In Defense of Fake Beauty

the f word UK:

‘Natural’ beauty slyly requires us to use just enough makeup, spending just enough money and putting in just enough effort to convince people there was never any money or effort or makeup involved.

And, as it turns out, such an achievement doesn’t come particularly cheap, or particularly easy. The cult of natural beauty does not, in reality, ask us to strip away our feminine ‘fakery’, but rather to make our fakery more subtle and more convincing, which requires ever more expertise, ever more specialised products, and ever more anxiety about getting it wrong. A dress that doesn’t flatter her, an uneven streak of foundation, a dodgy hair dye job: signs of failure, mocked because they signal ineptness at mastering our image - the ultimate sin of womanhood.

We live in a culture where the natural is made synonymous with the real, the authentic, the true and, by implication, the good. We live in a culture that still persuasively naturalises inequality, and we live in a culture where deviations from ‘natural’ states of gender and sexuality are met with heavy penalties.

Society’s unnaturals are forced to constantly work at convincing it that they’re real enough and honest enough to be accepted into its fold: that they were “born this way”, that they have an authentic, immutable origin of identity (a gene, a brain structure, a hormone) and a doctor’s note to prove it. All this is demanded of them in order to validate their very existence, and still they are regarded with brutal suspicion.

What we have is not a war against fakery, it is a war against that which displays itself as fakery; we’re all supposed to be pretending that we’re naturally wide-eyed and soft-skinned and blushing and blemish-free. Women are expected to be photorealist portraits of femininity, not expressionist canvasses; lies are tolerated only in so far as they are told convincingly. But when we start being too overt about the fabricated status of natural femininity, there’s a lurking danger that we might start to question their absurdity, or realise that we can invent altogether new images in radical moulds.