The Beauty Myth

by Naomi Wolf

  To understand the primal force of this religion, we need to see that men die once and woman die twice. Women die as beauties before their bodies die.

  Women today in the full bloom of beauty keep a space always in mind for its diminution and loss. Medieval death awareness that “all flesh is grass,” the memento mori, kept men economically aligned to the Church, which could give them “new life” beyond their natural life-span. For women to be urged to think continually of beauty’s fragility and transcience is a way to try to keep us subservient, by maintaining in us a fatalism that has not been part of Western men’s thinking since the Renaissance. Taught that God or nature does or does not bestow “beauty” on them—randomly, beyond appeal—we live in a world in which magic, prayer, and superstition make sense.

  Light

  Eve’s sin meant that women are responsible for losing grace. “Grace” was redefined during the Renaissance as a secular term, and used to describe the faces and bodies of “beautiful” women.

  Skin cream—the “holy oil” of the new religion—promises “radiance” in its advertising. Many religions use a light metaphor for divinity: Moses’ face when he descended from Mount Sinai blazed like the sun, and medieval iconography surrounded saints with halos. The holy oil industry offers to sell back to women in tubes and bottles the light of grace, to redeem women’s bodies now that the cults of virginity and of motherhood can no longer offer to surround with consecrated light the female body whose sexuality has been yielded to others.

  Light is in fact the issue, central to an innate way of seeing beauty that is shared by many, if not most, women and men. This way of seeing is what the beauty myth works hard to suppress. In describing this quality of light or having it described, one becomes uneasy, quick to dismiss it as sentimentality or mysticism. The source of the denial, I think, is not that we do not see this phenomenon, but rather that we see it so very clearly; and that publicly to name it threatens some basic premises of our social organization. It is proof as nothing else is that people are not things: People “light up” and objects don’t. To agree that it is real would challenge a social system that works by designating some people as more thinglike than others, and all women as more thinglike than all men.

  This light doesn’t photograph well, can’t be measured on a scale of one to ten, won’t be quantified in a lab report. But most people are aware that a radiance can emerge from faces and bodies, making them truly beautiful.

  Some see that radiance as inseparable from love and intimacy, not picked up by a separate visual sense but as part of the movement or warmth of a familiar. Others might see it in a body’s sexuality; still others, in vulnerability, or wit. It strikes one often from the face of someone telling a story or listening intently to someone else. Many have remarked on how the act of creation seems to illuminate people, and have noticed how it envelops most children—those who have not been told yet that they are not beautiful. We very often remember our mothers as beautiful simply because it lit them up in our eyes. If any general descriptions can be drawn, a sense of wholeness seems involved, and maybe trust. To see this light, it seems, one has to look for it. The poet May Sarton calls it “the pure light that shines from the lover.” Probably everyone has a different name for it and perceives it differently; but most know that it exists for them. The point is that you have seen it—your version—and have probably been dazzled or excited or attracted; and that, according to the myth, it does not count.

  Society severely limits descriptions of this light, so as to keep it from taking on the force of a social reality. Women are said to emit it, for instance, only in the act of giving their bodies to men or to children: the “radiant bride” and the “radiant mother-to-be.” Straight men are almost never told that they are luminous, radiant, or dazzling. The Rites of Beauty offer to sell women back an imitation of the light that is ours already, the central grace we are forbidden to say that we see.

  To do so, they ask women to negotiate a three-dimensional world by two-dimensional rules. Women “know” that fashion photographs are professionally lit to imitate this radiant quality. But since we as women are trained to see ourselves as cheap imitations of fashion photographs, rather than seeing fashion photographs as cheap imitations of women, we are urged to study ways to light up our features as if they were photographs marred by motion, acting as our own lighting designer and stylist and photographer, our faces handled like museum pieces, expertly lit with highlights, lowlights, Light Effects, Frost n’ Glow, Light Powder, Iridescence, and Iridience.

  Synthetic light comes with rules. Older women must not use frost effects. What light will the woman be seen in—office, daylight, candlelight? Women’s mirrors have lights built in; if we’re caught in an unexpected setting, we will be exposed, like a photograph that, in the wrong light, turns to nothing. That stress on special effects serves to addict women psychologically to civilized indoor lighting, traditional female space; to keep us fearful of spontaneity and digression. Beauty’s self-consciousness is intended to hover at skin level in order to keep women from moving far inside to an erotic center or far afield into the big space of the public realm. It is intended to make sure we do not catch a glimpse of ourselves in a brand-new light altogether.

  Other practices drive women indoors as well. Once she uses Retin-A, a woman must abandon the sun forever. Cosmetic surgery demands that women hide indoors away from the sun for times ranging from six weeks to six months. The discovery of “photoaging” has created a phobia of the sun entirely unrelated to the risk of skin cancer. While it is true that the ozone layer is thinning, this sun-phobia mentality is severing the bond between women and the natural world, turning nature into the fearsome enemy of the male tradition’s point of view. If the female tradition were not under siege, the damaged ozone layer should be sending women out onto the environmental barricades to protect it. The beauty myth stimulates women’s fears of looking older in order to drive us in the opposite direction: indoors once more, locus of the separate sphere and the Feminine Mystique; the proper place for women in every culture that most oppresses us.

  Indoors or out, women must make their beauty glitter because they are so hard for men to see. They glitter as a bid for attention that is otherwise grudgingly given. Catching light draws the eye in a basic unsubtle reflex: Babies’ undeveloped eyes follow glittering objects. It is the one way in which women are allowed to shout in order to command attention. Men who glitter, on the other hand, are either low-status or not real men: gold teeth, flashy jewelry; ice skaters, Liberace. Real men are matte. Their surfaces must not distract attention from what it is they are saying. But women of every status glint. Dale Spender, in Man Made Language, shows that when in conversation, men cut off women in most of the interruptions by far and that men give women’s words only intermittent attention. So pyrotechnics of light and color must accompany women’s speech in order to beguile an attention span that wanders when women open their mouths. What women look like is considered important because what we say is not.

  The Cult of the Fear of Age

  To sell two unreal ritual product lines—ersatz light and transient thinness—the Rites of Beauty are skillfully adapting standard cult techniques to inculcate women into them. The following scene plays on television in the United States: A charismatic leader dressed in white addresses an audience, her face aglow. Women listen transfixed: Three steps are to be undertaken in total solitude. “Give this time to yourself . . . Concentrate. Really feel it,” she says. “Follow the steps religiously.” Women testify: “I wasn’t a believer at first either. But look at me now.” “I didn’t want to commit to it. I’d tried everything, and I just didn’t believe anything could do it for me—I’ve never known anything like it. It’s changed my life.” The camera focuses on their faces. Finally, all are wearing white and clustered around the leader, eyes shining. Cameras pan backward to the sound of a hymn. The source of the shared secret is Collagen Extract Skin Nourishment, $39.95 for a month’
s supply.

  These video conversions only supplement the main cult action in department stores, where 50 percent of holy oil sales are made at “points of purchase.” The scheme is pure religion carefully organized.

  A woman enters a department store from the street, looking no doubt very mortal, her hair windblown, her own face visible. To reach the cosmetics counter, she must pass a deliberately disorienting prism of mirrors, lights, and scents that combine to submit her to the “sensory overload” used by hypnotists and cults to encourage suggestibility.

  On either side of her are ranks of angels—seraphim and cherubim—the “perfect” faces of the models on display. Behind them, across a liminal counter in which is arranged the magic that will permit her to cross over, lit from below, stands the guardian angel. The saleswoman is human, she knows, but “perfected” like the angels around her, from whose ranks the woman sees her own “flawed” face, reflected back and shut out. Disoriented within the man-made heaven of the store, she can’t focus on what makes both the live and pictured angels seem similarly “perfect”: that they are both lacquered in heavy paint. The lacquer bears little relation to the outer world, as the out-of-place look of a fashion shoot on a city street makes clear. But the mortal world disintegrates in her memory at the shame of feeling so out of place among all the ethereal objects. Put in the wrong, the shopper longs to cross over.

  Cosmetics saleswomen are trained with techniques akin to those used by professional cult converters and hypnotists. A former Children of God member says in Willa Appel’s Cults in America: Programmed for Paradise that she sought out people in shopping malls “who looked lost and vulnerable.” The woman making her way down an aisle of divinities is made to look “lost and vulnerable” in her own eyes. If she sits down and agrees to a “make-over,” she’s a subject for a cultic hard sell.

  The saleswoman will move up close into the face of the shopper, ostensibly to apply the substances, but in fact generally much closer than she needs to be to do so. She keeps up a patter that focuses in on a blemish, wrinkles, the bags under the woman’s eyes. Cult converters are trained to stand very close to their potential subjects and “stare fixedly in their eyes. . . . You’d look for the weak spots in people.” The woman then hears herself convicted of the sins and errors that are putting her in jeopardy: “You use what on your face?” “Only twenty-three, and look at those lines.” “Well, if you’re happy with those pimples.” “You’re destroying the delicate skin under your eyes.” “If you don’t stop doing what you’re doing to it, in ten years your whole face will be a mass of creases.” Another cult member interviewed by Appel describes this procedure: “It was the whole thing of exuding confidence, of maintaining direct communication so forceful that you’re always in complete control. . . . You have to play up the feeling that all these people have of no sense of real security, no sense of what was going to happen in the future, and the fear of just continuing to repeat old mistakes.”

  The shopper probably gives in, and accepts the cosmetic range as her personal savior. Once back in the street, though, the expensive tubes and bottles immediately lose their aura. Those who have escaped from cults feel afterward that they have emerged from something they can only dimly remember.

  Advertisements in print must now approach the potential cult member with more sophistication. For two decades they have used a mysterious language the way Catholicism uses Latin, Judaism Hebrew, and Masons secret passwords: as a prestigious Logos that confers magic power on the originators of it. To the lay person, it is a gibberish of science and mock-science. For example: “Phytolyastil,” “Phytophyline,” “PlurisomeTM”; “SEI Complex” and “biologically active tissue peptides LMP” (La Prairie); “hygrascopic elements and natural ceramides” (Chanel); “a syntropic blend of the unique Bio-DermiaTM”; “Complex #3” “Reticulin and mucopolysaccharides” (Aloegen); “Tropocollagen and hyaluronic acid” (Charles of the Ritz); “IncellateTM” (Terme di Saturnia); “Glycosphingolipids” (GSL, Glycel); “Niosomes and Microsomes and Protectinol” (Shiseido).

  “Western societies from the early centuries of the second millennium,” writes Rosalind Miles, “all found their own techniques for ensuring that the ‘new learning’ did not penetrate the great under-class of the female sex.” A long history of intellectual exclusion precedes our current intimidation by this battery of mock-authoritative language.

  The ads refined this daunting nonsense language to cover the fact that skin creams do not actually do anything. The holy oil industry is a megalith that for forty years has been selling women nothing at all. According to Gerald McKnight’s exposé, the industry is “little more than a massive con . . . a sweetly disguised form of commercial robbery” with profit margins of over 50 percent on a revenue of 20 billion dollars worldwide; in 1988 skin care grossed 3 billion in the United States alone, 337 million pounds in the United Kingdom, 8.9 trillion lire in Italy, and 69.2 million guilders in the Netherlands, up from 18.3 million in 1978.

  For forty years the industry has been making impossible claims. Before 1987, the Food and Drug Administration just twice made minor objections. In the past two decades, holy oil makers went beyond the outrageous, claiming to retard aging (Revlon Anti-Aging Firmagel), repair the skin (Night Repair), and restructure the cell (Cellular Recovery Complex, G. M. Collin Intensive Cellular Regeneration, Elancyl Restructurant). As women encountered the computerized work force of the 1980s, the ads abandoned the filmy florals of “hope in a bottle” and adopted new imagery of ersatz technology, graphs and statistics, to resonate with the authority of the microchip. Imaginary technological “breakthroughs” reinforced women’s sense that the beauty index was inflating out of control, its claims reported too fast for the human brain to organize or verify.

  Information overload joined new technologies in airbrushing and photo doctoring to give women the sense that scrutiny itself had become superhuman. The eye of the camera, like God’s, developed a microscopic judgment that outdid the imperfect human eye, magnifying “flaws” a mortal could not detect: In the early 1980s, says Morris Herstein of Laboratoires Serobiologiques, who characterizes himself as a “pseudo-scientist,” “we were then able to see and measure things that had been impossible before. It came about when the technology of the space program was made available, when we were allowed to use their sophisticated analysis techniques, the biotechnological advances which allowed us to see things at the cellular level. Before that we had to touch and feel.” What Herstein is saying is that by measuring tissue invisible to the naked eye, beyond “touch and feel,” the struggle for beauty was transposed into a focus so minute that the struggle itself became metaphysical. Women were asked to believe that erasing lines so faint as to be nonexistent to the human gaze was now a reasonable moral imperative.

  The tenuous link between what the holy oils claimed to do and what they did was finally broken, and no longer meant anything. “The numbers are meaningless until all the tests and rankings are standardized,” a women’s magazine quotes industry spokesman Dr. Grove, adding that “consumers should always remember that what the machine measures may not be visible to the naked eye.”

  If the “enemy” is invisible, the “barrier” is invisible, the “eroding effects” are invisible, and the holy oil’s results “may not be visible to the naked eye,” we are in a dimension of pure faith, where “graphic evidence” is provided of the “visible improvement” in the number of angels that after treatment will dance on the head of a pin. The whole dramatic fiction of the holy oil’s fight against age began, by the mid-1980s, to unfold on an entirely make-believe stage, inventing psychic flaws to sell psychic cures. From that point on, the features of their faces and bodies that would make women unhappy would increasingly be those that no one else could see. More alone than ever, women were placed beyond the consolation of reason. Perfection had now to hold up beyond the artist’s frame, and survive the microscope.

  Even many industry insiders acknowledge that the crea
ms do not work. According to Buddy Wedderburn, a biochemist at Unilever: “The effect of rubbing collagen onto the skin is negligible. . . . I don’t know of anything that gets into these areas—certainly nothing that will stop wrinkles.” Anita Roddick of The Body Shop, the beauty care chain, says, “There is no application, no topical application, that will get rid of grief or stress or heavy lines. . . . There’s nothing, but nothing, that’s going to make you look younger. Nothing.” Anthea Disney, editor of the women’s magazine Self, adds, “We all know there isn’t anything that will make you look younger.” And as “Sam” Sugiyama, codirector of Shiseido, concludes, “If you want to avoid aging, you must live in space. There is no other way to avoid getting wrinkles, once you are out of the womb.”