So. I was reading about Nigella Lawson’s ‘makeup free’ Vogue cover in The Guarniad, the subhed (or subhead, or I suppose if you prefer the dek) of which is The magazine’s former food editor has posed without her familiar vamp makeup and hair, but looking every bit as confident as she did with her ’courtface’ on.
I was initially perplexed that Ms. Lawson had posed without hair. It seemed difficult to accomplish as a pose, just for a photo shoot—even for Vogue. One supposes she could just wear a hat. At any rate, it appears that the word vamp is also meant to apply to her hair, although Your Humble Blogger would not have described her hair that way. Or, for that matter, her usual makeup—it is a Style defined, I would have said, by a certain well-prepared and sultry elegance, rather than vampiness. I admit, though, that I know little about these matters.
I did want to draw attention to the idea of the photograph as makeup free, or to use the original scare-quotes ‘makeup free’. Sali Hughes writes that “she is wearing lots [of makeup], as are most celebrities posting ‘no makeup’ shots”. I assume this is generally true—but in this photograph, Ms. Lawson looks as made-up as she usually does, if in a different style:
And, of course, if she really were wearing no (or minimal) makeup under the kind of lights a photographer would use for Vogue, Ms. Lawson would look terrible, and probably look deathly ill as well. Which doesn’t mean that news outlets should repeat the no-makeup thing.
But I really bring it up for two reasons: first to do the rant about gender and makeup that I evidently have not done here. And that rant is, essentially, that I am outraged by the expectations that women will wear makeup and wear it well, and that men will not wear makeup at all. Of course this falls more heavily on women (no, really? a patriarchy?) who have to learn how to use the stuff and purchase it and carry it around and live up to unrealistic expectations and all that stuff. We all know that, right? The expectation that women will wear makeup daily and nightly and wear it well is almost bafflingly bad—it would be bafflingly bad if it weren’t part and parcel of the expectations of women performing femininity generally, what with the shoes and no pockets and starting at size zero and all the rest of it.
So I sometimes feel bad complaining about men not being expected to wear makeup. I want to avoid making it sound like there is some sort of equivalence here; there isn’t. My complaint is just that I have bad skin, and when I get dressed up to go out, a little foundation would not go amiss. Well, probably would not go amiss; even with doing stage makeup now and then, I don’t have much practice at it. I certainly never learned the skill of making-up-to-look-not-very-made-up, which is how I would want to look. Most women, I would think, have made up their faces something like five thousand times by the time they are my age.
And this isn’t, as it happens, ‘women’s work’ like cooking or laundry or even knitting, where boys aren’t encouraged to learn it, but men who can do it get (currently) more or less equal amounts of praise and mockery. Were YHB to wear a little foundation and some lipstick and a touch of rouge out to dinner, even as well-applied as Ms. Lawson’s usual face is, scorn and derision would be pretty much the only possible response. Oh, I could go in drag, I suppose, and get such scarce support as exists for that, but my point is that there is no butch version of makeup, no cosmetics that comport with masculinity at all. Which makes no logical sense—but what, in that whole realm of gender presentation, makes any logical sense at all?
Oh, and the other reason I brought it up was so that I could show this photograph of the New Image for Nigella Lawson, the one that Ms. Hughes described as “relaxed”:
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
“relaxed”, huh.
I have not been in the habit of wearing makeup, and fortunately have not taken a career path in which it’s required. Mostly. There is some argument among independent knitting designers as to whether one should wear makeup for photoshoots. (I’m not in favor of me wearing makeup. My audience isn’t necessarily a makeup-wearing one–but that’s a different argument.)
I digress.
There’s an interesting thing that I’ve read recently that I am inclined to believe – that middle class white cis women (such as me) are more able to get away with not wearing makeup because of privilege. Again, depending on career path; I suspect that if I had gone the corporate career route or the entertainment route, I would have had to learn how to wear understated makeup and do my hair and all that sort of thing.