Fashion Brief
Autumn Whitefield-Madrano is a seasoned women’s magazine writer and editor and a beauty blogger, most recently a writer at the American online intellectual magazine the New Inquiry. Over the years, she has written miniature etymologies and commentaries of words we associate with beauty (like foxy, cute and attractive), and documented how she’s been treated moving through the world both with fake eyelashes and big hair; and with a restrained French twist and light dab of blush. She has also spent time examining her relationship with the mirror through the lens of Hegelian philosophy.
Thoughtful and erudite, Whitefield-Madrano’s ongoing investigation into the ways beauty, both as an ideal and as a practice, has shaped women’s lives is at once playful, illuminating and troubling. Her first book, Face Value, thinks through the complicated and often contradictory ways that women are both empowered and constrained in the cultivation of beauty.
One of the things I was most surprised to learn from Face Value is that only 63% of American women wear makeup. To me, that seemed low.
I was surprised too! I don’t remember exactly how the study worded the question, but it may have been about wearing makeup regularly. Certainly most women, I think (though there are plenty who don’t) have some kind of makeup in their bathrooms. I think the number of women who wear makeup, every day or on occasion, is higher than 63%.
You did many, many interviews for this book. What was it like to be constantly coming up against the knowledge that maybe your own practice isn’t the standard beauty practice?
I started thinking about beauty from a place of personal exploration. My default assumption, for better or worse, would be to take my routine as a kind of standard. I’d go into an interview thinking, OK, so she does about the same amount of beauty work that I do. And it was interesting to see where people put themselves on the old scale of high-maintenance v low-maintenance.
I timed it, and it takes me six and a half minutes to do my face. Which for some women is like, ‘Oh my god, that means I have to get up six and a half minutes early, forget it.’ And other women are like, that’s not a big deal. The point is we all think that what we do is normal. I definitely went into my interviews that way; I’d think, OK, this person is more high-maintenance because she takes 10 and a half minutes. Which is a ridiculous thing to think about four extra minutes.
The internet has enabled so many people – especially women – to chronicle their own experiences. A whole world of hidden beauty work has opened up. Do you feel like that’s part of the reason you wanted to do this book now?
It’s partially an organic thing, the visual aspect being native to the internet, and women documenting their beauty practices. I talk a bit in the book about public beauty work, and how I cringe when I see another woman on the subway putting on makeup. But I also champion it: let people know that I didn’t hashtag-wake-up-like-this. Let people know, this takes a lot of work. I think the heightened visibility in that sense has given more respect to the effort involved in beauty, even if we still think it’s a silly, frivolous thing. But that’s shifting a little.
Of course, there’s the debate about whether we should be congratulating other women for the amount of time and money they spend on their beauty, but I think it does heighten the respect, and also lessens the shame.
You have a background working in women’s magazines. Is the women’s media sphere, including beauty writing, different now?
I just turned 40, so for me there was a very clear division between women’s magazines and the rest of the magazine industry.
I chose to go into women’s magazines because that was the audience I wanted to reach. But that also limited the people I could reach, and the number of outlets I could work for. And then, it changed. There’s been this explosion, there are so many sites for women, so many outlets. I think there’s more of a “why not?” attitude.
I remember telling my fellow interns at Ms magazine, oh I got this great job at CosmoGirl! And one of them actually rolled her eyes. But now I think the division is crumbling. There’s still a bit of a distance between serious women’s writing, and the more xoVain kind of beauty writing, sites that are more frivolous. But I don’t think young women see as much of a conflict there – they’re still excited to write for those sites because that’s what they grew up reading, and it went hand in hand with feminism for them. It’s not so much capital-S serious, but they might not see the same conflict there as I once did.
We’re also seeing the emergence of this more hybrid project: I’m thinking of Jezebel, but also Racked, Fashionista. There are these sites that have come forward as feminist-minded, and often beauty-centric and fashion-centric. They came about without that conflict. Or, we’re now willing to explore that conflict in a more nuanced, generous manner.
What does it mean to try to achieve beauty for yourself? How do we figure out at what point it becomes, ‘Oh, I feel like I look my best, because when I look my best, I look the closest to the narrow beauty ideal?’
In speaking with women, I actually heard them use the word “justify” when they were talking about their beauty work. Particularly women who identified as feminist, but that wasn’t necessarily the only type of woman who was using that word. A lot of my own interest in writing about beauty has been about justifying my beauty work. And not just the work, but the desire to meet the standard.
I’m always trying to find a peaceable resolution between feminism and beauty. A lot of women take comfort in meeting a certain level of the beauty standard. That is still their definition of feeling beautiful. There’s no feminist way to say that’s something we should welcome. But just acknowledging that there is a conflict there can be a place of growth.
How do we reconcile the fact that what’s good for the individual doesn’t always benefit the group? It feels good for me to occasionally wear bright red lipstick, to come a little closer to the ideal beauty standard, but feminism is, historically, meant to be a group effort.
There is a strain of feminist argument for beauty work that champions it as self-expression. And that sounds great until you really look at what that means. It’s hard because, as a feminist, you always want to believe people’s experiences. So, for example, when a 15-year-old girl is like, “I want to wear this crop top to school because it’s ridiculous that we’re told we can’t wear it because we’re a distraction to boys, and it’s up to boys to not be distracted, and not up to me to cover my body,” I believe her. I want to honour her perspective and her voice.
But then, the women who are making these valid arguments are also coming from the same constraints that the patriarchy has been placing on us all along. So, she might be saying that authentically, but there’s still that mindset there. Until the patriarchy is lifted, we’re not going to know what’s “authentic” and what isn’t. And though feminism is collective, we can’t all decide that, OK, this is a feminist thing that we can do with our beauty, and this isn’t a feminist thing we can do with our beauty. It doesn’t work that way.
- Face Value: The Hidden Ways Beauty Shapes People’s Lives is now available from Norton in the US
