With headlines screaming ‘20 celebrities with or without makeup!’, BuzzFeed is a store of our worst celebrity culture tropes. Yes, we’ve made progress: the campaign against airbrushing – perpetuating unrealistic and dangerous aspirations for self-image – has grown from a minority voice to a popular ethic.
Indeed, the most recent chapter of the BeyonceÌ-epic saw the online community defending her right to acne after pre-air-brushed images from the L’Oreal campaign were leaked. “BeyonceÌ has skin. Did you think otherwise?” – ran one comment. “She still looks absolutely beautiful”. It is heartening to see that ‘imperfections’ (and I use that word begrudgingly – the conflation of ‘perfection’ with superficial qualities is itself problematic) don’t threaten to dethrone the Queen of Pop. The Queen is human. Shouldn’t we welcome this development in celebrity culture? Perhaps so.
However, there is a really discomfiting strand in this new obsession with the celebrity au naturelle. In my view, BeyonceÌ supporters are somewhat in denial – the BeyonceÌ brand is safe whilst her ‘bad skin’ remains just a ‘bad skin day’. The real ‘natural beauty’ that captivates Bey’s fans is inextricably bound up with an airbrushed aesthetic. You might remember the hit YouTube documentary Year of 4 in which we followed round the ‘natural’, everyday Bey on her hectic schedule. This was just about as ‘candid’ as an Instagram selfie. I agree that BeyonceÌ is a strong female role model – most agree that her ‘natural’ beauty lies in her on-stage energy, her theatricality, and her drive – but let’s not pretend that the face on the cover of the new Flawless album correlates in anyway with the acne scars of leaked photographs. That’s not actually what people – at least collectively in the media machine – want from their Queen. When Uma Thurman walked out onto the red carpet recently with no mascara – headlines spun. ‘What has Uma Thurman done to her face?’ It was as if the media were saying, “Well she could have made a bit more effort…”
Natural beauty is the new black, but how ‘natural’ is it? It’s being fetishised by the media. ‘15 ways to be more naturally beautiful’ aÌ€ la BuzzFeed. Serums, diets, pills – ‘natural beauty’ is being commodified by the beauty market. More than ever, ‘natural beauty’ is becoming something as unobtainable as the cover girl body. The BeyonceÌ story is one such example. And, as the case of Uma Thurman shows – ‘fresh faced’ is apparently only okay for the young, whose naked features hardly deviate from the ‘ideal’ at all.
We’re left scratching our heads wondering why our own ‘natural beauty’ isn’t quite so ‘beautiful’, even when we’re young. Cue Scarlett Johansson: ‘See Scarlett Johansson’s Fresh-Face Look!’ reads The Daily Mail. Johansson is being celebrated for wearing no makeup at the Oscars practice. But this is nothing more than one catalogue look, manicured by a team of stylists. We’re losing touch with what’s really natural and our aspirations for self-image only continue to inflate #instagram #nomakeup
