019: On beauty and lies

Deception is at the core of the modern beauty industry. Does truth have a place?

In the modern world, beauty is labour — the kind that has to be invisible for its fruits to be valuable. In other words, you have to do the work — the hair-taming, the body-buffing, the skin-tightening and lip-plumping — but your methods have to be elusive, slippery, undetectable.

A few weeks ago, Christina Aguilera appeared in a new video (2002 calling!) looking, well, like it was still 2002. In a piece for Dazed, a plastic surgeon commented on her new look: “What people are doing to their face in the next year is going to blow you away,” Dr Prem Tripathi proclaims. “The time in aesthetics that we’ve all hoped for and waited for where the procedures that people are having done to their face are not detectable [is here]… I think the undetectable part is that it’s done so well, so beautifully, that to the natural observer it just looks like a person who’s maintained some youth.”

Naturally, this sent shivers down our spines — the idea that not only do you need to be beautiful and young forever, but that we’re edging towards a world where that state will be expected. Have you heard anything more dystopian? It’s a funny paradox though, that while we’re in this era of ‘undetectable’ beauty, there’s also a wave of radical honestly about the beauty procedures women are undergoing. We’re talking hour-long Youtube videos detailing everything from fillers, to surgery, to peels and lasers and Botox. Is the honesty useful? Or is it another way of selling us the ideal, and outlining the (very expensive/time-consuming) way to get there ourselves?

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Divya: Beauty has always been part of the project of communal womanhood. Women have been swapping tips on bathing in donkey’s milk, or dyeing their hair with henna etc. for centuries. Can we look at this wave of women sharing the intricacies of their aesthetic modification online in the same way?

Diana: I can totally see how these communities of women sharing beauty secrets can be both comforting and empowering… but also feed into this cycle of pressure. I came across a TikTok about "Irish hair," where your hair is straight on top but frizzy underneath. And I was like wow, I had never had the language to describe what’s occurring on my head before. As lame as it sounds, it was empowering. Like, I knew the problem, so I could fix it. But!!! I also worry that we are just entrenching the idea that these are problems to begin with. Like, at the same time as these videos told me the solution, they also affirmed that yeah, the hair I wake up with isn’t the hair I should walk out the door with.

To clarify: “Irish hair” appears to have nothing to do with Ireland or the Irish.

Divya: The tone is always like, ‘Girlies, I won’t be gatekeeping how I got my jawline to go from this to this (greenscreen background)’. It’s like you know a secret, because it’s about how to look like you haven’t had anything done at all. It’s like, here, let’s participate in this collective dishonesty… together! In a way, it sort of compounds the feeling of being part of something together.

Diana: Is it just women deceiving men? Because God knows they don’t know what ‘natural’ looks like.

Divya: Oh my god, I was reading about this idea of ‘cosmetic infidelity’, where women don’t tell their partners about the work they’ve had done and apparently, they’re all getting away with it. I can believe it.