Remember back in Chapter One, when I wrote that attractive people are advantaged in the workplace? Well, this is generally true, but I may have oversimplified things a bit. In truth, the relationship between beauty and success in the workplace is fraught with complexity; in most workplaces and jobs, attractiveness is rewarded in hiring, respect, and promotions, but this isn’t always the case. Sometimes it’s actually more advantageous to be plain.
For example, studies reveal that unattractive women may be disadvantaged while working low-level positions, such as being a secretary, but in upper-level positions, and in fields that are historically male-dominated, good-looking women may be viewed as too feminine, less intelligent, and less competent (not only by men, but also by their female peers). In a study of attorneys, it was found that the very best-looking female attorneys were less likely to achieve partnership before their fifth year after graduation from law school compared with average-looking women attorneys. Many scholars believe that a “bimbo effect” exists, causing extremely good-looking women to be penalized in labor markets and be taken less seriously. I’d certainly observed hints of this in academia, with the opposite being true in the fashion industry.
In another interesting study, similarly complex patterns appeared regarding criminal sentences for crimes: Attractive female offenders, whose offense was not deemed to be appearance-related (i.e., burglary), received greater leniency than unattractive offenders. However, when the offense was perceived to be attractiveness related (i.e., swindling or con jobs), attractive offenders received harsher punishments than their unattractive counterparts! In other words, this body research suggests that if a woman’s job is one in which she is seen as being able to unfairly “get ahead” by being beautiful, she’ll be judged more harshly, as though she’d used her beauty to con her way into advantage. However, for jobs in which attractiveness seems unrelated to success, being beautiful might be a bonus, thanks to that darned halo effect.
Styling and makeup present another area of complexity. For example, the amount of makeup a woman wears impacts the extent to which she will be seen as likable, competent, trustworthy, and attractive. Researchers showed study participants photos of women that had been digitally altered such that the same woman would appear in different photos wearing four different levels of makeup, described as none, natural, professional, and glamorous. In the first study, subjects were first shown the images for 250 milliseconds. In a second study, a different set of research subjects looked at the same photos for unlimited amounts of time. The women in the photos were rated in terms of competence, likability, attractiveness, and trustworthiness. The researchers found that, when the faces were shown very quickly, all ratings went up with increasing use of cosmetics, regardless of the look. However, when research subjects were given unlimited time to view the photos, the results changed. As explained by one of the study’s authors, “When they got to the more dramatic makeup looks, people saw them as equally likable and much more attractive and competent, but less trustworthy.” Supporting this idea that too much makeup is detrimental for women, another study found a correlation between increased time spent on personal grooming and lower income.
Researchers have found a “Goldilocks effect” (yes, this is a real term) when it comes to breast size and how women are perceived in the workplace; breasts should be not too small, not too big, but juuuust right. In one study, participants watched one of four videos in which a female actor delivered a speech on a neutral subject. The only difference between the four videos was the size of the woman’s breasts, which ranged from A to D cups (the researchers had the naturally small-busted actor stuff her bra with increasingly voluminous amounts of cotton padding). After watching one of the videos, participants were asked to assess the woman on a number of characteristics. Women were generally not influenced by breast size, but men perceived the woman more favorably on both professional and personal characteristics when her breasts were medium-size, i.e., neither too small (A-cup) nor too big (D-cup).
Knowing what this body of research predicted about beauty and the workplace was torturous for me. Wear makeup, but not too much. Medium breasts are ideal, so pad your itty-bitty-titties or mind your melons. Try to be as attractive as possible if you’re in a low-status position, but downplay your attractiveness if you want to be taken seriously as a leader. Trying to navigate all of the potential variables was overwhelming, especially since I had three professional roles: graduate student, college instructor, and volunteer/activist at About-Face. Sometimes knowledge is power, but other times it’s paralyzing.
In light of this, abandoning makeup once a week might provide a refreshing break from my overanalytical calculations . . . but would it come at a cost?
• • •
FOR MY FIRST MAKEUP FREE MONDAY, I WAS SCHEDULED TO teach two lectures. Raising the stakes even higher, I’d invited Lisa Wade, a well-respected sociologist and cofounder of the Sociological Images blog, to give a talk in my Sociology of Deviant Behavior class. Lisa was a role model of mine, and even though I suspected that she didn’t give a fig about makeup, I wanted to feel like I was putting my best self forward when I spent time with her. I’d never imagined that I could be at my best without at least a swipe of mascara, some concealer, and pinched cheeks for a healthy flush. But instead of my normal mirror-less makeup routine, I left my condo that morning wearing only sunscreen and lip balm.
Of course, I had to decide what, exactly, counted as makeup. For example, was it fair to decide that my SPF15 makeup primer oughtn’t count as makeup since it wasn’t tinted? A sales rep at Sephora had promised me that this primer would help both “brighten” and “even out” my skin tone. Would it count if it enhanced my skin tone, even if it wasn’t technically makeup? What about curling my eyelashes? Using an eyelash curler was obviously not makeup, but it wasn’t exactly natural, either. What if I ate berries with breakfast and they “accidentally” stained my lips and cheeks in stunning shades of makeup-free raspberry-rouge and blackberry-blush?
I stared at the sheet hanging over my bathroom mirror and contemplated not washing my face, in hopes that the prior day’s waterproof mascara was still clinging to my eyelashes. What would be less awful, greasy skin with dark lashes or clean skin with invisibly blond lashes? With a sigh, I went ahead and washed my face. I applied the sunscreen/primer, curled my eyelashes, looked longingly at my makeup kit, and then added some SPF30 lip balm to my lips. My face felt great, but not being able to see myself in the mirror made the whole process really anticlimactic (yet nerve-racking). I felt like a freak for missing the scents of my foundation and lip gloss.
What did I do with the five minutes I’d shaved off my morning routine? I must have been desperately craving contact with some non-makeup cultural symbols of femininity. I sniff-tested all of the perfume samples I’d collected over the past few years and decided to spray myself abundantly with something called Touch, by Tocca. It had smelled great in the sample sprayer, but not so much on me. According to the marketing materials, the core scent notes of the perfume should have been gardenia and balsam. Sadly, even though the sample sprayer smelled like gardenia (heady romantic floral), I just smelled like balsam (a resinous pine tree). I spent the next few minutes unsuccessfully attempting to wash the scent off my wrists and neck. Overall time saved: negative three minutes. Oops.
After all of this I felt really nervous to leave the house. I felt more nervous, in fact, than I’d felt at the beginning of my project when I hadn’t been sure if I’d applied lipstick to my eyes and mascara to my nose. All I knew was this: I was barefaced and I smelled like a pine tree. Was I about to commit career suicide (i.e., the worst-case scenario)? Or was I about to experience a major body-image breakthrough?
What actually happened fell a bit short of a major body-image breakthrough, but certainly wasn’t anywhere near career suicide. Simply, nobody noticed. Or, if anyone did notice, nobody said anything or acted very differently; not m
y students, not my office-mates, and not even Lisa Wade, with whom I had a lovely chat over coffee after her guest lecture. I guess this doesn’t surprise me on a logical level, but on an emotional level I’m still suspicious that people were just being nice. Then again, maybe being nice is all that should count?
The next day I wrote up the whole story in a blog post, and promptly received the following comment from Lisa Wade:
I didn’t even notice that you weren’t wearing makeup! :)
An exclamation point and a smiley from Lisa Wade? Score! It felt awesome to know that a role model of mine was engaging with my project. Still, I knew that my questions about makeup—whether I needed it—couldn’t be answered through just one Makeup Free Monday. I’d need to take this show on the road. Going without makeup while teaching in my own lecture hall was one thing, but my professional life extended across a variety of venues, including giving conference presentations at the upcoming annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, as well as my work in the About-Face offices. Also, I didn’t know this yet, but my professional and personal lives were about to clash colorfully into each other, publicly and dramatically.
• • •
I’D PLANNED TO SPEND THE REST OF MY WEEK TEACHING MY classes and prepping for my upcoming trip to Las Vegas for the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, the biggest and most important conference for sociologists to attend each year. I was looking forward to meeting other graduate students and sociologists from across the country who shared my research interests. This year’s ASA would also be a valuable opportunity for me to share and get feedback on my own. I was slated to give two presentations; the first would be about a research project I’d done on beauty standards and gender norms in sororities, and the second presentation would be based on a research project I’d done with my mentor, Abby, and my friend/colleague, Dave Frederick, that explored whether reading news reports on obesity causes people to express more fat prejudice. I would be presenting my own research, but Abby would be giving the other talk, which took some of the pressure off. Regardless, I had two PowerPoint presentations to create.
And so, on Tuesday morning, the day after my first Makeup Free Monday, I settled into my office at UCLA to get some work done. I’d made about an hour’s worth of progress when a text message pinged on my phone.
“There’s an article about you in the Bay Citizen!” wrote Jennifer Berger, the executive director of About-Face and a good friend of mine. This was exciting news, but not a huge surprise. A few weeks back, after my blog had been picked up by Sociological Images and Jezebel, one of the About-Face interns had drafted a press release explaining my project and my work with About-Face and had sent it out to a few local news groups. We were all hoping that any news coverage of my story might help bring some much-needed attention to the work that About-Face was doing. A writer from the Bay Citizen, a nonprofit news site in San Francisco, had been the only reporter we’d heard back from. I’d spoken with her on the phone for a few minutes, and we’d all crossed our fingers that she’d get the story approved. I clicked on the link Jennifer had provided in her text, pleased to find that the article (“Local Blogger Swears Off Mirrors for a Year”) had been overwhelmingly positive about my project and had also included a great description of About-Face along with a link to the website.
“Yay!” I texted back to Jennifer. “Glad the press release caught some attention!”
I turned back to my work, but was quickly distracted by an unexpected flurry of e-mails to my inbox. Apparently, the Bay Citizen article had caught the attention of a slew of other news media. Within hours, I’d been contacted by several radio stations requesting on-air interviews and by reporters from the Huffington Post, Canada’s Globe and Mail, and San Francisco’s ABC news station. Was I going viral?
The next few days passed by in a blur of radio interviews and local media requests, broken up by my desperate and distracted attempts to prepare for my talk at ASA. On Wednesday, Jezebel ran an article titled “Can A No-Mirrors Campaign Change How We Think About Beauty?” and by Thursday I’d been interviewed on a handful of small radio stations. I was excited and flattered by all the attention, but felt overwhelmed by the near-constant bombardment.
Nothing shocked me more than hearing from a writer at The New York Times who wanted to pitch my story for their wedding section, Vows. With excitement verging on delirium, I called Michael immediately.
“The New York Times might want to cover our wedding!!” I shrieked with delight.
“Huh!?” he asked warily. “What, exactly, would that entail?” Michael had, up until this point, been excited and amused by my ten minutes of fame.
“Well, before we could even be considered we’d have to fill out this really long questionnaire,” I explained. “Then, if we got picked, they’d send a reporter and a photographer to be at our wedding, and we’d end up in the paper and on the website. How cool is that?! Your mom is going to flip!”
I heard only silence from Michael’s side of the conversation.
“Hello? Are you still there?” I inquired.
“I’m still here,” he responded with a sigh. I heard him take another deep breath before continuing. “I’m just not sure how I feel about this. I don’t want to rain on your parade or anything, but the idea of having a reporter at our wedding makes me feel really anxious. It’s going to be stressful enough for me to recite vows in front of all our family and friends.”
“Oh,” I responded, gulping. I’d forgotten about Michael’s dislike for public speaking. “Can’t you just take a couple of beta-blockers or something?” I suggested obnoxiously. I figured we’d both be walking down the aisle under the influence of at least a few glasses of champagne anyway, so why not add an antianxiety medication to seal the deal before we sealed the deal? Then we’d both be happy, right?
“I really can’t think about this right now. I’m about to go into a meeting. Can we talk about it later?” he asked.
“Okay,” I agreed, realizing I may have been a bit overbearing. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to stress you out.”
“It’s okay. I want to be supportive. Just promise me you won’t agree to anything like that without talking to me first, okay?” he pleaded.
“Of course not,” I promised. He’ll come around, I told myself. Who could refuse The New York Times?
After hanging up the phone, I immediately went back to the NYT Vows website and started filling out the lengthy questionnaire. It started simply enough, asking for details about the wedding date and the ceremony venue, but quickly evolved into something reminiscent of a detailed curriculum vitae—for every member of my family as well as Michael’s. Around the time I finished entering my father’s occupational details, my enthusiasm crumbled. This felt like bullshit.
I’d been floating around in the clouds of bridal fluff, imagining myself to finally be the kind of person who ended up in the New York Times wedding section. Instead, I felt like a shelter mutt trying to fake a pedigree, all for the privilege of competing in some hoity-toity dog show. It felt fake, even though the prospect of having my wedding on those infamous pages tugged a bit at my heartstrings. But who, exactly, was I trying to impress? And why was I furiously filling out this questionnaire-cum-pedigree-chart when I had two important professional presentations to prepare for?! I’d jumped onto the bridal ballyhoo bandwagon once again and needed to get off at the next stop. I forced myself to turn back to my PowerPoint presentations, muttering, “Sanity comes first, sanity comes first, sanity comes first . . .” under my breath.
• • •
THE NEXT MORNING I FLEW TO LAS VEGAS TO ATTEND MY CONFERENCE. I’d managed to finish giving a handful of radio interviews and was proud, but hopeful that the media attention might be settling down. I wanted to spend my time at the conference focusing on my research, not my no-mirrors project. Very few of my colleagues even knew that I was shunning m
irrors, much less blogging about it, and I hadn’t forgotten my advisor’s warning that anything that resembled autoethnography wouldn’t be taken very seriously by “the academy.” For the next four days I wanted to keep my professional and personal lives as separated as possible. As my plane landed in Las Vegas, I promised myself that I would ignore any media requests that trickled in over the next few days and wait to deal with them until I got back home.
What I didn’t know was this: In between the time my plane had taken off and the time it landed, Yahoo! had published an article about my no-mirrors project on its home page.
I suddenly found myself bombarded by a whole new level of media interest. Even though my first taste of press attention had been fun and flurrisome, I soon developed a new appreciation for that old saying about having too much of a good thing. My smartphone pinged and pinged and pinged with new e-mails, texts, and calls.
Gone were the polite requests from local radio shows and nonprofit and feminist news outlets. I’d no sooner unpacked my boring conference suits and hugged my friend Liz (my roommate for the conference) than I began to receive an onslaught of e-mails and phone calls from the big guns; producers from Rachael Ray, Anderson Cooper’s new talk show, Anderson Live, The Doctors, On Air with Ryan Seacrest, NBC’s Today, and ABC’s 20/20 were all interested in having me on their programs.
I was flattered (okay, thrilled), but the timing was horrible. Of all the weeks in the entire year, that week was the one in which I most needed to focus on my research and connecting with other sociologists in the academic community. I thought I might be able to just put off getting back to the requests (this usually worked in my personal life!), but ignoring the e-mails and calls wasn’t working; if I didn’t answer quickly, they’d just try again, sometimes using a different e-mail address or phone number. I was in way over my head and starting to freak out.
Mirror, Mirror Off the Wall Page 17