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Today we're going to talk about makeup and makeup tutorials.
Now, as a dude, makeup has always been a part of my life,
but not really a direct part.
I rarely wear it.
I used to on "Know Your Meme."
Some of those times it was obvious,
but most of the time it wasn't.
And that's really the only kind of makeup
that I know how to do, sort of like on camera
no makeup, makeup.
I have a strict no makeup policy for Idea Channel, which
is probably no surprise if you've
seen that one stress zit that I get sometimes.
It's not a judgment on makeup, I just
don't think of myself that way.
But, I will say, the process of applying it,
when I did wear it, was, sure, about covering up
that stress zit or whatever, but also about becoming myself,
becoming another version of myself
for camera that wasn't super different
but was distinct in some way, which is what I'm interested
in, this connection between makeup and self
that I think many people, or at the very least, I, deeply
misunderstand sometimes, and which YouTube makeup tutorials
kind of lay bare, ironically, like when
you watch Michelle Phan or Zoella applying cosmetics
on camera.
And here I think I'm talking mostly
about beauty tutorials, drugstore makeovers, every day
makeup tips, not special effects or costume makeup tutorials,
though you could definitely argue that they do factor here.
Anyway, watching people in these videos,
you are watching someone become themselves,
or showing someone else on their face
how to become themselves using their own face as a stand-in
for their audiences.
And even though that process involves
a lot of talk of product and color and shape,
there's also this other largely unspoken talk
about the self, its elusiveness, and how this stuff might even
be able to help you track it down.
I started thinking about this last year when Anna Icona
uploaded, "How to Put On Your Face,"
which if you haven't seen it, you gotta.
It reads sort of like the makeup tutorial
version of Steven Soderbergh's, "Schizopolis,"
where instead of reciting their lines,
actors announce their intention or subtext,
reassurance that it is all about having fun,
not looking a certain way, but how looking a certain way
makes you feel, followed by a vague statement connecting
makeup tutorials to a barely sensible post modern concept.
And it talks about each step in her makeup routine
as though it is a component of her attitude
and not some bit of kit.
Now to start off, dabble your eyes with optimism.
And though this is a comparison that Anna was probably
not going for it, sort of makes me think of my grandmother, who
I have many very strong memories of saying,
I have to put my face on before leaving the house as a kid.
This was confusing to me for two reasons.
First in the Amelia Bedelia sense of,
your face is already on grandma.
But the second confusion is one that I still
contend with today, why does one have to put on another face?
What's wrong with the one that's already there?
There's a tendency for a lot of dudes,
myself included, to think that saying things
like, you don't need makeup, you're beautiful without it,
is a compliment.
But it's sort of like saying, when
you adjust your appearance, I see it as an attempt
to please others, not yourself.
In reality, all of those things, appearance, self, others,
are bound up in one another.
We've arrived at our current attitudes
after a long history connecting all of them with makeup.
There's evidence going way back, as far as prehistoric times,
that people, mostly men in some places,
applied color to their faces to emphasize their features.
But by post enlightenment, the Western, and eventually
American, attitudes about cosmetics became complicated.
In Victorian England, makeup with thought highly improper.
For the longest time cosmetics were more almost
home remedy than product.
They were even called "kitchen physic."
And over time their effects became associated
with morale and good health.
Look good, feel good.
But even during the long transition
from recipe to product, makeup maintained an association
with purity.
It was only the clean or pure wearer
who, through the application of cosmetics,
could obtain true beauty, which was largely
associated with the idea of natural beauty
that you might imagine comes packaged
with all sorts of troubling ideas
about race, some of which we are still
working through today given the West's
fair skin centric global domination of the beauty
industry.
Around World War II after makeup became
productized and industrialized, it was viewed and advertised
as an important component of maintaining morale
during the war effort.
But one look at some of the advertisements and one
can't help but wonder if the source of that morale
is supposed to be satisfying self-expression or prettying up
for the approval of others.
MALE NARRATOR: Soften the effect with your finger tip.
See how much more personality shows in your face.
Feminism of the '60s cast makeup
as a tool of the patriarchy for perpetrating
the social and commercial subjugation of women.
That idea comes up against more recent ideas
about bodily autonomy.
Each individual body, not all bodies on mass,
is a political battleground.
This necessarily complicates any definitive statement
about what makeup does.
It's just simply not that straightforward.
Also around this time, there was a resurgence
in the number of male makeup users in Europe and America
at least, thanks in no small part
to celebrity culture and its related economic forces.
This is very hard to do.
And I am not good at it.
But also thanks largely to the gay community, which again,
you could argue, had much of its unique style
co-opted by commercial forces.
This is even harder on this side.
Given all this, what can we responsibly say makeup does?
What does it enable us to do?
Let's turn back to the other place now.
Makeup enables us to do a lot, much of the same stuff
our clothes enables us to do.
It advertises social group, political leaning, lifestyle.
Significantly, and arguably in a manner
distinct from fashion writ large, cosmetics
also encourages community.
Since long before beauty blogs and their amazing audiences,
it's been significant that much makeup knowledge has
been passed between people because it's
been forbidden, deeply personal, or complicated.
In much of the reading that I did for this episode-- sources
in the dooblidoo, by the way-- there
was all kinds of reference to magic and spells.
And forgiving any kind of femininity
inspired exota slash mysticism, this attitude towards beauty
feels, I don't know, present.
It underlies so much beauty media,
tutorials chief among them.
When one learns cosmetics, they learn not
only a set of techniques for applying a set of signs
directly onto their body, but also
what we've all sort of agreed those signs
mean, how they constitute what Camilla Power calls
a playful, shared fiction of identity,
how they contribute to the magic of institutional reality.
When one learns cosmetics, one learns
to stick with our magic metaphor, some sort of weirdly
codified conjuring spell, where the thing conjured is
both internal and external to the caster.
What makeup tutorials provide, especially given
their availability and ubiquity, is some seemingly endless set
of techniques and signs for designing and conjuring
this speculative self.
However, they might also provide encouragement
of what Bernadette Wegenstein calls the cosmetic gaze, where
humans "view their own or other's bodies
as incomplete projects that await
the intervention of technologies of enhancement, which
will help better approximate their true self
or natural potential."
For Wegenstein, these technologies
don't stop at makeup, but include all image enhancing,
self-editing, digital technologies and media.
When the infinity of looks documented by tutorials
is added to the infinity of angles and lenses and color
correction and lighting, does the potential
for viewing our own or others' bodies as incomplete grow?
Maybe.
But so too does our knowledge of what part
we might play in that shared fiction of a reality, how
we might play it and with whom.
Perhaps, as is the case with their subject matter,
it is irresponsible to make any definitive statement
about what makeup tutorials do.
What do you guys think?
What can we responsibly say makeup does,
and how to make tutorials fit into that?
Let us know in the comments.
And it would be beautiful if you wanted to subscribe.
If you do celebrate it, I hope your val slash galantines
day was very romantic and that all of your ships have sailed.
Let's see what you had to say about korrasami.
Steve the leg suggests that Nick may be asked the Korra creators
to tone down korrasami because they were
afraid of offending viewers.
And there were a lot of people who took this is step further
and talked about how Korra is carried in a lot of countries
where non-heterosexual relationships are strictly
verboten.
And so in sort of fear of not being picked up
for other seasons, or not being further distributed,
they didn't go explicit with the end of book IV.
And there were a lot of really good responses to this.
And the one that I think is the most interesting
has to do with the fact that for the last several seasons
Korra has been online only.
And so you got to wonder how strong the economic pressures
really are, right?
Like they-- I think they have even said--and someone please
correct me if I'm wrong-- that they are taking a break,
that they don't have another Avatar season planned.
Why not just go for it?
Linnirivercat2777, and a lot of other people,
pointed out that maybe korrasami could
have been pushed further if there
were more development of it in the main story line of Korra,
that the writing, even though some people, and myself
included, see there as being hints of this thing,
that it was a sort of out of the blue.
And Vinceissomething and Oliviaportella
also talk about the related idea of queer baiting,
that this was maybe done just intentionally
to get the kind of press that they have been receiving.
And I don't know if I buy that, and neither, it seems,
do a lot of the people who are suggesting that it's possible,
just sort of throwing it out there.
But, it is an important question to ask,
you know, whether or not like when this kind of thing
happens, when it is and isn't sort of true representation.
And it seems like that's a big question related to Korrasami.
So these are great comments.
Links to these and all the others in the dooblidoo.
Iwritefanfiction, atsacredlist, paveldupont,
and a bunch of other people point out
that while fanfiction might be great for kind
of pushing the envelope of major market media,
it's also great for recombining characters and situations
in an endless array, that you can
do all of the permutations of all of the characters
and all of the situations throughout popular culture,
and that you get new stories that way.
And iwritefanfiction takes it one step further
and says that it also means that there
is a kind of built in audience for the things
that you're working on because they're
going to be interested in those characters and situations
before they're interested in your name as a writer
because no one knows who you are.
And that it's kind of almost like there's
a built in like writer's workshop in that
side of the community, which is an idea that I love.
I think that's great.
Megan Getts writes about how fanfiction
might be addressing problems of representation,
but also addresses this want of audiences
to experience the same kind of thing over and over again.
And I think that we all have this relationship
with something.
There's some piece of media or some moment
that we want to just sit in and experience repeatedly.
And fanfiction, what it allows you to do
is it allows you to experience say, a relationship between two
characters, not just the same way
repeatedly, but repeatedly many, many different right
ways, which I never expected-- or never thought of.
And that's really interesting and cool.
Also on the subject of a ship's, Meghan's OTP
is Stephen and Connie from Steven Universe, which yes, I
agree.
And if you're out there and not watching Steven Universe, what
are you doing?
You have to.
There were so many good ships in the comments
that we are never going to get to all of them.
So we'll collect a bunch and put them in the dooblidoo.
But there are a couple that I just
wanted to talk about because they're so good.
Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect.
That's-- I love it.
That's amazing.
Jelsa, which I had never heard of.
Jack Frost, from the "Rise of the Guardians," and Elsa,
from "Frozen."
Yes, they have lots of things in common, the color blue.
Also, of course, and finally, me and the dooblidoo.
I'll make sure to invite everybody to the wedding.
This week's episode was brought to you
by the hard work of these shipping magnates.
We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a subreddit links
in my beloved.
And the tweet of the week comes from KPHawkin,
who points us towards a "New York Times" piece,
asking whether or not Twitter is the new pillory, the new place
to shame people in public for their wrongdoing.
Hey, why not?
And hey, in case you were wondering,
this episode of Idea Channel was brought to you by Squarespace.
The latest version of their platform, Squarespace 7,
has a completely redesigned interface, integrations
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If you want to try Squarespace, go to Squarespace.com
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