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Category: Beauty Industry

Dying to be beautiful

“Would madam prefer to have blood drawn from her veins and then smeared across her face, or to have her brow scraped with a razor-sharp scalpel blade?”

Welcome to beauty treatments 2017 style — where the aptly named Vampire Facial and Dermaplaning are de rigueur.

Enduring pain for the sake of beauty is of course nothing new. During the 1600s in Europe, fashionable beauties would paint their faces with a white lead powder in order to appear paler.

(It caused their skin to rot.) In the 19th century, Englishwomen consumed the poison arsenic as it gave the skin an interesting glow. (It also, eventually, killed them.)

The recent death of a beauty salon owner who police allege had anaesthetic and breast filler injected into her last week by an unqualified practitioner, is a reminder, however, that we can still fall into the trap of being complacent and unquestioningly compliant.

A radical new treatment known as the Vampire Facelift or Vampire Facial is growing in popularity. (Pic: News Corp)

Despite the euphemistic language often used by the beauty industry (“rejuvenation” and “refresh” are favourites — one would think our body parts were all off on a vacation rather than being poked, prodded and pricked) there are serious risks associated with most treatments (ranging from infection through to severe allergic reactions).

So accustomed have we become to gritting our teeth and enduring in the hope we shall be made more attractive, that it’s become difficult to know when to question therapists.

Television’s no-nonsense Judge Judy once spoke for the uninitiated when she questioned a plaintiff who had received burns to her scalp and significant hair loss due to her hairdresser leaving bleach on her head for too long; “Didn’t you think to point out it was hurting you?”

Oh Your Honour, I thought while watching, you’ve obviously never had a Brazilian wax. Pain-for-pretty is a trade off many women are now conditioned to make.

Brazilian waxes are no longer favoured predominately by women working in the pornography industry; they have become so mainstream that research indicates almost half of undergraduate university students remove all their pubic hair.

We’ve become so accustomed to enduring pain in the pursuit for beauty that it’s difficult to know when to question therapists. (Pic: iStock)

Botox injections aren’t just the secret weapon of Hollywood starlets prepared to paralyse their facial muscles in order to look less lined. Rather, they are the modern-day alternative to a Tupperware party: groups of women gather at a friend’s house and indulge in cheese, crackers, chardonnay — and a cheeky neurotoxin.

Breakfast TV hosts recently scoffed at reports teen girls at a Victorian high school had protested at being told they were to take time out their studies to learn how to walk in stilettos as part of a deportment course. But those killer heels “lengthen the legs” insisted Samantha Armytage.

Sometimes, the risk may instead be to the hip pocket. Since July 1, 2016, a NSW Department of Fair Trading spokesperson reports they have received 77 complaints about beauty services including laser hair removal, eyebrow tattooing (feathering), skin and nail treatments, and cosmetic injectables (fillers): “Complaints generally relate to unsatisfactory performance of the service, dissatisfaction with the results of the treatment, and products and services not matching their description, advertising, or express guarantees.”

And sometimes those who really suffer are those who serve us. In an audit conducted this year by Fair Work inspectors of 1600 hair and beauty salons in NSW, Victoria and Queensland, more than half failed to comply with workplace laws and were found to be underpaying staff (young people and migrant workers were identified as being most at risk).
While it can be fun to flirt with the beauty industry (a date with a bouncy blow-dry is one of my favourite treats) perhaps it’s time to turn our lash-extended critical gaze on to our relationship with it.

No-one needs a lover that makes false promises, is overly time-consuming, drains our finances, or indeed physically harms. It’s ultimately just not a good look.

This post was originally published by The Daily Telegraph, 9/9/17. 

Unilever – because white skin is the best skin.

This week I’d like to share a guest blog post by  Melinda Tankard Reist. Melinda is an author, speaker, commentator, blogger and advocate for women and girls.

As I have just returned from an amazing repeat visit working with Indigenous girls in Griffith, rural NSW ( I shared the first in this series of workshops in a previous post) Melinda’s words particularly resonated with me.

I too have questioned the beauty industry’s obsession with making us feel (quite literally) uncomfortable in our own skin.  Back in 2007 I also offered the short film “A Girl Like Me” as stimulus for this discussion. I will also share it again here: Melinda’s post to follow.

MTR-193x300Promoting white supremacy

Here at the MTR blog we’re not exactly what you’d call fans of the global corporation Unilever.

Unilever has been named and shamed here before for its sexist advertising through the Lynx/Axe brand as highlighted here and here, for its hypocrisy in promoting so-called “real beauty” through its Dove brand while presenting women in degrading and objectifying ways, for its Slimfast products promoting rapid weight loss (because real beauty only comes in size skinny) and for promoting skin whitening products to dark-skinned women (Unilever – to the rescue of dark not skinny women everywhere!).

Now Unilever has taken its white supremacist ways a step further, with a new Facebook application which enables Indian men to lighten their profiles, while at the same time promoting its Vaseline brand of skin lightening products. The company spruiks the product using a Bollywood star whose face is split in half, showing the (unsightly) dark side and the (magically transformed) light side.

vaseline-skin-white-app

Unilever appears to have no shame. One of its earlier skin bleaching products was called “White Beauty”. Playing on certain racial insecurities by telling dark skinned people that they can never really be beautiful – that’s what Unilever is doing. For some great Unilever dark skin despising action, check out this You Tube clip.

Of course, it’s not just Unilever. Garnier, Nivea and L’Oreal (‘because you’re worth white skin’. OK, I made that up) do the same. These products promote ethnocentric stereotypes about the superiority of white people.

Sociology professor T. K. Oommen at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi told Agence France Presse:

Lighter skin is associated with the ruling social class, with wealth, with general betterment. Skin lightening creams for women have been a cosmetics staple in India for decades, so when a men’s cream debuted a few years ago, its success was almost ensured.

Even Indian children are internalising these dark-skin shaming messages, with 12-14 year olds constituting 13 percent of India’s skin whitening market.

The products are also dangerous, causing kidney damage and thin skin. They have also been connected to cancer (see: The hidden costs of skin whitening products).

Indian dermatologist Dr Aamer Khan has seen a rise in women suffering from serious skin conditions as a result of skin bleaching.

I see patients with hypo-pigmentation (loss of pigment) resulting in white patches and hyper-pigmentation leading to darker areas – both are caused by skin bleaching agents. People buy these creams that offer false hopes, but the fact is, there is no safe way to whiten your skin. There needs to be more stringent moderating of these products, as it is a very serious problem.

This is a perfect quote illustrating the hypocrisy, also from The Guardian:

…in an era of increasing transparency, parent companies like Unilever can’t hide behind a barrage of sub-brands anymore. They can’t promote skin-lightening in India and self-esteem in England and expect to retain any credibility when it comes to their corporate brand.

There’s a campaign calling on Facebook to remove racist applications. Why not add your name to it today.

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