Ready for our Zoom close-up with or without makeup
I’ve just finished watching a Kylie Jenner simple isolation-appropriate makeup tutorial in which the reality TV star and cosmetics mogul seems to have reduced a 37-step beauty and makeup ritual to fewer than eight — which is still, except for professional pictures, more than I’ve ever done in my life.
While I took heed of the immortal line: “A strong eyebrow makes for a strong day” — how can one possibly disagree with that — it led me to a more powerful and current isolation-appropriate question:
Do most women look and feel better without makeup? Can they still have powerful days? Welcome to Women of a Certain Digital Age. Or a Zoom of One’s Own.
We’ve accomplished a lot professionally, we’ve honed our fashion style, we keep our grooming up, we tastefully highlight our fashion-forward hair; our friends used to tell us all the time when we met up for a nice dinner in the before times: “You look amazing.” That was then. This is now: forced to hibernate at home for more than two months without access to many of those products and services that helped many women look polished, women now appear on video conferencing apps and even on the street looking … well, still rather pleasantly like themselves.
What, you were expecting “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” Or, as one of my close friends, who has naturally one of the most youthful faces I’ve seen for a women in her sixties puts it in mock self-denigration, “looking like forty miles of bad road.”
Except we don’t. We all still look pretty much the same. As if makeup — or isolation — has never made that much difference after all.
One of the positive surprises for me is how wonderful women I know look onscreen in those little video conferencing squares, seemingly without all the goop and gizmos that empty our wallets and turn us into artificially glossed up versions of ourselves.
Is it wishful thinking or do I detect in the air a new-found acceptance — on and offscreen — of one’s self-isolation look? A sense of freedom and self-confidence that comes from saying ‘Hey, this is the best I can do right now, and I’m OK with that.’ As one woman wonderingly tweeted on her new makeup free life “men live like this every day.”
If this new-found self-acceptance takes hold, what will this mean for the cosmetics and esthetics industry as the economy gets rolling again? Maybe a retro campaign when we’re out? Ladies, get that isolation glow, once again.
The late writer and director Nora Ephron, who often wrote about how women really feel about their looks, once famously confessed: “I feel bad about my neck.” Ephron bemoaned the number of hours of upkeep and money she had to devote to looking good as she aged. She apparently went to her hair salon for a blowout twice a week.
Now I also recognize how surprisingly confident most women have seemed recently as we convene book clubs and other digital social events without our full cosmetic and esthetic arsenal.
It’s almost as if the whole intensive beauty industry has been a bit of a scam.
Digital meetings are here to stay. So, of course, are cosmetics. And some of them are healthy and indispensable. (Do not ask me to give up my bronzer or my lip gloss.)
But a different kind of esthetic self-confidence is being born, a subtle shift that has surprised me.
It’s not just well-seasoned women in their late middle age and beyond who are enjoying the minimal or make-up-free existence. But younger, women, too, who today — while touting feminist principles wear far more makeup than I ever did at their age — are going for “makeunders.” A recent New York Post piece reports that younger female stars and women who follow them were eschewing “cat’s eye” makeup and God knows what else and going for a simpler look at home.
I stopped yesterday on my walk to distance chat with a neighbour, 79, who says Zoom has saved her during these isolation days. Political discussion groups, book clubs, neighbourly chit-chats. She loves them all. With a respiratory problem, she isn’t supposed to be out at all except for her short daily walk.
“I don’t think I look that good on Zoom,” she confessed, but then added “I never wore makeup anyway.” She said she had bought a bunch of brightly coloured clothes on her last trip, and so she was wearing a few beautiful ones on her video calls to jazz up her appearance and besides “when will I get to wear them again?”
Having raised a daughter, I don’t think feminism has come close to cracking the female stereotype code and the idea that a woman’s looks can define — or limit — her in ways that a man’s don’t. If you doubt it, check out the insulting misogynistic comments on social media about any female politician. A woman’s looks are always the first insult lobbied. Dog. Pig. Hag. Ugly.
But what this isolation period has driven home better than any cosmetic company’s slick “you are all beautiful just the way you are” campaign, is that when beauty props and procedures are not available, not reachable and certainly not worth the risk to undergo, women just get on with what they are really good at — being themselves. Zooming from the heart of their experience — and the soul of their being.
And their friends still say: “You look amazing.”