On Beauty, and Beauticontrol

by LEAH FRANQUI

April 2009

A woman in a swimsuit stands on a diving board. Sleek and muscled, she secures her swimming cap and prepares herself to jump. Taut, strong, ready, she awaits an internal gunshot, some cue to start. Bang! She dives. She moves, slick, sleek, through the water, crisp, cutting through the waves of the pool, flying, past the speed of sound. She’s magnificent, she’s powerful, she’s sixty if she’s a day and she’s moving better than I can at 21.

“She needs Beauticontrol!” my aunt screams behind me. “Her body is okay but her face is a mess!” I stare at my aunt in disbelief. This woman has the body of an 18-year-old cheerleader. She’s fantastic, fit, active, and healthy. And all my aunt can think about is her skin care regime.

To be fair to my aunt, however, that is her field of expertise. My aunt sells make-up and skin products for a living—that is, in fact, what Beauticontrol is: a brand of makeup and skin products made of natural materials and heavily marketed to Latin American markets. She’s actually really good at it, my aunt, she’s earned a huge amount of money for her family, and she’s one of the most successful saleswomen of this product in her area. On many levels this has been a deeply empowering career for her. She’s gained a huge amount of confidence, she controls her hours and her earnings, she’s lost weight, and she’s happier than I’ve ever seen her.

Whenever I visit her, my aunt showers me with body scrubs and eyebrow pencils, while my mother is given anti-aging creams and wrinkle fighting concealers. Well-meant as these presents are, they always strike a dissonant note in me as I stare at them, sitting innocuously in my medicine cabinet. My aunt thinks she is giving me a kind and considerate gift, the sort any young woman would adore. She thinks she has given my mother a valuable and joy-inducing product that will help her fight age, the common enemy of women over forty. I know she means well. But I can’t help but be troubled by these presents and their implications. When my aunt looks at these things, the lip-gloss and the eye shadow and the firming serum and the foot lotion, she sees all the things that will help me be my very best self. When I look at them, I wonder if she’s telling me I need the help.

One of the things that has always struck me as positive about Yale is the lack of vanity among its students. It’s not uncommon to see a classroom or lecture hall full of students in sweatpants and pajama bottoms. In fact, it would be more uncommon to see a room full of girls in skirts and heels. And I always thought that that was a good thing, a sign of an environment that valued intellect over appearance, that placed more importance on the interior then on the exterior. Isn’t that a part of feminism? Disregarding the vanities associated with femininity, discarding the frivolous and menial pursuit of some exterior aesthetic being, and placing them aside in favor of true intellectual exploration? That sounds right, doesn’t it? If the pursuit of beauty has been one of the traditional millstones hanging around the necks of all women, then surely to pursue beauty in that way now, in the face of female emancipation and the feminist movement and Hilary Clinton and all those Dove ads…

The beauty industry feeds us pages of ads and hours of commercials showcasing products that will improve our faces, highlight our eyes, plump our lips, hide our wrinkles, destroy our pimples, and having done so, improve our quality of life. (All that in a mascara? Sign me up!) But we at Yale, surveying the land from atop our feminist high horses, should laugh at these wonder drugs and the women who pursue them as we trudge around the campus in our aged sweatpants and sneakers. That’s the feminist thing to do, right?

Well the thing is, my aunt makes more money shilling face cream than her husband does consulting for a bank. She put a down payment on a new house with the money she made in a year of selling margarita-scented glitter spray and brown sugar perfume to her friends and relatives. She may yell at commercials, movies, and even women on the street and try to get them to buy her potions and gels, but she also has her own business and in a matter of years has become the primary earner of her family and an example of a successful Latina business woman in her community. And the other thing is, when I use her little shimmery gifts, I don’t feel less intelligent or capable; I feel put-together, strong, attractive and energetic. Her highlighter does the work of a cappuccino without the calories. I participate more in my classes, I feel better about myself, and I’m more motivated to do my work efficiently. I don’t feel anti-feminist, or like I’m playing into a heteronormative construct. I feel good.

And the other thing is that as I looked around Yale’s campus I began to realize that while the women around me may be wearing sweatpants, those sweatpants were designer-brand, and paired with cashmere sweaters and lip-gloss. Even when they are most casual, Yale women are as obsessed with appearances as those at say, Florida State. Certainly very few women I meet here are comfortably identifying themselves as a feminist or would categorize their clothing and make-up choices as feminist or anti-feminist.

It is the unconsciousness of this that most bothers me. Susan Lori-Parks posits that race is always a performance. I would add that gender might well be a performance as well. If this is the case, then cosmetics are included in the costume. Cosmetics make up part of the mask with which we play the part of “female” or “woman” or “girl”. And it’s important to be conscious of those roles as you play them, to understand what image of women you are participating in as you get ready in the morning. This to me marks the line between what we do because it makes us feel good and what we do because we feel like we ought to.

A friend of mine says that men feel more comfortable with women who dress according to their prescribed gender role– that is, women who wear skirts and dresses and articles of clothing traditionally associated with femininity. However, it has been my experience that whenever I don an outfit that doesn’t include an elasticized waistband, I make most of my male peers uncomfortable. They twitch in their seats, they squirm, they dart their eyes from my face to my décolletage and back again, and they have trouble speaking in complete sentences. They don’t seem to be able to deal with someone who can look good and think at the same time. I’m not saying it’s for everyone, but if Beauticontrol can give my aunt a career, give me confidence, and give the arrogant men of Yale College a challenge to their concepts of female intelligence being disproportionate to female attractiveness… well, sign me up.

But I still think the swimmer in her sixties doesn’t need a goddamn thing.

Leah Franqui is a senior in Yale College.