No woman thinks she looks ‘normal’
As Unilever bans the word on its beauty products, why this isn’t virtue signalling — but actually long overdue
The beauty world is abuzz with news that global grooming giant Unilever has declared its products will no longer feature the word ‘normal’ on its packaging, to prevent any customers feeling excluded.
The decision will cover not merely Dove, but all this UKbased company’s wares, including bathroom favourites Vaseline, Alberto Balsam, Sunsilk and Lifebuoy. In supermarkets and chemists across the globe, ‘normal skin’, ‘normal hair’, normal anything will be a thing of the past.
The obvious question is why. We live in febrile cultural times and one has to wonder whether this is a superficial attempt to appeal to young, politically sensitive customers paranoid about any sort of label.
Unilever says its new policy is part of a drive for diversity, not least because it’s a business that spans 190 countries, reaching 2.5 billion consumers a day.
The company argues that its move followed a study of 10,000 people, which revealed that seven in ten people agree that using the word ‘normal’ has a negative impact. For millennials and Generation Z — aged 18-35 — this rises to eight out of ten.
There is no doubt that for many women, the word ‘normal’ holds racial connotations. Anyone who thinks otherwise should read Toni Morrison’s Nobel prize-winning novel, The Bluest eye, in which the heroine knows what is beautiful, and it is not her; being resolutely dark, and thus condemned as ‘ugly’.
None of us wants women of colour ever to feel that white and silky-haired is the norm, or that they are in any way imperfect.
At the same time, for me, the implications of the word ‘normal’ go still wider.
Because what woman has ever thought of herself as normal? I certainly haven’t met one. Neither
supermodels, nor the (apparently) super-confident, of any ethnicity, ever describe themselves in such terms. Our level of rampant self-criticism simply never allows for it. Meanwhile, feeling abnormal appears like a constant female condition.
NOrMAL skin? Do me a favour! Not when there are pores to become cavernous, pigmentation to spread like a rash, and sagging chins to concertina ever downward.
There’s probably about half an hour one afternoon in her late 20s when a woman feels as if she might just about qualify as having vaguely normal skin. Before that it will be deemed too spotty, after that too wrinkled. Then, come menopause, we get to be both.
Normal hair? Surely that’s even less of a possibility? There’s a reason why ‘bad hair day’ has become a phrase.
have any of us ever considered ourselves to be in the midst of a ‘good hair day’?
That magical 24-hours in which our manes are a bobbing swathe of gloss and shine?
Currently, my own hair is greasy at the roots, parched at the ends, frizzy and flat at the same time, tips jagged with split ends. have I ever purchased ‘normal’ shampoo, even as a ten-year-old? have I hell! Instead, growing up, we are painfully self-conscious precisely at the moment at which we are at our most blooming.
A new study on social media habits published this week has found that a staggering 90 per cent of young women digitally alter pictures of themselves before posting them online. Skin tone, face shape and weight will all be doctored; normal here appearing to mean a Kim Kardashian-style inflatable doll.
Later — when confidence might finally be setting in — we are fed the message that we’re old bags whose collapsing features no longer make the grade. how many middle-aged women avoid being in photos at all costs?
There’s never a Goldilocks moment of womanhood: one that is ‘just right’.
My friend Clara uses a skincare range with packaging that includes 12 boxes to tick depending on what unwanted symptoms need addressing. It may be honest, but that way madness lies. Meanwhile, products with positive messages remain few and far between because — even where we tell ourselves that we are grooming ‘for ourselves’ (and I do) — we also know that we are doing it to be judged socially acceptable.
With a fundamentally sexist society continuing to insist that we’re never good enough — never ‘normal’ — the most positive message we afford ourselves is L’Oreal’s ‘Because you’re worth it’. Translation: not normal, but worth the investment to endeavour to pass for it.
PerSONALLy, I’ve never put much value on normal. I have never been blonde, super-fit, or had a tan; never longed to be a bride, a size 10, or smell of flowers. I don’t mind being an oddball: it means I’m an individual, idiosyncratic, myself.
And I’m going to take Unilever’s new non-normal as my inspiration to renounce the word altogether.
Because normal shouldn’t be an ambition: it’s a straitjacket, whatever our skin colour, or the texture of our hair. Unilever is letting it go and so should we.
What the phrasing will be for features that are not dry, not oily, is not yet clear: ‘healthy’, perhaps? Presumably, marketing gurus will be paid fortunes to bash out some inoffensive solution. No term will be entirely without its challenges, but any will prove an advance — for women everywhere.
TODAY, in the fifth part of our life-changing diet series, NHS GP Dr David Unwin explains how going low carb can boost your energy levels and mood, while chef and food writer Katie Caldesi shows you how to bake delicious treats without using heaps of sugar.
How often do you reach for something sweet or full of carbs during the day to give you a ‘boost’ — particularly if you are flagging? A lot of the younger patients in my practice (and some older ones!) tell me they often resort to sugary energy drinks for a lift.
That’s because most of us associate carbohydrates with energy — and we’re regularly told we need them to give our brain and muscles the fuel they need.
But sugary carbs can cause highs and then lows in your blood sugar levels, which in turn can leave you feeling hungry, triggering both physical and mental symptoms such as shakiness, dizziness and irritability — what’s commonly described as feeling ‘hangry’.
I remember one morning at work thinking I was having a rather bad panic attack, which was later ‘cured’ by eating three biscuits!
BuT with a low-carbohydrate diet I find I have more sustained energy over the whole day as my body is able to burn its own fat stores for fuel, as required.
I also need an hour-and-a-half less sleep every night since I switched to eating fewer carbs.
Feeling less hungry and more energetic is an almost universal experience of my type 2 patients who’ve cut carbohydrates. ‘I have so much more energy,’ is a constant refrain I hear.
Several high-level athletes are also taking advantage of this fatburning effect, including Chris Froome, four-time winner of the Tour de France, who believes following a low-carb diet gives him the edge.
Meanwhile, for the rest of us, steady levels of energy throughout the day are excellent for productivity even if we aren’t elite cyclists. what’s more, a lowcarb diet can have beneficial effects on mood.
As I explained in Tuesday’s Daily Mail, our brains release the ‘happy’ brain chemical dopamine when we eat a sugary or carbohydrate-rich meal.
This, you may remember, is the chemical involved in reward and motivation — and many addictive substances act initially by increasing brain dopamine levels.
But over time the brain becomes desensitised to its effects, meaning you need more and more of the substances concerned — in this case, sugar or carbs — to produce the same well-being effect.
I experienced this myself, particularly over the festive period before I discovered low carb, back in 2012.
Every day I seemed to eat more milk chocolate and Christmas cake, yet never felt ‘satisfied’.
I also needed little naps in the day and everything was an effort, even playing with my children.
And I noticed that my mood was inexplicably flat. A similar effect is seen with serotonin, another important brain chemical also involved in mood.
High levels of insulin (triggered by sugar or starchy foods) allow tryptophan, an amino acid that your body produces when it digests protein, to pass into the brain more easily.
once there, the tryptophan is converted into serotonin, the ‘happy and relaxed’ brain chemical.
But as with dopamine, if this process is repeated often enough, serotonin becomes less available to the brain, as research published in the journal Molecular Metabolism in 2013 showed.
In a study involving 25 healthy men, researchers from the Netherlands found that highfat, high-sugar snacking ‘significantly’ reduced the amount of serotonin available (as seen from scans).
So in this way not only can a low-carb diet help stabilise blood sugar, but it can also help boost energy and mood.