Beauty concepts and applications

¶ … Beauty and the Eye of the Beholder -- "Making myself up"

You've come a long way baby!" This popular cigarette advertisement of the 1970's, showed a slim woman smoking an even slimmer cigarette. It seems dated to the contemporary eye as an expression of modern women's liberation. What woman today would think that indulging in a negative habit such as smoking could be an example of female liberation? Sadly, Susan Sontag's essay from 1975 on "Beauty" does not nearly seem as dated as this advertisement. In her essay, Sontag reflects that, even before a woman's day has begun, her real work has already started -- before the mirror.

A man, Sontag, asserts, simply is -- he can be handsome, or otherwise, but a woman must construct herself and construct her face and feminine loveliness with cloth, makeup, and the right sense of fashion and color, before she even embarks upon the long morning commute to work or feeds the cat or wakes the children. A woman must make up herself. An exhausting task, in addition to the added labors of housework, schoolwork, and the working pressures of the world, for any woman to endure.

Life is hard for everyone today, and busy for everyone today, but the task of beauty for women is an additional labor -- of justifying the self, one's whole existence and intelligence by creating the illusion of one's self as the daily incarnation of beauty. Making the self up -- with makeup, with the correct clothing choices and haircuts, to construct one's persona in the world may be a task faced by all, men and women. But it is more costly, time-consuming, and self-consuming for women. This is because appearance-creation for women has a more limited and narrow goal -- attaining an ideal of beauty, rather than simply expressing the self or looking presentable for work, is an ideal that few women can obtain.

If such an assertion seems overly paranoid, a bit of feminist raving, consider this item of evidence -- Exhibit a. The hair band. Who does one think of when one thinks of a hair band? Why, Hilary Rodham Clinton of course. A Wellesley and Yale Law School graduate, an architect of the first coherent plan for national health care for his nation, and a New York Senator. But one of Hilary's most controversial stands was her decision to wear a rather dowdy hair band when she spoke upon the public stage. Appearance consultants were called in, and this travesty was removed, and the offending hairstyle reformed. Yes, women are taken seriously -- but only after they have proved themselves capable of meeting certain, often very rigorous standards of attractiveness.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder -- but that is what is so difficult. Because to judge the self by outside cultural standards of beauty means one is forever in doubt. Unlike measurable standards of intelligence, work performance, or even one's ability to provide in material terms for one's family, beauty is subjective. Her catty colleague may mock a thin fashion model for being too skinny. A voluptuous beauty is sneered at in the gym. A waiflike young woman is ignored at because of her perceived youth when she speaks in a court of law, despite her degree. And the only solution our culture has to offer even these women who may meet some societal standard of beauty is to buy a push-up bra, work out some more, and buy some lipstick.

And heaven help the woman who doesn't even have a claim in the beauty sweepstakes, who is born plain!