Bookings for cosmetic surgeries are down: are we seeing a beauty revolution?
Watching many of the protagonists in the US election these past few weeks reminded me that one of my favourite diversions when I was wading through the legalisation of usury (1571), for my history A-level, was a delve into the weirder nooks of Elizabethan beauty regimes.
Celebrities are extremely touchy with regards to suggestions their beauty may not be entirely down to genes, even when it’s blindingly obvious. Perhaps they already fear, deep down, that their fame and wealth aren’t deserved, and that if we know that they bought their cute little noses and cheekbones, we’ll strip them of their privileges? The public’s response to all this is not entirely rational either. We don’t mind when others dodge their bad health genes, but mock them when they tamper with their beauty inheritance.
Now there’s news this week from the British Association of Beauty Therapy and Cosmetology that bookings across its 2,000 members are down 51 per cent on a year ago; sales of lipstick are falling (what’s the point when you wear a mask?); skin care is rising and those appointments with the knife look less and less appealing.
Does this mean pillow faces, cats’ eyes and porn-star lips are slipping out of fashion, just as the lead carbonate Elizabethans used to whiten their faces and the deadly nightshade that brightened their eyes (shortly before killing them, at least they went out twinkling) did?
It has to happen at some point. Beauty ideals start off very sensibly, as an external indicator of good health, then rapidly acquire their own momentum until they defy all logic, and because they sometimes demand permanent distortion of the physical form, eventually seem grotesque. That’s why clothes time travel reasonably well – we can still admire the dresses and exquisite lace collars in a Rembrandt portrait. But those mottled, turnip faces. Eeww.
In a century or so, those Hadid/kardashian ideals of beauty might look as weird and wonderful as the couple in the famous 1434 Arnolfini portrait, with the brows and hairline plucked until they look almost fetal. In the absence of brow lifts, it was the best stab they had at looking younger.
The killjoys who throughout history attempted to pass various laws demonising any woman resorting to artifice (it was always women, even if it wasn’t), or tried to make the wearing of cosmetics tantamount to witchcraft, were actually doing women a favour. Many beauty treatments were deadly. One contemporaneous account reports that 17th-century women had their skin “flead” to improve its texture. Your guess is as good as mine as to whether this means flayed or involves actual fleas. Both, possibly.
Women who were too poor or perhaps too wise to bow to the more bizarre beauty fads of their day tend to come out of things much more satisfactorily, at least to modern eyes. Too bad they’re dead and can’t benefit. Something for Kim Kardashian to mull over though. One of the many photos of her 40th birthday celebrations, which she posted on her Instagram f feed last week, s shows her with a bunch of old fr friends who look… a amazingly normal. Might the N Normal Friends, in time, look be better than Kim? Hard to be sure, but as another example of extreme beauty fads that have not aged well, I give you those face patches that were all the rage after the Restoration – made of black taffeta or red leather, they were worn on different sides of the face according to political allegiance.
By the 1650s they’d become ever more fanciful, cut into the shapes of birds, moons, fish, castles until they reached the e giddy dimensions of a full coach and horses.
Just imagine anyone having animals or allegorical figures etched on to their bodies these days – or having their faces plumped out with tissue paper, or their skin tightened with egg white. We’re far more sophisticated in our approach to beauty now. OK, OK, we’re not.
So why aren’t we? We have lasers and lights, fillers and muscle paralysers, derma planing, tattoos and acid peels to achieve what we’ve being striving to achieve for thousands of years – smoother, plumper, hairless skin. And good eyebrows. Modern cosmetics promise an “airbrushed” look. Elizabethans paid fashionable artists to airbrush their portraits.
Because the tools available to us today are all lumped under the mighty umbrella of “technology”, we assume they’re both more advanced and more humane than the options our ancestors had. Often they’re neither. We’ve all seen those too-tight face lifts where the protagonist can’t blink. Remember the Sex and the City episode where Samantha had an acid peel and cou couldn’t leave her ap apartment for a we week because the to top 20 layers of he her dermis looked as though they’d b been flayed, or flead. No one would call that kind of work kind.
But many of us feel pressurised into looking young – either because of our jobs, our partners or our friends. Once on this road, many find themselves attending those appointments with Dr Youth until forever in order to ensure their beauty remains fashionably artificial. Heaven knows what they’ll do if artifice itself becomes unfashionable. And it could. What happened in 1789 – apart from that revolution, I mean? Beauty went on the turn. Wigs, patches, white powder, as favoured by Marie Antoinette and her court – all swept away in a revolutionary zeal to go au naturel.
We’re definitely on the cusp of a similarly seismic beauty shift. On the one side there’s 82-year-old Jane Fonda’s – fabulous, dynamic and definitely “worked”. On the other, the 69-year-old influencer Linda V Wright, also fabulous, dynamic, and not worked. Which way will we flip?