Why I fear her obsession with make-up may harm my teen daughter’s career
BY RADIO 4’s JUSTIN WEBB
ZADIE SMITH, I have something to confess. You are my hero. You have spoken words that my darling daughter Martha needs to hear. Words that, from her father, might as well be spoken in Mandarin, but from you, could yet have an impact. You have called time on make-up madness.
At a literary event in Edinburgh last week, the award-winning author talked about her seven-year-old daughter Kit’s beauty routine. ‘I saw she had started spending a lot of time looking in mirrors, and it was infuriating me,’ she said. ‘So I spontaneously decided on a principle.’
The result? Young Kit, who remember is only seven, now has a mere 15 minutes to get ready. Yes, you read that right: 15 minutes. Ten minutes too long in my view, but it’s a start.
Here is the problem, as parents of daughters across the land will know only too well. There is an industry out there — a booming and highly sophisticated industry — trying to capture their sweet, unspoiled faces and lure them into a world much older than their years.
I’m talking about the legions of beauty bloggers and vloggers who invade our daughters’ bedrooms by means of YouTube ‘tutorials’ — I know I sound 103, but on what planet does a teen’s monologue on mascara amount to a tutorial? — on the best way to cover your face in make-up.
My daughter Martha may be 17 years old — no baby any more — but I’m baffled that my clever, funny, resourceful girl, who has aspirations to become a lawyer, should pay so much attention to these meaningless demonstrations and soulsapping narratives.
Granted, I know Zoella, who’s made an estimated £2.5million from her beauty and lifestyle videos, is revered by Britain’s teenage girls. But once you’ve worked out how to put on the lipstick and brush the hair — it’s never taken my wife very long — what’s the point of tuning in again?
But here lies the genius of the beauty industry: it pushes ever so gently on an open door — a door we parents unlocked.
Facepaint, we called it. And the first time our little darlings pursed their lips like Mummy and stared with joy at a vision of themselves in a mirror, we smiled and encouraged it. What else can you do? Frown and take the mirror away?
Like many little girls, Martha loved nothing more than dressing up to look like Mummy. Sometimes, this would involve trying on high heels. At others, an ill-advised rummage through her cosmetics bag. Now? It’s full-on contouring and what seems like hours to get ready. Is it our fault?
After all, as parents, we indulged her childlike enthusiasm for dressing up. Should we have discouraged any innocent pretensions to prettiness at all?
THE parents of one of my own schoolfriends banned TV. I’m sure they acted out of a genuine desire to protect him and allow him to flourish, but the result was that, to most of us, he appeared to be an oddball.
He had fewer friends and fewer things to talk about. I often thought of him when making my choices as a parent and his story generally persuades me that ‘going with the flow’ is the kind and life-enhancing thing to do — even when ‘the flow’ looks alien and worrying.
But when it comes to make-up, I really wish I had spoken up like Zadie Smith — and done so earlier on. Because now, with Martha, it’s way too late.
She may be about to embark upon her A-level year, but if her dressing table is anything to go by, she looks as though she’s fully enrolled at beauty school. Pots and tubs, brushes and wands, sponges and serums jostle for space. If only I could say the same for her textbooks.
And not only is she devoting increasing amounts of time to ‘getting ready’, but she is now booking beauty appointments, too.
I was sitting at the kitchen table the other day looking at university prospectuses with her brother Sam when Martha breezed by. ‘See ya,’ she said. ‘I’m going into town to have someone look at my eyebrows.’ Sam and I raised ours. Most of all, it’s the level of concentration devoted to the whole rigmarole that I find so alarming. The endless talk about palettes. The concern about hair colour. The primping and prinking and tweaking and twirling to get the look just right. Just right for what? And for whom? Of course, I know it’s not just Martha. Millions of girls her age and younger are following the same routines. Swapping tips. Working out strategies. And I suppose there is some female bonding to be had through comparisons of bronzer. But I can’t help thinking that if all this teenage effort were expended designing a rocket, it wouldn’t take long before we’d be walking on Mars.
And there’s a more serious point here. I haven’t mentioned the F-word yet but it hovers above the dressing table mirror.
Feminism. It matters. To me, and hopefully, Martha, to you. We both want a world in which men and women have the same opportunities, the same freedoms, the same pay.
So I am backing up my Zadie Smith point with a deeper and more literary approach that Ms Smith would certainly be familiar with and perhaps Martha might care to consider.
Simone de Beauvoir was a hero for my mum and her generation because she wrote about women and the possibility of freedom — of agency, the ability to do what you wanted with your life.
My mother had very few choices in life, and when she had an affair and got pregnant with me in 1960 those choices evaporated almost completely. She lost her job, too, as
you did as a pregnant unmarried woman in those days.
So when Mum read her book The Second Sex it led to an awakening. And its message is as deeply relevant to my daughter and her generation as it was to my Mum’s, because the message is not about whether you can get a good job and go where you want and wear what you like — all freedoms Martha has that Mum did not — it’s about what it means to be a woman. Never mind sexist bosses. It’s the mirror that’s the enemy.
For by responding to the pressure to peer into it, women are complicit in turning themselves into objects to be looked at.
This is not me speaking. Or Zadie. This is the woman who wrote one of the most significant feminist tracts of the last century. Tell her you can care about your eyebrows and your job and she’ll be raising hers from beyond the grave.
Of course, life has changed hugely since de Beauvoir was writing after World War II and women today can care about their looks and have fulfilling careers. But can the mirror still act as the same trap today?
Like any parent, I want to believe Martha and her generation really can have it all. And I should acknowledge that, when not waving a mascara wand, she plays chess far better than I ever could and passes exams with a studied diligence she might otherwise reserve for an out-of-place eyelash.
As I write this, she is upstairs reading Paradise Lost. Hopefully, she will take her beauty routine to one of the nation’s finest universities next year and who will be laughing then? My wife, Sarah, for one. Unlike me, she is relaxed about it all, despite being the much stricter parent. But on make-up, she shrugs. So what, she says? And since Sarah wears the stuff herself but also has a science degree (proper science, she reminds me, unlike mine in Economics) and helps run a very substantial advertising company, who am I to make a fuss? I realise I have stepped into a minefield here. The politics and the psychology of beauty (not just the industry but the actual thing: beauty) are hugely complex and more than skin-deep. They delve into who we are and who we want to be. Simone de Beauvoir did not have the last word. But her words are worth reading. I have bought The Second Sex for Martha. She has politely put it outside her door, on the floor. I am not sure whether that means, ‘I am thinking about reading this’, or ‘Chuck it’.
One thing is for certain. It is her choice. And nothing I say will decide it. Fathers do not control their daughters. And that is exactly how it should be.
MARTHA SAYS . . .
OH DADDy, wrong again! There are two things you don’t seem to understand. The first is that I wear make-up for fun. It’s for pleasure. Like you reading endless books about American politics.
Well, I put on make-up. And the putting on of the make-up is the biggest part of it. It’s the actual activity that’s fun.
A bit like a Japanese Tea ceremony, you simply get lost in the doing of it. It is also, I’ll have you know, highly skilful. I spend much of my time cramming for exams and writing essays. It is actually fun to have something to do that involves much less intellectual input. And a practical skill is not a bad thing. If, as they say, computers using artificial intelligence are increasingly taking over the work of lawyers, here is an alternative career if all else fails. But, to be honest, I am not doing it with any great purpose in mind. I remember facepainting as a child and you are right that it led to my current interest, but not because of the result but because of the activity. The other thing that you get wrong is that I am doing it for myself. Being interested in make-up is not a sign of being controlled by other people, or wanting to be controlled by them. I am not the slightest bit worried about what people think I look like — or at least no more worried than you are when you shave before going to the Today programme studios. But I am very concerned in what I think of myself. It’s not a waste of time. It is me. This is the point. Make-up makes you feel good. Putting it on is fun and wearing it is fun. It is about giving yourself power. It is about making yourself feel special. Not in a stupid way but in a way that makes the day better. I know perfectly well that there is a marketing industry out to persuade me, but that is the case in lots of other areas of life: we have to live with it. As for feminism, well I don’t really think about it in those terms. Feminism ought to be about choice and not being ashamed to do what you want. After all, there are plenty of boys who spend ages in front of the mirror. I once had a boyfriend who took longer to get ready than I did! Let’s do a deal. I will read the Simone de Beauvoir book. But not yet — I’m very busy. As you know, I am taking A-level Philosophy and I have to work out whether anything exists and how we could know it exists first. you see, Daddy, I have plenty of time for things other than make-up.
That’s what Radio 4’s Justin Webb calls the obsession with cosmetics gripping his teen daughter’s generation — fearing it’ll harm her career ambitions. But she insists: you’re wrong as usual Dad!