Beauty, Class, Wealth

As beauty standards rise, is it only the wealthy who can keep up?

I always hated my teeth so when a friend suggested I get veneers a dozen years ago, I did. The current cost for a great set of veneers, meaning that they look as natural as possible, is about $70,000. ¹

Veneers are an expensive “treatment” compared to estheticians (facials, make-up, etc.), personal trainers, hair colorists, and the entire brigade of people and products that keep the wealthy looking as good as their genetics permit. Then there’s cosmetic surgery, which is in another category of expense.

It costs a lot of money and time to look attractive, especially as we get older. So it should follow that the more unequally wealth is distributed, the more unequally beauty will be distributed. And if you go to places where the wealthy gather––the expensive hair salon on Madison Avenue where I get my hair cut –– and then go to the places where the wealthy are scarce––the M&M store in Times Square––you will see an inequality of what modern Western culture has anointed as attractive.

My thoughts above were sparked by portions of a discussion I had with Laura Kennedy about her terrific book Some Of Our Parts,

I inhaled Laura’s book in 48 hours and was sorry that it ended. Its theme is how we add up to something greater than our labels––labels we choose, labels we think we choose, and labels given to us by others.

Laura is a former beauty editor and a sharp observer of the class and beauty divide. Laura’s comments below are from our conversation, edited lightly.

(Note: The video of my entire conversation with Laura is at the end of this post. We discuss many topics covered in her book including feminism, autism, and how to live an examined life.)

Class

“If you look at where I come from in Ireland, a working-class beauty aesthetic is very high effort. It's lots of makeup, very expertly applied. It's effortful hair that smells great and is shiny and is voluminous. And there's lots of it.

It's wearing sequins on a Wednesday night. You go hard into your aesthetic because that is signaling status in that context. If you reject everything about that sort of feminine aesthetic, you're probably at a disadvantage in the workplace, at the school gate, trying to establish social connection with others in your community. It's part of the ritual of belonging, of socializing.

Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and Olivia Newton-John transformed in Grease

In contrast, there are the kind of women who would say ‘I'm above this’, ‘this is shallow’, ‘this is for people who are vain and who are upholding patriarchal ideas of what femininity should look like’. Often those women in my observation come from a more privileged, wealthier sort of university educated background, whereby they have other routes to signal belonging, often because they exist in communities of other women who agree with them. It’s all responding to the incentives around us.

Traceless Transformation

Beauty standards definitely do vary. They’re obviously culturally and socioeconomically relative. But I think what's really interesting about them is that the nature of an ideal means the horizon always has to recede as you approach it. So we went through a period from like 2015 on when obvious augmentation was associated with beauty.

You’d have wealthy American celebrities who had had very obvious lip filler and this was considered appealing, or BBL surgery or whatever else, but as soon as those treatments became more accessible to people with lower incomes and lower status, the horizon shifted again. Because you cannot have the standard of beauty among the wealthy and influential being accessible to the poor and non-influential. It ceases to be their idealised conception of beauty as soon as that happens.

So it has to ratchet up and become inaccessible again. We’re at a level of inaccessibility now when it comes to aesthetic surgical intervention that is just unprecedented. I wrote a piece for the Irish Times recently about the acceleration in aesthetic interventions over the last five years. There’s been a bunch of famous female faces of late that have turned up to events suddenly looking the way they looked 20 years ago, but better. And it's not clear what's been done here, but it's so clear that many things have been done here.

This is the new level of aesthetic aspiration, which is traceless transformation and change. That is something you only have access to through exorbitant sums of money – in the hundreds of thousands of dollars – and social access, because you need to know who can do this for you. That creates a totally insurmountable barrier between rich and poor in a way that's absolutely visible.

Everyone has the right to do whatever they want with their body, and they should. In a world where there’s significant personal advantage to chasing beauty standards, I hold it against nobody to do so. But this also creates a dissonance, a judgment and a feeling of personal inadequacy in the average woman looking at it. And that kind of thing, I think, can only make women feel terrible about themselves.

The Game of Beauty

There is a way for individuals to empower themselves through beauty, and I don't mean that in a “magaziney” way. I mean it literally. I can get into rooms if I look right (and by ‘right’ I don’t mean conventionally attractive, but able to pass according to the aesthetic norms inside that room). I can change how people see me if I augment how I look. Should I have to do that? No. But by doing it, can I become more powerful in the world? Yes, unfortunately, and that's a reality. Sometimes, particularly in feminist circles, by pointing out the reality of how things are, you’re viewed as endorsing that reality but I'm just describing it.

In these sorts of spaces, it's not necessarily that you’re trying to be a person who is perceived to be beautiful by those around you. It’s more complex than that -- there is a very high-level intra-female signaling game going on whereby beautiful is the ideal. That is what people who win the genetic lottery are, or people who win the genetic lottery and also come from intergenerational wealth who can augment themselves to an elevated level of aesthetic aspiration. But the game is a pursuit of and an awareness of that standard – by signalling this awareness, you are recognised as one of ‘us’ by the people who value the standard.

In the context of working in beauty journalism in London, it's knitted so deeply with social coding, socioeconomics, class, and this conception of passing. Among women who like makeup, if you can do perfect winged eyeliner, that is an absolute flex. It's not something necessarily that people who don't care about beauty will be interested in. This sort of thing is not necessarily about being seen as, you know, ‘I have arrived at beautiful’, but it's kind of, ‘I am groomed’; ‘I have ingroup knowledge’; ‘I belong here’.

It's these sorts of things that signal to other people within that context that you pass, you fit, you belong, which is a much more complex and slightly-easier-to-achieve, though not easy-to-achieve, thing than reaching this sublime ideal of ‘I am beautiful’.

We are always doing more than one thing when we choose how to present physically in the world. ‘How can I construct an appearance that's authentic to me?’, we think. But of course, it's never authentic to you because it's a combination of reflecting who you feel you are, pandering to or counterarguing who other people think you are and trying to express who you'd like to be. And that's how we present in the world. It's never just one thing.

It's not ‘this is who I am and this is my style and this is how I dress’. It's always signaling something. And it's always in part signaling our desire as opposed to our reality.”

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What about men

If, as Laura writes, ever-higher standards of unattainable beauty can make some women feel inadequate and terrible about themselves, what about men?

Mostly we hear about the despair of low status young men–––not wealthy, not well educated, not genetically gifted––who resent the lack of women who are available to them.

What interests me is the increase in men getting facial surgery, pec implants, botox, hair implants, and so on. Some men who do so may be celebrities who make a living from their appearance. Some may think that looking younger will help them in their careers. ²

But some men are getting treatments and surgeries to compete in the mating game. It raises the question of whether there’s a quiet cosmetic surgery/treatment/appearance arms race going on.

Will beauty standards for men follow the rise in beauty standards for women? It seems likely to me. What did you think about that?

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About Laura Kennedy: Laura’s labels include

• child of a heroic working-class single mother,

• neurodiverse,

• Irish,

• white half of a biracial couple,

• holder of a PhD in the philosophy of psychology,

• former beauty editor,

• current resident of Canberra,

• and a woman skeptical of “you-can-have-it-all” feminism.

Laura writes personal essays on

Peak Notions with Laura Kennedy

––I don’t miss a single one––and we’ve collaborated before on our varying ideas of success.

In the course of our conversation about her book, Laura called the two of us “Substack buds,” a label I will own with pride.

1. My dentist is a master. When I called him the “Vermeer of Veneers,” I added that “I bet you get that often.”

He said I was the first ever to make that pun. Evidence that I don’t always read the room well.

2. I found different varying estimates of how fast the men’s market for procedures and surgeries is growing. But the point is it’s growing and is no longer seen as such a stigma in certain circles.

I also found a bizarre article from 2019 in New York Magazine’s The Cut. It’s title is “How Many Bones Would You Break To Get Laid?”

The article may be paywalled. It’s basically about involuntary celibates-incels, desperate to improve their chances with women through surgery and their idolization of a particular surgeon who’s willing to go the extra nip and tuck.

To give you a flavor:

“The surgeon’s not sure exactly why a patient would want testicles of dinosaur-egg size. But that’s true of many of his procedures, which he tends to design in response to patients’ requests. If his practice had a slogan, it would be ‘We don’t care why you want it,’’ he tells me. ‘And I suspect patients seek me out because they know I won’t ask them. I don’t see it as my job to cast a judgment’.”

“[the incels were also convinced their lives would improve significantly if they could somehow become Chad [an incel name for a guy who get all the good looking girls]. They tried “gymceling” and “steroidmaxxing” (incel-speak for bodybuilding and taking steroids). They tried jelqing (penis-stretching exercises) and mewing (chewing hard foods to bulk up the masseter muscles, said by British orthodontist Mike Mew to augment the jawline). They tried pulling on their faces to reshape them. They got into skin care.”