What’s beautiful NOW?

There’s a new mood in beauty, says former Cosmopolitan and Elle magazine editor Farrah Storr – and about time, too!

Something huge is happening. In changing rooms, at beauty store counters and on TV adverts. It is happening on social media, in teenagers’ bedrooms and in the mirrors that women look into every morning. Beauty is being reclaimed. The way we see it, the way we hear it, but most of all the way we feel it.

You must have noticed it. Armpit hair in adverts. Hyperpigmented faces gazing at you from shop front images. Young women parading gloriously thick legs and juicy bums on Britain’s streets. People talking about wanting to look fresher, more luminous, the best version of themselves as opposed to an approximation of how they looked in their 20s.

I was a half Pakistani woman coming of age in the early 1990s. ‘Heroin chic’ was my bible – girls as thin as Biros, pale, almost translucent skin and hair that hung long, straight and limp. I watched my sister navigate the 1980s with similar trepidation, where big hair, toned bodies and Christie Brinkley were held up as the epitome of good looks. And then there was my mother, who lived through the impossible 1960s and 1970s – Twiggy, Farrah Fawcett and the dawning of cosmetic surgery – and, as such, spent a lifetime on Ryvita and Shape yogurts.

I never saw anyone who looked like me – singer Tanita Tikaram was about the closest you got in Celebrity Land, but no one held her up as a great beauty. And so I aspired to look like what the western world told me was beautiful: slim, pale, perfect. It was a task which, some 25 years later, has left me with body issues, skin as thin as tissue paper after years of chemical peels and eyebrows that never quite grew back.

Of course, as anyone of a certain age knows, beauty, and our concept of it, has always fluctuated. Nothing is quite as vulnerable to cultural change as the way women are taught to see themselves. If the 1920s were all slim hips and emaciated eyebrows, the 1950s put paid to that with sensuous, hourglass bodies and thick, dramatic brows. If the 1960s vogue was slim-hipped androgyny and cute pixie haircuts, then the 1980s pushed back with muscular, athletic bodies and bouncy perms. It is true that every decade has had its own exacting feminine ideal, but it is equally true that every decade has done its own, quiet work to lay the foundations for the shift in beauty standards we have today.

It is all too easy to forget that women such as Barbra Streisand, Grace Jones and gap-toothed Lauren Hutton did much to break beauty stereotypes. Or that Yves Saint Laurent, in the 1970s, was one of the very first designers to put black models with natural hair on the catwalk. And while everyone knows the name Estée Lauder, few are aware of cosmetics powerhouse Barbara Walden – one of the first women to introduce mainstream cosmetics for women of colour back in the 1960s. But if Barbara laid the first brick, then Somali-born supermodel Iman helped build the house when in 1994 she launched her own range, Iman Cosmetics.

Around the same time, a young Canadian brand called MAC Cosmetics (which had become known for its vast array of foundations and free in-store makeovers so that women of colour could finally get a decent colour match) made drag queen Rupaul the face of its Viva Glam lipstick. Revlon made 1990s supermodel, Veronica Webb, the first African-american model to land a major cosmetics deal. Did it smack of tokenism? Sure, Webb has since admitted, but it gave her the power to demand black makeup artists, photographer’s assistants, even caterers. Big deal, some activists may think today. But back then, it really was, and moral judgement of a time one did not know, understand or experience should be used with caution. For they all did their bit to help reshape the beauty narrative.

Everyone’s definition of what looks and feels beautiful is completely different

SOCIAL MEDIA

But if these outliers provided small flames of hope for a new, more inclusive aesthetic standard, it was going to take something significant to fan those flames into something truly culture shifting. That came in the form of the internet and later social media.

By the turn of the last century, the internet allowed global conversations and connections to take place; anonymous ‘chat rooms’ and blogs allowed women to hear and feel the beauty frustrations of women from around the world. We no longer felt isolated. But something approaching rage was brewing. If the world had so many size 16 women, we all thought, where were they? If freckles were so cute and open pores so prevalent, how come we never saw it reflected back at us?

In the mid Noughties, video platform Youtube launched. A year later, regular women such as a then 20-year-old Michelle Phan started creating makeup tutorials for women just like her. A slew of individuals who would become known as ‘influencers’ followed: a mum from Liverpool called Caroline Hirons, a former recruiter of Iraqi heritage called Huda Kattan, and a twentysomething male makeup artist called James Charles.

REAL PEOPLE

Beauty was no longer being dictated by corporations and lofty image makers. Real, diverse individuals were calling the shots and spreading their messages on social media. It felt like a revolt, but instead of placards and megaphones, its messages were sent via makeup-free selfies, beauty blogs and tearful Instagram confessionals about living with acne. The corporations and the lofty image makers started to listen: Dove launched its Real Beauty campaign by using regular women in its advertising; a plus-sized singer called Beth Ditto walked a 2015 fashion show for Marc Jacobs and, that same year, Joan Didion became the face of Celine at 80 years of age.

I was one of those corporate people. I edited Cosmopolitan when Tess Holliday crossed my path. Though few knew her name in my world, on Instagram she was a legend for her effyourbeautystandards movement. At close to 300lb and around 5ft 5in, Tess was not your ‘conventional’ cover girl. But what was conventional? So we put her on the cover. The image of her in a swimsuit provoked rage, joy, relief and confusion. This was not what beauty was supposed to look like. Was it?

Today, I’d like to think we all know that beauty comes in myriad forms. Certainly if we take our cue from the culture around us. (And cultural conditioning plays an enormous role in how we see ourselves). You can walk into most cosmetics stores today and find 50 shades of foundation thanks to Rihanna and her excellent brand, Fenty Beauty. You can turn on the TV and see adverts with real body hair thanks to shaving brand Billie. You can see Harry Styles gyrating on stage in a feather boa and Down’s syndrome model Ellie Goldstein working for some of the world’s biggest commercial brands. You can see Kardashian clones in every corner of the country, as well as the Love Island aesthetic – all ‘baby’ Botox, lip filler and gym-honed bodies. Because, if there’s anything the last 100 years have taught us, it’s this: everyone’s definition of what looks and feels beautiful is different. And true beauty lies in that difference.

Farrah Storr writes Things Worth Knowing, a newsletter on the secret lives of mid-life women. farrah.substack.com