The Effortless-Authentic Beauty Maintenance Matrix™
Oh, this old thing?
There is no such thing as natural beauty. Iconic words from Dolly Parton in Steel Magnolias. It is a statement that becomes truer with time. The natural beauty market category may disagree, as it backstrokes its way through nine-figure profits (or valuations) Scrooge McDuck-syle, and as reply guys’ greasy little fingers are still choreographing their ignorance to the Qwerty waltz of I tHiNk WoMeN lOoK bEtTeR wItHoUt MaKeUp (no you don’t, you just don’t know what makeup looks like). The expectations that natural beauty is demanded to fulfill is a paradox not unlike having your cake and cutting it too. Natural beauty is as close to nature as reality television is to reality — extremely watchable, but mostly because it’s manipulated to be.
Effort is always positioned as the antithesis of beauty, not ugliness. Being ugly is never the offense the way trying too hard will always be. Jolie laide (aka “ugly hot”) offers another avenue of aspiration for those whose eyeballs appreciate uniqueness. Invisibility still remains beauty’s most marketable claim. It disappears right into your skin. You won’t even notice them. Untraceable finish. The most disappointing thing a beautiful person can turn out to be is high maintenance, you know?
There’s no truth, authenticity, or morality to be gleaned from beauty; the simpler truth is that we are all googley-eyed goldfish who like looking at nice-looking things. The tension between performing beauty authentically while navigating a “necessary” amount of vanity is a tight one. Demanding authenticity from what is ostensibly the act of artful obfuscation is…unwise. Expensive injectables for the sake of looking naturally and undetectably refreshed for a semi-permanent amount of time makes a convenient, low-maintenance routine out of what’s considered a high-maintenance beauty treatment. Dramatic, full-beat makeup and fully coiffed hair that can be done at home and washed off at the end of the day reads as high-maintenance. The dissonance between the cause/effect of how beauty looks and how beauty is made renders authenticity and effortlessness irrelevant.
There is no need to create a beauty metaverse — it’s been alive and thumping! Beauty’s meta-morphosis has been made by way of our contradictory attitudes towards our own desires and the pitfalls of desirability. The way we engage with beauty has switched to screens more than in person at this point, and it’s opened up a liminal space between what you see and what it purports itself to be, the pathway of which often does not correlate to the destination. Folks really think we just look airbrushed without all the plucking, scrubbing, snatching, etc. Well not anymore now that everyone is beautying about beauty online.
The Effortless-Authentic Beauty Maintenance Matrix™ maps the practice of beauty as it is interpreted in juxtaposition to how it is achieved or created. The tenets of effortless and therefore authentic beauty belie our ideas of high vs low maintenance — which makes the stakes more fraught as they get confused for one another.
We want so badly to believe in an impossible perfection, even if it means being lied to, as long as we never find out. In fact, the problem is conceptual – there’s an inability to conceive of beauty as a constructed thing, even if people recognize that it’s something that shifts and changes according to time and place, even if it has always required work that takes up very real time and space.
— Daphné B. (from Made Up: A True Story of Beauty Culture Under Late Capialism)
The EABMM is a working scribble. There are so many more things to squeeze between these dots, I’m sure — including all the micro-trends that some app’s algorithm thrusts upon us weekly. These hydra-headed beauty trends born from viral content are confusing to those who believe trends or virality to be a form of legitimate authority and something we have to do for some reason.
Some trends resurface in a new way to update an old thing and re-consume it in a new way, with a new perspective, like a baby-birding regurgitation. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. If only we were able to look at so many other things in our lives we take for granted and look at them renewed and novel. “Clean girl” beauty is just another example of no-makeup makeup. Party girl beauty is just fun, creative makeup. (What they gain in specificity, they lack in nuance.)
Viral trends do not create meaning so much as just more content. Content begets content — more tabs in the great, glitching browser of beauty culture. It hums at a frequency that always seems to imply that those who cannot participate are not enough as they are. Originality and creativity take time, which nobody has patience for. So content becomes overwhelming rather than inspiring, and then we’re left with an iteration of nude-colored lip liner and lip gloss and naming it “gym lips” to give the girlies something new to try. But you have to remember, trends aren’t made for everyone — nothing is. You don’t have to participate in either or any. But if you are unaware of the time and effort involved in this iteration of beauty, if you haven’t put thought and intention into your own personal beauty aesthetic or chosen what form of expression suits you best, that’s when you might feel pressured to.
The eternal glamour of preening, the constant ca-ching of self-optimization — Beauty™ is a self-perpetuating machine with the ability to exploit any narrative for social or economic gain, often at its own expense. It has less to do with actual beauty than it does economics and entertainment. Dismissing beauty simply as a means towards perfection, or rather someone else’s idea of perfection, degrades the message. Beauty is, after all, just another way we communicate our internal selves to the outside world around us. And it’s how we separate ourselves from the most common indignities we’re subjected to based on whatever station in life we’re dealt. If effortless, natural beauty is the only validated end game, sooner or later we all have to accept that natural forces will become our enemy. A body is a lot of things but static it is definitely not. I mean, it’s only natural.