About Face: Beauty is a Weapon
The second instalment of a series on my years in the beauty industry
This column is part of my About Face series on beauty and my time as an editor working in the beauty industry. But if you’re not a beauty buff, don’t worry — this is Peak Notions, so this column also touches on class, gender, academia, aesthetics and Irish national treasure, novelist Marian Keyes. If you like Peak Notions, find yourself regularly interested in or constructively mad at it. please consider a paid subscription. It allows me to keep creating it and keeps the weekly column free for everyone.
That time celebrated stylist Sam McKnight did my hair and I slept in it for two nights rather than take it out
Now whatever either on good or upon bad grounds tends to raise a man in his own opinion, produces a sort of swelling and triumph that is extremely grateful to the human mind
- Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
After more than a decade as a beauty journalist schlepping to events and parties where I was surrounded by vivacious socialites and impeccably dressed ‘it girls’, influencers in five-inch heels and magazine editors with 1990s energy on 2020s salaries, I committed to writing a series of columns here called ‘About Face’ to reflect upon my time within the beauty industry. I made that commitment last November in this column detailing my choice to step back from a career of more than ten years. And then… I wrote nothing more about it. It’s a tricky topic and writing about it has proved more challenging than I anticipated.
Once, very early on in my beauty writing career, I attended an event organised by a well-known French beauty brand in Dublin when the novelist Marian Keyes approached me. You’d know her anywhere — voluminous, raven hair that shines with a sort of mesmeric glossiness, that voice with an inimitably soft, mellifluous timbre and large, kindly blue-green eyes that really see you when they look at you rather than scanning the horizon of the room in the usual protocol of professional party FOMO.
She came over to me simply to say hello — this was the first time I’d ever met her — and whisper with genuine enthusiasm that she loved the fact that I’d turned up in jeans and converse to a room filled with glamorous, polished women. Keyes didn’t phrase it that way, but that was the gist. Her compliment was entirely sincere.
This paragon of Irish literary talent, whose face appearing before my own nearly took the legs from under me like the rap of a broom to the back of the knees, appeared to interpret my objectively inappropriate ensemble as some sort of high confidence power move. The kind of thing you’d only do if you felt immune to or above all of that intra-female status signalling. A deliberate statement of confident separateness. That wasn’t really it at all. I was just chronically underdressed due to a combination of ignorance and a deep understanding that this was a joust I could never win. It felt as though there was little point in climbing onto the horse in the first place.
Aged 17 or 18, not knowing the rules of the beauty game (no idea about the weird arm bruise). The lego haircut was unfortunately consensual. RIP the eyebrows.
I didn’t know the rules. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I’d spent the seven years to that point inside the walled community of a university, developing no practical skills whatsoever except a high level ability to stand in corners silently doing an excellent impression of an article of furniture, studying philosophy and surrounded by male academics — the sort of people who abjure all pretension to grooming as unintellectual frippery. As a woman in that environment, showing evidence of considering your external appearance was then sufficient to convince others that you lacked any depth, ironically because nobody was thinking all that deeply about it.
I fought that norm, wearing red lipstick to department meetings and feeling a bit like the whore of Babylon. I did not defeminise my appearance but neither did I gather useful information on dressing for women who nurture beauty as a virtue. I just bought lady jeans for people with incredibly short legs from Marks and Spencer and got on with my life. By the time I was presented with a social occasion where elaborate, trend-oriented garb may have helped me to fit in and signal what I needed to signal to get ahead, it was too late.
There is significant irony in the fact that since taking a step back from the professional world of beauty a few months ago (a job which ensured every new product launch landed on my doorstep in a scenario that any beauty lover — including me — would consider beyond their wildest dreams), most of my disposable income has been joyfully spent on beauty products. None of my enduring love for its sensorial, transformative capacity has eroded.
I do not engage in beauty as something trivial and fluffy but as two things primarily — a form of creative self expression and a weapon. An honest-to-goodness weapon. As something I can point at a flawed world and use to maximally dictate the terms upon which it engages with me rather than the other way around. Bugger all the fluffiness. I have known what it is to be a person who is invisible and have experienced the ways that engaging in beauty as a practice and culture can render you present when you urgently need to be. In a literal sense, curating my appearance helped get me into rooms that are generally not open to people of my background - not appearance alone, of course, but in part. In this sense, for me beauty isn’t about attractiveness or sexual appeal — the raw materials I’m working with are as they ever were — but about signalling and strategy in primarily female environments. It is one more element of ‘passing’ — presenting as a person for whom doors should open.
We all engage in the industry and practice of beauty. Our basic morning ablutions are an aesthetic enhancement, as is choosing one deodorant scent over another. How we choose to smell, whether we wear makeup or we don’t. Whether we grow out our body hair or let it bristle forth, dye our grey roots or permit them do their thing, have a two- or a ten-step skincare routine or none — all of it signals our beliefs to other people. All of it is a visual representation of both who we believe we are and who we desire to be seen as.
Expensive hotel lighting and a great haircut work wonders. The haircut is by Dylan Bradshaw. If you find yourself in Dublin, put your hair in his hands and see what aesthetic wonders emerge (but book far in advance!)
Beauty is never value neutral, and therefore it’s far from trivial. Status and belief signalling is big girl business, as most women will know. By turning up in my jeans and converse and carefully winged eyeliner all those years ago in Dublin, I was indeed signalling separateness, low effort (yet distinctly high effort, technical winged eyeliner says ‘I know how to do it if I want to’) and therefore perhaps even contempt for the standards being met by those around me. It may have come from a place of bafflement rather than legitimate confidence but the people around us aren’t telepathic. They work backwards, interpreting outcomes and then presuming intent. I might have come across as confident, or I might have seemed like a bit of a dick. Both were true and not true.
The self-care messaging which was so prominent in beauty for a few years is starting to circle the drain and this is only a good thing. We appear to be entering a slightly more honest era (or if not quite honest, then less discreet). More women seem to be willing to reveal the complexity and expense of how the beauty sausage is made. What it takes to achieve taut, clear skin as you age. The needles and toxins and lasers and topical medications. The LED mask devices that make you look like a serial killer. The supplements and nutritional strictures and the tug and knead of targeted facial massage draining puffy morning faces at the bathroom sink. The vast expertise and financial exorbitance which represent the bare minimum in making famous women look the way they do. The snake oil and the science and the artistry of constructing an appearance that helps a woman through a misaligned world to a greater extent than it gets in her way.
Sure - it goes without saying that how we look should not be either a social lubricant or an obstacle and yet we all recognise the world in which we live. There are the beliefs we profess to hold and then there are the ones we base our actions upon. It wouldn’t be difficult to argue that our true beliefs are represented by what we do and not what we say. There is power in beauty and the ways in which we construct it. We know this and we use that knowledge one way or the other. The version of ourselves that we can convincingly (confidently) present to the world is the one it will believe.
As a hamster-cheeked adolescent with a lego man haircut and a mother who did not understand how such signalling works, I was conscious of the power of beauty and its capacity to translate a person into a version of themselves that others might comprehend or even want to listen to. I just didn’t yet know how to get there and felt all of the consequences of that dearth of knowledge. Nobody talked about how the sausage is made. My mother believed sincerely — as working class people sometimes do — that we live in a meritocracy where education is sufficient to guarantee socioeconomic elevation and a route out of the life I was raised in.
How the sausage is made: Red-faced, puffy early morning before a magazine shoot (the after photo looked better I swear)
Once you obtain that education, it isn’t difficult to determine that the ability to signal appropriately can often get you a good deal further than having read Hegel or being able to knock up a quick Likert scale. To climb, you have to belong in the room and to belong, you must either have been born in similar rooms or you must look familiar and behave in ways which do not reveal the knots you’ve tied yourself in to get there. You must not signal otherness to the extent that it discomposes the room’s existing culture and cohesion. You must not be a jagged edge that things might snag on. Once you get into the room you can choose to be one of course, but at your peril. A system is primarily concerned with its own longevity. It bashes edges. It buffs them smooth. It pulls out a circular saw and imposes a curved edge where once there was a right angle. What it does not do is change to accommodate one piece that doesn’t quite fit.
What we don’t focus much on in the conversation around the pressure women feel to look a certain way is what they are missing out on by inhabiting a space in which their physical appearance is not maximised to signal whatever might be most advantageous to them (this quickly comes to equate to what is beautiful to us). Because beauty is not looking beautiful in some limited, appealing-to-men swimwear model sense. It is proximity to status, money, aspiration, health. This is of course all largely nonsense but it is the suite of presumptions upon which our culture complacently sits. It isn’t about reality but, ironically, appearance.
To court beauty is to be pleasing to have around (we are sadly nicer to and more inclined toward interest in strangers when we consider them to be visually appealing - this is true of women as well as men). To maximise your appearance is to appear to know how the world works and therefore sadly to be taken more seriously within it. To do it while signalling minimal (or less) effort is to win the game outright. To meet the standard without appearing to try. That impossible bar.
We can opt out but this too signals something. Critiquing individual women for either engaging or not engaging in the beauty game strikes me as along the lines of thinking that people recycling their yoghurt cartons can save the world from environmental collapse. It’s bigger than that. The game is one of many ongoing regardless and it isn’t fair. We all choose our weapon.
Beautifully written, Laura, my first subscription in substack, I can't get enough of your writing. Your description of our efforts to fit in...wow. You are a fantastic writer, can't wait for the book. XO
I’m 71 years old on Saturday. I worked as a copywriter most of my life and felt old at 35. Now I’m arthritic and lame and look for descriptors like ‘balm’ and ‘repair’ in products I buy. I’m convinced there’s a market for a facial cream blended from equal parts formaldehyde and petroleum jelly… Getting old and the arthritis means I have to actually occupy my body, which is a mixed blessing. I’ve been reading you for a long time now and think your writing is great.