Ugly Beauty (27 page)

III

B
ut if new
bodies, and new faces, are available off the rack, how will we choose which to
select? Who sets the fashionable ideal?

The answer is: some enviable, powerful other. The
look of the eighteenth-century French court, for example, was not only clownish
but dangerous. Everyone knew that the skin-whitening paste called ceruse, made
from lead, was a deadly poison that ruined the skin it covered and could cause
death. But the king painted his face in this way; and rather than risk losing
their social position by appearing outlandishly unpainted, members of the court
made themselves up to match.

More recently the choice has often been a matter of
race. Sometimes, as with those who sought urgent nose jobs in Nazi Germany,
“passing” can be a matter of life and death. More often people simply want to
look like the majority, because that majority holds the social and economic
power. “Trying to succeed in a white world is very, very difficult,” said Sami,
a young Malaysian man living in Britain. “It’s hard enough if you’re white—but
even harder if you’re black.” Sami was about to spend 40,000 euros on a
leg-lengthening operation because he felt his present height—5’2”, nothing
unusual in Malaysia, where the average male height is 5’4”—made it impossible to
be taken seriously in a society where the average man is 5’9” tall. And from
mere practicality—aping the looks of the powerful because that will make life
easier—it is a short step to finding those looks aesthetically preferable.

It is thus not surprising, though still depressing,
that America’s first black self-made millionaire, Sarah Breedlove, aka Madam C.
J. Walker, made her money by developing hair-straightening products such as the
hot comb. “Hair pressing was a ritual of black women’s culture of intimacy,”
wrote the black author and historian bell hooks. “It was a world where the
images constructed as barriers between one’s self and the world were briefly let
go. . . . I was overjoyed when mama finally agreed I could join the
Saturday ritual.” Later, hooks abandoned straightened hair, wearing her
“natural” as a political declaration. But “For years I still considered it a
problem. . . . It has been only in recent years that I have ceased to
worry about what other people would say about my hair.”
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Similarly, flat-chested Asian girls living in Caucasian societies
seek breast enlargements to conform to the white notion of what is beautiful,
while big-bosomed black women seek reductions for the same reason.

Recently, L’Oréal has used two nonwhite women as
its “face”: singer Beyoncé Knowles and Freida Pinto, who starred in the film
Slumdog Millionaire
. In both cases, however, the
pictures used in the ads showed them paler than in real life. When a storm of
protest was raised by the sudden lightening of Beyoncé, L’Oréal said it was
“categorically untrue that L’Oréal Paris altered Ms. Knowles’s features or skin
tone in the campaign.” But the fact remained: the image they used was lighter
than any other photo of Beyoncé. If L’Oréal Paris had not done the alteration,
someone most certainly had. Presumably it was thought the main customer-base was
not yet ready to emulate anyone more than slightly coffee-colored.
2

Above and beyond the thorny issue of race, however,
the lightening of Beyoncé raises interesting questions. They concern the
relations between photography and the beauty industry; for not only do the age
of mass cosmetics and the age of universal photography coincide, they are
inextricably intertwined. Powerful new technologies inevitably affect our
perceptions. The arrival of the gramophone changed the way we listened to music.
And in the same way, the arrival of photography revolutionized the way we
visualized ourselves. For the first time in history, we could obtain, at any
moment, a record of ourselves as others saw us—and use that image to experiment
with ways of improving what they saw. From then on, the camera dictated the way
we wanted to look. And despite the camera’s deceptive instantaneity, that look
was always far from nature.

Photography has always been an art as much as a
recording device. Because the earliest photographic films were more sensitive to
blues than reds, and so didn’t properly register flesh-tones, the detail of
early portraits had to be manually adjusted after the event. And when both films
and cameras became more efficient, a new problem arose. The super-sharp images
were wonderful for landscapes and buildings, and also for portraits when the
intention was documentary, as in pictures of relentlessly weathered Native
American braves or aging, bewhiskered prime ministers. But a pitiless record of
every pore was not what a lady required. Often, therefore, photographers
inserted a kindly blurring, softening the focus until blemishes were obscured in
a gentle fuzz. After the small photographs known as
cartes-de-visite
became de rigueur in the 1860s, every woman
visualized herself as she might be when posed in soft focus against a studio
background.

It was this photo-face, painstakingly smoothed and
prepared, that Helena Rubinstein presented to her customers, both in her
advertisements and in all the other extensive publicity she engineered. Madame,
as she appeared in those photos, was everything implied by the word
soignée
, her hair glossily in place, her skin matte,
white, and flawless, her lips a perfectly outlined scarlet jewel, her face—even
in her sixties and seventies—preternaturally devoid of wrinkles. Often pictured
in her lab coat, she looked calm, dignified, smooth, youthful, elegant, an image
of perfection that was far from the chaotic and substantial reality. “I had to
airbrush
inches
from her waist!” moaned photographer
Cecil Beaton after snapping the distinctly rotund Madame of the 1930s; and
snapshots taken at less guarded moments show how much of this ideal look was
achieved by a combination of skillful makeup and photographer’s artifice. But
the alteration had a significance over and above vanity. It was the photographs,
not the unretouched reality, that defined the look women wanted to emulate; and
the cosmetics those photographs sold gave them the means to do so.

Other cosmetics companies of course used their own
endorsers, chosen from among society’s enviable strata—which at first meant
socialites. During the 1920s, Pond’s Cold Cream divided these ladies into two
classes—$1,000 people and $500 people—approaching them for endorsements around
the twentieth of the month, when their allowances were getting depleted. They
also recruited some genuine aristocrats from Europe—the Duchesse de Richelieu,
Lady Mountbatten, and Queen Marie of Romania “a bargain [who] endorsed for
$2,000, two silver boxes, and a miniature of herself by de Laszlo.”
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There, under a misty photograph, nestled the
illustrious name; but you would have been hard put to identify its original if
you passed her in the street.

Soon, however, these blurry socialites were
supplanted by a new, specifically photographic aristocracy: film stars.
Traditionally, actresses had been classed with courtesans, and had ranked
similarly low in society. But photography—and, a little later, and definitively,
cinematography—transformed them into goddesses, their images known and
worshipped across the world. Constance Talmadge, one of the great stars of the
silent screen, was said to have posed for 400 testimonial photographs in one
day, “showing a set of white teeth due to the exclusive use of Pepsodent,
Iodent, Kolynos, Dentyne, Ipoma, Squibbs, Lyon’s, Colgate’s or Pebeco.”
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Between takes, maids would help change her
outfit, and stagehands would rearrange the settings.

These endorsement photographs were quite obviously
posed. But soon a different class of pictures entered the public’s photographic
consciousness: the off-duty “snapshots” that became such an important part of
Hollywood publicity. These photographs, the public was given to understand,
represented the movie gods and goddesses in their casual, offscreen moments. The
truth, of course, was that nothing could have been less casual: those perfectly
clear complexions with their carefully graded highlights, those huge, mascaraed
eyes, those big scarlet lips, that hair glowing with improbable brilliance and
color, were the result of careful makeup, endless posing, skillful lighting,
and, usually, extensive retouching.

And it was this denatured photographic
“naturalness” that women tried to reproduce through cosmetics. You ladled on the
foundation and powder, the eye shadow, mascara, and lipstick, and left the house
camera-ready. Even in the most dimly day-lit offices and high streets, people
felt undressed if they weren’t wearing long black lashes, blue-shadowed eyes,
bright red lips, and pancake foundation, as though imminently about to face the
klieg lights. Traveling in the New York subway one day, I was struck by the
unusually beautiful complexion of the young woman opposite—only to be confounded
a few seconds later as she opened her bag, took out a makeup kit, and proceeded
to cover her face with pink gloop. When she’d finished she looked just like
everyone else, which, presumably, was the intention. Office life required this
bland, smoothed-over, highly colored look. Even some men in the public eye—think
Tony Blair, John Edwards—now feel undressed without the layer of artificial tan
to which constant studio exposure has accustomed them—and us.

So people’s notion of what constituted a “normal”
appearance was rejigged to fit the movies. But the conspiracy was, on the whole,
benign. Not only were the cosmetics companies happy, so was the woman in the
street. At least the effect she sought was achievable. The Helena Rubinstein of
the advertisements might be an artifact, but she was a self-created artifact.
Artur Rubinstein the pianist, her friend, compatriot, and neighbor in New York
(though no relation), would watch from his Park Avenue window, directly opposite
her makeup room, as Madame, then well into her seventies, painstakingly
constructed the face she wished to present to the world—a ritual he found
touching, impressive, and, as a public performer himself, understandable.
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And the final result, though heavily worked,
nevertheless remained rooted in actual appearance. With time and expertise you,
too, could construct a comparably perfect surface: a carapace that (if you
followed wartime
Vogue
’s instructions, applying the
color, blotting, powdering, reapplying, reblotting, repowdering . . .)
would carry you through the day without cracking. The products were within most
people’s easy financial reach, and the effort was free.

T
oday,
all is different. The fashion pages and celebrity magazines no longer represent
living women and men but a sort of meta-world. In the film
The September Issue
, about
Vogue
magazine, there is a wonderfully self-referential scene where the
cameraman is persuaded to become part of the fashion shoot he is filming. He is
of normal shape—that is to say, his stomach is not perfectly flat. When Anna
Wintour, the editor, views the resulting pictures, her immediate reaction is to
call the Photoshop studio to have the offending inches shaved down. They are an
intrusion: they have no place in the world
Vogue
sets out to create. In
Vogue-
world, as in the
world of “procedures,” reality is merely a starting point. Just when the
universal takeup of cosmetic surgery, Botox, and the rest began to shift the
boundaries of what could be achieved in recasting the body, Photoshop began to
revolutionize the photographic image. Ever since, the two have been twinned.

The acknowledged master of Photoshop is Pascal
Dangin, a Frenchman living in New York. He works for (among others)
Vogue
,
Vanity Fair
,
Harper’s Bazaar
,
Allure
,
French Vogue
,
Italian Vogue
,
V
, the
New York Times Magazine
. Many photographers, including
Annie Leibovitz and Steven Meisel, “rarely work with anyone else.” For
Leibovitz, he is a sort of validator of her craft. “Just by the fact that he
works with you, you think you’re good. If he works with you a lot, maybe you
think, Well, maybe I’m worthwhile.”
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Lauren Collins of
The
New Yorker
spent several months shadowing Dangin for
a profile, “Pixel Perfect.” Here she describes him at work on some pictures of
an actress:

“She looks too small
because she’s teeny,” he said. On a drop-down menu, he selected a warping
tool, a device that augments the volume of clusters of pixels. The dress
puffed up pleasingly, as if it had been fluffed by some helpful
lady-in-waiting inside the screen.

Next, Dangin moved the
mouse so the pointer hovered near the actress’s neck. “I softened the
collarbones, but then she started to get too retouched, so I put back some
stuff,” he explained. He pressed a button and her neck got a little bonier.
He clicked more drop-down menus—master opacity stamp, clone stamp. [This]
minimized the actress’s temples, which bulged a little, tightened the skin
around her chin, and excised a fleshy bump from her forehead. She had an
endearingly crooked bottom row of teeth, which Dangin knew better than to
fix. . . .

Another time, Dangin
showed me how he had restructured the chest . . . of an actress
who, to his eye, seemed to have had a clumsy breast enhancement. Like a
double negative, virtual plastic surgery cancelled out real plastic surgery,
resulting in a believable look.
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Even the recent Dove campaign, which uses larger
women to model underwear in an attempt to counteract the relentlessly skinny
ideal promoted by the fashion industry, was Danginized. “Do you know how much
retouching was on that?” Dangin said. “But it was great to do, a challenge, to
keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking
unattractive.”
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