Natural Beauty

Examining appearance shame

Last week, my husband and I went to Olympic National Park to celebrate our one-year wedding anniversary. It was magical. While we were camping, I read the book “Natural Beauty” by Ling Ling Huang and boy was it a doozy! I couldn’t put it down. The topic of wellness and “clean beauty” is close to home. When I make desperate lists of my interests to uncover what I should do with my life (for work), I often list “clean beauty.” I never considered this interest to be problematic until I read this book. While beauty has never been a passion of mine, I am focused on finding non-toxic products. Huang’s book is an evisceration of our culture’s obsession with beauty, youth, and wellness. After finishing, I wanted to jettison the few spendy tinctures that I have in my bathroom.

I have always felt deeply flawed (a recurring theme for me) for not having a skincare routine. I don’t know what a toner is. I recently purchased an expensive oil that I haphazardly douse on my face before I slather on some cheap Alba Botanica moisturizer. Am I doing it right?

I am embarrassed to admit that I have always wanted to emulate Gwyneth Paltrow. Now I am convinced she’s another Ghislaine Maxwell who is harming other women (she’s not, although there is a character in the book who does resemble Maxwell).

In her excellent newsletter, “Culture Study,” Anne Helen Petersen recently interviewed Elise Hu, who wrote a book on K-Beauty and aesthetic self-optimization, “Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital.”

I related deeply to Hu’s ambivalence and conflicting feelings regarding K Beauty. She “felt strongly about resisting the pull to somehow ‘perfect’ [her] face, but also…felt the continual pull of a billion serums, in part…because she was ‘attracted to the prospect of improvement.’” What is the difference between self-care and self-improvement? Hu notes,

“Our physical appearance gets conflated with the self (even though the concept of the self is so much more nuanced and richer than exteriors), and so a lot of us have internalized the notion of self-care as skincare, or costly treatments. That means there’s a thin line between nurturing our bodies in a way that is caring and sensual, and falling into extractive beauty work that benefits powerful interests.”

Hu continues, “We should challenge the system instead of judging the woman.” You mean I can’t just be mad at Gwenyth? This has always been a struggle for me. I want to shake my friends who get Botox and yell “Don’t you see you are doing exactly what capitalism wants you to do!?” Conceptually, I know it’s not their fault, it’s the system. This doesn’t stop me from feeling helpless and sad as I watch my friends modify their beautiful faces. This concept made me think of my mixed feelings about Emily Ratajkowski. Can a woman demand respect while profiting off of pandering to the male gaze by posing nude? I am not sure! Blame the system, not the woman…Hu continues,

“We need a kinder relationship with ourselves, and by extension, a kinder relationship with each other…I see beauty culture as hustle culture that’s reached into our bodies. Hustle culture as applied to disciplining or modifying our bodies isolates us from one another because we end up in competition, looking over our shoulders, and scared to ask for help when we need it. It’s a recipe for inequality and marginalization on one end, and anxiety and exhaustion across the system.”

Perhaps this is why I have always felt so deeply flawed. Our capitalist culture wants us to feel isolated and less than - it’s what motivates us to buy products we don’t really need.

“If we look to nature as a guide, the foundation of a well-lived life and a healthy social ecosystem is actually built on mutual care. So just as we millennials (with enough privilege to do so) need to remap our relationships with work, we can also remap our relationships with aesthetic work. I learned to take a beat and reflect on the ways that we almost automatically adhere to the notion that our worthiness boils down to our looks, and from there, began to untangle that knot.”

If we are so focused on “natural” beauty, why don’t we look to nature as a guide? In Olympic, we visited the “Hall of Mosses” in the Hoh Rain Forest and it was a dreamscape filled with trees 200-300 years old. As I admired the moss-covered trees that resembled orangutans, I thought of the documentary, “Fantastic Fungi,” which I highly recommend.

“Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of fungi, so the mushroom is like the apple. The bulk of the organism is growing underground and it's composed of these long threads.” “Mycelium are incredibly tiny ‘threads’ of the greater fungal organism that wrap around or bore into tree roots. Taken together, mycelium composes what's called a ‘mycorrhizal network,’ which connects individual plants together to transfer water, nitrogen, carbon and other minerals.”

Trees communicate and swap nutrients with one another using mycelium as pathways. I had no idea that trees support one another via the carbon that moves between them. For example, if a mother tree knows that there are pests around and that she's in danger, she will increase her competitive environment toward her own babies so that they regenerate further away.

John Dawson’s art on the back of the map of Olympic National Park

In February, I read the book, “Drinking Games” by Sarah Levy in one sitting. It was truly my memoir. I begin each year devouring “quit-lit” books - which are memoirs about getting sober. The fact that this is a pattern I repeat annually should tell me something that I clearly do not want to acknowledge.

Levy’s struggles with body image, self-love, friendship, relationships, clothing, wellness, and work all mirror my own thoughts about wanting to fit in and be accepted. Essentially, she would shape-shift in order to be liked. Quitting drinking allowed her the space to actually take stock of who she was and who she wanted to be. She let go of the noise of who she “should be” in order to fit in. So much of the messaging towards females is: be small, be quiet, be pretty, dress well, have a lot of friends, and most importantly, have a partner - do NOT be alone. Capitalism and social media send you a barrage of images that say “YOU ARE NOT ENOUGH.” You are not thin enough, you are not rich enough, you are not luxurious enough. Without this cream, this vacation to Europe, this engagement ring, you are broken, wrong, inferior to others.

“Whenever I bought a new beauty product or supplement, I got high on the same strain of hope. This, I always thought, would finally fix me. This moisturizer changed my life, every online review read, and I believed it every time.

I wanted a body that was lean, long, thin, fit, active, strong, fast, tight, tucked, and skin that was plump, glowing, bouncy, dewy, and hydrated. Like my drinking, it was all too much and never enough. I was bottoming out on wellness, I realized. But I wasn’t sure I was ready to walk away from it. Wellness had been a pleasant distraction and safe catch-all for my feelings for the better part of a decade. Whenever I felt angry, hurt, or sad, I focused on my weight instead of digging into the root of my feelings. I had wrapped my identity around drinking and changing my body, and I wondered what would be left of me if I unraveled this thread too.”

It makes me sick to think about the percentage of my life and brain space that has been/currently is dedicated to obsessing over my body’s flaws. Imagine how wondrous and expansive the world would be if women weren’t programmed to constantly agonize over how unattractive we are.

Hu ends the interview with this: “Liberating ourselves from appearance shame is an issue of bodily autonomy — and a matter of social justice — because it informs how we can show up in the world and participate in it.”

—

Tags: Beauty, Books, Fear, Feminism, Health