" in particular have received some
positive and
negative attention and some
wonder whether
separating those two fashion categories
is truly inclusive. Vogue
responds.
posted by zarq
on Mar 1, 2010 -
31 comments
Researchers have found that beautiful women have more children than their plainer counterparts and that a higher proportion of those children are female. Those daughters, once adult, also tend to be attractive and so repeat the
pattern.
posted by monospace
on Jul 28, 2009 -
111 comments
BBC iPlayer: As the American phenomenon of the children's beauty pageant hits the UK,
this documentary uncovers a surreal new world where nine-year-olds get fake tans and seven-year-olds wear contact lenses.
[more inside]
posted by nam3d
on Jul 22, 2009 -
41 comments
Elizabeth Wurtzel writes:
Because I need to make a point, I’m just going to be immodestly candid: I was a remarkably adorable child, the kind with such rosily expressive cheeks that grown-ups couldn’t resist pinching them. So when I became a teenager and then an adult, I was what you would call a hot number or something like that—at any rate, they put me half-dressed on the covers of my books to sell them, so draw what you will from that. Now that I’m in my forties, people say, I think kindly, She still looks good. This is to be followed by a phase of …for her age, which is hot on the trail of handsome, and then—then who knows? I think it deteriorates from there, enough so that the vain among us start to look forward to death, or at least stop resisting its horrific pull. (via)
posted by Joe Beese
on May 29, 2009 -
175 comments
He Saw, She Saw. According to a study published today in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, beauty may affect men's and women's brains in different ways.
posted by sarabeth
on Feb 23, 2009 -
33 comments
