Two weeks ago we had a bit of a beauty hiccup. An issue of the magazine that I work on full-time introduced a Positive Beauty Manifesto in a bid to move the debate away from the superficial and into the self-esteem-boosting.
To my knowledge, no one took offense to that notion... until:
A week later, this, from Viv Groskop, in The Guardian:
Here, then, is my response - from the blogger me, the 'real' woman me, and the woman behind the beauty pages at PSYCHOLOGIES.
I'd love to know your thoughts...
You may have ‘it’ when you’re young, but do not expect to hang onto it as you get older. If you’re not seen to embody ‘it’, but feel pretty darn good about yourself anyway, you’re a fool, or insane. ‘It’ is a specific thing, black and white, governed by symmetry and percentages.
Can ‘it’ – beauty – be boiled down to this?
No.
When I worked with the PSYCHOLOGIES team in the UK, and internationally, on drafting a 10-point Positive Beauty manifesto that spelt out the values we wanted to celebrate, we realised we had to talk about beauty on an emotional, rather than physical, level. For us – and we all agreed on this – feeling beautiful is more important than looking beautiful. This is not some touchy-feely notion – it’s a psychological fact: when we feel good, we actually look better too. Any psychologist will tell you that – take that flush of first love, which actually makes us glow. And it’s not just love – when things are going well in our lives, it shows in our faces, simple. I may look back at the photograph from a first romance, a brilliant summer holiday, an amazing night out with friends – and think I look lovely, but I may also look back at it and think I look less beautiful than I felt that night. That’s just fine though. I’d happily go the rest of my life never looking beautiful – if I felt wonderful while doing so.
Knowing this, we at PSYCHOLOGIES do not write about beauty in a solely skin-deep way. You either have it or you don’t – or you’re just born with it – is, in my mind, patently untrue. Some of the strangest looking babies grow up to be supermodels; while some of the world’s most beautiful women end up with faces that reflect each and every blow of their miserable lives. According to Burchill, we may have ‘it’ in our teens or twenties, for a fleeting moment, but then we lose it. I disagree. As we age, many of us become more attractive… and feel it – within our own skin, a good fit for the first time. And this is not some trite cliché – I cannot think of a single friend who counts their teenage years as a golden age. It takes a while for all those bodily fluids to settle, and for self-confidence to take root. Working in the beauty industry I have spent more time than most on photo-shoots, stood beside ‘perfect looking’ 20-something girls who did nothing but malign their bodies and pick fault with their faces (thankfully, the models I work with at PSYCHOLOGIES are more mature in both age and attitude). I am in no way conventionally beautiful, yet I quite often feel attractive … you can have beauty and youth and feel ugly; or be old as the hills, but feel beautiful.
Beauty is not just an aesthetic ideal. An aesthetic ideal cannot explain the allure of the wonky-nosed girl who lights up the room – something that Emma Forrest wrote about in the same June issue as our Positive Beauty Manifesto [http://www.psychologies.co.uk/beauty/join-our-campaign-for-positive-beauty/]. We do not hold with the notion that beauty is some alien place – inhabited only by genetically blessed models and actresses; no, the beauty we are interested in is far less obvious than that. It’s behind the specs of that girl reading the book on the tube; in the smile of a friend; in the face of the grandmother with the bright lips and dirty laugh.
At PSYCHOLOGIES I try to write about beauty in a refreshing way – but still come from a relatively cynical starting point. The hackneyed ‘this lipstick will change your life’ attitude does not belong with us. We know a lipstick will not change your life – but it can be fun, it may cheer you up, make you smile – and there’s enormous merit in that too.
Beauty need not be declarative either. Feeling it is statement enough. Unlike many other women’s magazines, our take on beauty has never been simplistic – we write for women of all ages and races, so it’s a mindset we present, not a paint-by-numbers set of instructions. And, we have never preached an obvious, sexualised, dieted-down message either, or a ‘buy it now’ ‘must-have’ ‘can’t live without’ mantra that promises women a prettier face should they fork out the cash to pay for it – something that cannot be said of most women’s magazines. As our manifesto made clear: ‘Beauty and femininity are complex, and should not follow a simplistic set of rules or universal conventions.’ We say, this is your face, this is your body, and if you take care of it you’ll feel better… and, yes, more beautiful too.
0 comments:
Post a Comment