by Ruth Brandon
And it was this denatured photographic “naturalness” that women tried to reproduce through cosmetics. You ladled on the foundation and powder, the eye shadow, mascara, and lipstick, and left the house camera-ready. Even in the most dimly day-lit offices and high streets, people felt undressed if they weren’t wearing long black lashes, blue-shadowed eyes, bright red lips, and pancake foundation, as though imminently about to face the klieg lights. Traveling in the New York subway one day, I was struck by the unusually beautiful complexion of the young woman opposite—only to be confounded a few seconds later as she opened her bag, took out a makeup kit, and proceeded to cover her face with pink gloop. When she’d finished she looked just like everyone else, which, presumably, was the intention. Office life required this bland, smoothed-over, highly colored look. Even some men in the public eye—think Tony Blair, John Edwards—now feel undressed without the layer of artificial tan to which constant studio exposure has accustomed them—and us.
So people’s notion of what constituted a “normal” appearance was rejigged to fit the movies. But the conspiracy was, on the whole, benign. Not only were the cosmetics companies happy, so was the woman in the street. At least the effect she sought was achievable. The Helena Rubinstein of the advertisements might be an artifact, but she was a self-created artifact. Artur Rubinstein the pianist, her friend, compatriot, and neighbor in New York (though no relation), would watch from his Park Avenue window, directly opposite her makeup room, as Madame, then well into her seventies, painstakingly constructed the face she wished to present to the world—a ritual he found touching, impressive, and, as a public performer himself, understandable.32 And the final result, though heavily worked, nevertheless remained rooted in actual appearance. With time and expertise you, too, could construct a comparably perfect surface: a carapace that (if you followed wartime Vogue’s instructions, applying the color, blotting, powdering, reapplying, reblotting, repowdering . . .) would carry you through the day without cracking. The products were within most people’s easy financial reach, and the effort was free.
Today, all is different. The fashion pages and celebrity magazines no longer represent living women and men but a sort of meta-world. In the film The September Issue, about Vogue magazine, there is a wonderfully self-referential scene where the cameraman is persuaded to become part of the fashion shoot he is filming. He is of normal shape—that is to say, his stomach is not perfectly flat. When Anna Wintour, the editor, views the resulting pictures, her immediate reaction is to call the Photoshop studio to have the offending inches shaved down. They are an intrusion: they have no place in the world Vogue sets out to create. In Vogue-world, as in the world of “procedures,” reality is merely a starting point. Just when the universal takeup of cosmetic surgery, Botox, and the rest began to shift the boundaries of what could be achieved in recasting the body, Photoshop began to revolutionize the photographic image. Ever since, the two have been twinned.
The acknowledged master of Photoshop is Pascal Dangin, a Frenchman living in New York. He works for (among others) Vogue, Vanity Fair, Harper’s Bazaar, Allure, French Vogue, Italian Vogue, V, the New York Times Magazine. Many photographers, including Annie Leibovitz and Steven Meisel, “rarely work with anyone else.” For Leibovitz, he is a sort of validator of her craft. “Just by the fact that he works with you, you think you’re good. If he works with you a lot, maybe you think, Well, maybe I’m worthwhile.”33
Lauren Collins of The New Yorker spent several months shadowing Dangin for a profile, “Pixel Perfect.” Here she describes him at work on some pictures of an actress:
“She looks too small because she’s teeny,” he said. On a drop-down menu, he selected a warping tool, a device that augments the volume of clusters of pixels. The dress puffed up pleasingly, as if it had been fluffed by some helpful lady-in-waiting inside the screen.
Next, Dangin moved the mouse so the pointer hovered near the actress’s neck. “I softened the collarbones, but then she started to get too retouched, so I put back some stuff,” he explained. He pressed a button and her neck got a little bonier. He clicked more drop-down menus—master opacity stamp, clone stamp. [This] minimized the actress’s temples, which bulged a little, tightened the skin around her chin, and excised a fleshy bump from her forehead. She had an endearingly crooked bottom row of teeth, which Dangin knew better than to fix. . . .
Another time, Dangin showed me how he had restructured the chest . . . of an actress who, to his eye, seemed to have had a clumsy breast enhancement. Like a double negative, virtual plastic surgery cancelled out real plastic surgery, resulting in a believable look.34
Even the recent Dove campaign, which uses larger women to model underwear in an attempt to counteract the relentlessly skinny ideal promoted by the fashion industry, was Danginized. “Do you know how much retouching was on that?” Dangin said. “But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”35
Routine retouching of this kind has created an ever-greater distance between what the beauty business tells us we ought to look like and what is achievable. The pictures of the possible and desirable that we carry inside our head are no longer based upon images of actual bodies. Jay Nicholls, the dancer who so loves her Botox, is thinking of using it to prevent underarm sweating. Not because sweating presents a particular problem: “I already use a roll-on solution that stops me sweating for two weeks.” But she “would love to be able to stop it for longer.”36 What’s sweating, after all? A mere bodily function. And who, these days, has any patience for those? Inside and out, we prefer the virtual ideal.
Of course people are aware of this disjunction. And the nervousness it arouses is reflected in their fury when the image of some well-known icon appears so heavily reconstructed that it is no longer possible to pretend these images reflect reality. With L’Oréal’s Beyoncé and Pinto pictures, many of the protests were prompted by the perceived racism of the alterations. But race played no part in the controversy surrounding the heavily doctored images of actress Kate Winslet published by Vanity Fair in November 2008. “Those of us who are not legally blind will instantly realize that the woman on the cover looks nothing like the real Kate Winslet. Is the woman an imposter? An evil twin? Or just the result of hundreds of man hours of digital retouching? I’m going with ‘alien,’ ” typically announced one blog.37
A video has recently been doing the rounds of YouTube. Marked “Every Teenage Girl Should See This,” it shows a transformation scene: a normally pleasant-looking young woman Photoshopped before your eyes, her neck lengthened, her face thinned, her eyebrows raised, her complexion clarified: duckling to swan. Photographically, she becomes the beauty no “procedures”—and certainly no makeup—will ever make her in real life. How the girl in question feels, faced with so clear and unattainable an image of what she might look like if she only looked different, we are not told.
Unsurprisingly, the now habitual digital enhancement of fashion and glamour images has given rise to a good deal of agonizing. The British Liberal Democrat Party is so perturbed by its pernicious influence on young girls’ self-esteem that it has proposed a new law. Just as cigarette manufacturers must print a warning on every packet announcing that tobacco is lethal, so they want every photographic image to be accompanied by a message saying whether or not it has been doctored.38
Our great-great-grandmothers encased their bodies in whalebone in pursuit of
the eighteen-inch waist; our mothers covered their faces with paste and powder so that they might look like their favorite film stars. And today’s women turn to the knife and the needle, liposucking off some inches here, tightening a jawline there, plumping out this fallen cheek, lifting that recalcitrant breast, in a never-ending, inevitably futile attempt to achieve the ultimate unreality: Photoshop.
IV
When Helena Rubinstein started out in business, men held the upper hand, financially and socially. And men decreed that respectable women should go unpainted.
Over the next half-century, the beauty industry ran hand in hand with women’s progress toward an equal place in the public world. Painting one’s face and cutting one’s hair signaled a new universe of choice and possibility. It is no coincidence that lipstick, between the 1920s and the 1950s, was bright, bright red. Helena Rubinstein’s motives were of course commercial: she wanted to be rich. But she also wanted independence, the right to control both her life and her money. And the cosmetics industry not only granted her wishes, it reflected her customers’ similar aspirations.
Today the wheel has come full circle. Cosmetics and cosmetic “procedures,” far from being unthinkable, have become almost compulsory. Who, now, dares be the only one in the room with wrinkles? Ironically, although women’s independence and equality are enshrined in law, their appearance is once again under someone else’s control.
And that someone is usually a man. Ninety percent of those “having work done,” both in Europe and America, are women. And 90 percent of cosmetic surgeons are men. Although the British Association of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons has 850 members, only 98 of them are women. In America, not one of New York magazine’s nominated “Best Doctors” for cosmetic surgery in 2008 was a woman. An online trawl through plastic surgeons in New York and Los Angeles turned up only four women’s names.
This gender imbalance does not mean that male plastic surgeons exercise some sinister power over their female patients. However, it does reflect the extent to which, in this world of supposed equality, men rather than women still tend to be the active agents. And nowhere is this truer than in the world the beauty industry now inhabits: the world of big business.
In her groundbreaking book The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, Betty Friedan asked why so many highly educated American women were effectively abandoning careers. Instead, they were devoting their energies to homemaking, which, despite all the propaganda in its favor, left them bored, frustrated, depressed, and unfulfilled. Friedan concluded that in postwar America, women’s “really crucial function . . . [was] to buy more things for the home.” An entire industry of advertising and market research devoted itself to persuading them to do so. And since the marketing men had decided that “a woman’s attitude toward housekeeping appliances cannot be separated from her attitude towards homemaking in general,” it had become commercially imperative that as many women as possible spend time at home being what business labeled “true housewives.” From the sellers’ standpoint, career women were considered “unhealthy.” And the persuaders had conveyed their message so successfully that the American career woman had become an endangered species.39
Partly as a result of Friedan’s book, that changed. But the sellers still needed to sell. So they expanded their sights to include not just the home but the body—which of course accompanies you wherever you go and whoever you are. And although the beauty business, the industry concerned with bodies, had traditionally been a female enterprise, that now began to change. The structure of the market thus remained what it had been pre-Friedan. The buyers were mostly women, the sellers mostly men.
Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden, Estée Lauder, the great names in twentieth-century cosmetics, got where they did because men hadn’t yet cottoned on to beauty’s commercial possibilities. But by the time Friedan began her research, they had begun to do so. Patrick O’Higgins, offered a job by Helena Rubinstein in 1955, wandered uncertainly past the drugstore windows, eyeing the products. His first thought was, “Golly! Who ever buys all this crap?” and his second, “Women’s names! Women’s work?” Only when he noticed the other names—Max Factor, Revlon, Charles Antell—did he reflect that “The beauty business is an enormous industry.”40 And that made it suitable for men. Once the likes of Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden had made beauty’s commercial possibilities apparent, the boys moved in.
Now they have taken full control. The beauty business has become very big business indeed—and big business in the twenty-first century is a male preserve. A survey released in March 2010 found that only 10 percent of directors in Britain’s top 100 companies are women, and twenty-five of the top firms had no women board members at all.41 Whatever the potion, the firm manufacturing it will almost certainly be run by men. And that firm will likely be L’Oréal, which now owns more than 400 subsidiaries and 500 brands, spanning 150 different countries, including (in addition to Helena Rubinstein) consumer products Maybelline, Softsheen, Garnier, CCB; luxury products Lancôme, Biotherm, Kiehl’s, Shue Uemura; the fragrance lines of Giorgio Armani, Ralph Lauren, Cacharel, Lanvin, Viktor & Rolf, Diesel, and YSL Beauté; professional products Kerastase, Redken, Matrix, Mizani, Shue Uemura Art of Hair; cosmoceuticals Vichy, La Roche Posay, Innéov, Skinceuticals, Sanoflore; The Body Shop; and Laboratories Ylang, the main producer of cosmetics in Argentina, where L’Oréal now controls 25 percent of the cosmetics market.
Seventy percent of L’Oréal’s chemists are women. In Lindsay Owen-Jones’s words, “the future of the company is in their hands at that level.”42 But the board is another matter. L’Oréal’s board of directors contains three women—Liliane Bettencourt, her daughter Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers, and Annette Roux, whose family runs a yacht-making business in Brittany, not far from L’Arcouest. But none of these sits on the ten-strong management committee, where all the firm’s real planning is done. At the time of this writing, the committee contained just one woman: the director of communications, Béatrice Dautresme—the same proportion as in the British survey and, as it happens, an exact echo of the proportions of males to females among cosmetic surgeons.
The constant concern of boards such as L’Oréal’s—the ambition of all big business, as shareholders press for ever-higher dividends—is expansion: to increase revenues and profits. And as the main cosmetic market of mostly middle-aged women approaches saturation, new avenues are being explored. One highly controversial trend encourages very young women to start Botox treatment preemptively, to prevent lines before they form: a 2009 market research survey found that there was particular growth of interest in “procedures” among teenagers.43
There is also the still largely untapped pool of men. Helena Rubinstein’s wartime cosmetics packs for soldiers developed into a postwar male market for such products as deodorants and aftershave. But despite breakthroughs (such as President Reagan’s much-touted use of Grecian 2000 hair dye) men never went for cosmetics in a big way. However, today’s fixation with youthfulness and attainable perfection affects both sexes. As the world gets fatter, and man-boobs (“moobs”) proliferate, more and more men are opting for breast reductions. The British Association of Plastic Surgeons reported an 80-percent rise in demand for this operation in 2009.44 And they’re worrying about their wrinkles. Boots’ “Protect and Perfect” line now includes a special range for men, while in a recent advertising campaign, a succession of aging male icons including Pierce Brosnan, the last James Bond but one, fronted for L’Oréal
’s tautening cream “Revitalift.” If straight men can be induced to share what was once a dread exclusive to women and gays, the potential market at once grows by almost 50 percent.
Whatever the sex of the consumer, however, the world of cosmetics is still, as it always has been, associated with social control. In Madame Rachel’s day, the argument was about keeping women in their place. For Helena Rubinstein, cosmetics were her route to emancipation; for her generation of women, they symbolized freedom. For Eugène Schueller, convinced that control and authority were essential aspects of a good society in which “Adam delved while Eve span,” they paradoxically conferred the means to enforce dictatorship. And now, when Madame Rachel’s “Beautiful For Ever” is literally and routinely attainable, the cosmetics world is the visible expression of a society in which anything is available to those with the means to buy it. The body has become a mere canvas, upon which the digital-age beauty business remasters our image of what is physically possible. But since perfection is ipso facto unattainable, what is really on offer, in the world of beauty as elsewhere, is infinite discontent.
[1] In an earlier example of this kind of power, Skin Deep, the Consumer Research book on the beauty business, almost had its publication stopped when the editor of a women’s magazine, The Woman’s Home Companion, an old friend of the book’s publisher, persuaded him that to destroy the cosmetics industry, as the book threatened to do, would remove too much valuable advertising from newspapers and magazines. Although the book was by then already at proof stage, its contract was canceled. Fortunately, the authors were able to find another publisher, and the book went on to be one of 1935’s top best-sellers.
