Sometimes, pop culture and science meet in ways that are pretty ridiculous. The latest example is the renewed attention being given to a study conducted in 2005 by doctors Leif Nelson and Evan Morrison and published in the February 2005 Psychological Science (the abstract of the study can be found here). The study says that in essence, when economic times are hard—or in what the researchers called “times of resource scarcity”—men prefer women who are heavier by a whopping two or three pounds. So ladies, the strategy is clear: hit the Hometown Buffet near you every night for a week, then hang out at the unemployment office and you’re sure to meet that future Mr. Right…or Mr. Sort-of-OK.
All kidding aside, is this science? It seems like the worst kind of pop sociology to us—data applied liberally to a barely-known aspect of human behavior and then broad stroke conclusions drawn. But Dr. Terry Pettijohn II has a theory about what might be at work here. He’s a psychologist who has done research in the same vein and his opinion is that when men are flush, they are attracted more to women who are childlike: slender, willowy, nubile. But when times get rough, men become more like women, who are hard-wired to gravitate toward strong men who can be good providers for them and their offspring. Pettijohn thinks that a few extra pounds make a woman seem sturdier, tougher, more able to survive hard times. Translation: when money is short and jobs are insecure, men want a woman whom they don’t have to “take care of.”
So what does this mean? That the recession is going to be a boom time for women with normal bodies of all shapes and sizes and the decline of the size-zero waif? Probably not. Studies like this inevitably overreach, and this one is probably no exception. We suspect something else may be at work here: low self-esteem on the part of economically depressed men. We live in a culture where men in particular are defined by what they do for a living and how they provide for their loved ones. After all, men can’t make babies. Instead, they build, create, innovate and invent (women do those things, too, but bear with us). When they are unemployed or in dire career straits, men feel less attractive because society tells them they are less desirable. So they unconsciously set their sights lower, figuring a truly “hot” woman wouldn’t be attracted to them because perhaps their financial desperation is written on their faces, their slumped shoulders, and their worn shoes.
That makes as much sense to us as any theory and ties in perfectly with our beliefs about Inner Beauty: when you feel confident, you are beautiful to yourself and others. With so many millions of men and women feeling powerless in this terrible economy, it’s going to be a challenge for this generation to find their own inner beauty and self-esteem…and it’s better if they ignore questionable pop-culture science like this.
No surprise here: women differ from men in the way our brains respond to beauty. In yet another blow to the attempts to create a gender-neutral society where men and women are basically identical reflections of one another in different clothing, a new study has discovered that when they see beauty (as in a painting in a museum), men’s brains light up in the areas linked to absolute spacial location, while women’s brains activate in areas connected to determining relative location. It’s a subtle difference that may reflect the evolutionary differences in the two genders.
The study, which can be found here, was conducted at Spain’s Universitat de les Illes Balears and published on February 23 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was small but provocative. Ten men and 10 women looked at images of modern and classic paintings, as well as photographs of landscapes, artifacts and urban scenes, while the researchers recorded their reactions with a magnetoencephalograph, which monitors real-time neural activity by measuring magnetic fields generated by electrical currents in the brain. This is superior to using functional magnetic resonance imaging, which reads blood flow to brain areas and has been somewhat discredited recently.
Across the board, beauty produced coordinate-processing activation in both men and women, and category-processing in women exclusively. The reseachers speculate that from an evolutionary and survival perspective, this may stem from differing roles that males and females played in hunter-gatherer societies. Men were the hunters, and so had to develop strong spatial senses to find and kill prey. Women, meanwhile, had to survey the landscape for safe tubers, roots, berries and nuts to gather, and so had to use comparison-centric parts of their brains more adept not only at location but memory and analysis. Fast forward 5000 years and you get different brain responses to beauty.
Interestingly, the differences don’t seem to affect how men and women preceive or react to beauty. Both sexes described their perceptions in the same way and described beauty as pleasurable and stimulating. So from a Beauty-Brain Loop perspective, what does this mean for us? It does suggest that we women are wired to find beauty on more relative, subtle terms in both men and women—it isn’t as absolute as a perfectly chiseled chest in a man or a long pair of legs in a woman. We’re more apt to think in terms of beauty in categories and to find different types of beauty in our environment, while men’s definition is more narrow. Hence the male role in the dating scene as the hunter, the search-and-conquer soldier on a mission.
We won’t suggest that a study like this defines anything about how we ultimately see beauty. First of all, it was small and needs to be replicated on a larger scale. Second, we don’t believe in being so reductive about women, men or beauty. We are partially shaped by our hard-wired brains, of course, but also by our experience and our choices. How we choose to define beauty is ultimately what determines the beauty we see in others and ourselves.
It’s not often that we give shout-outs to other websites, but we’ve simply got to do it for this one: AdiosBarbie.com. It’s a site for women of all body types who want to love their bodies and thumb their noses at the “size zero is beautiful” obsessions of pop culture. Created by editors Ophira Edut and Pia Guerrero, who collaborated on the book Body Outlaws: Young Women Write About Body Image and Identity, the site is all about healthy body image, debunking disrespectful and objectifying media images of women, and promoting community and sharing of personal stories about dealing with everything from self-esteem issues to eating disorders.
We love the message and spirit of this site. After all, in The Beauty Prescription, we devoted part of a chapter to talking about the negative power of Barbie to foster realistic stereotypes of women. Basically, a team of Canadian researchers applied Barbie’s proportions to a real woman and determined that if she was flesh, Barbie would have a colon so small that she would die of malnutrition. So much for Ken, Skipper, that cool Corvette and all the other accessories. They don’t help much if you’re so thin you’re dead.
That’s the importance of websites like Adios Barbie. They seed the soil of our popular mindset with the idea that it’s good to be different, confident and daring—and bad to obsess over every single ounce while despising your reflection in the mirror. Part magazine, part blog, part social network, part store and all saucy resource, this is a web resource that we can’t recommend too highly.
Documentary films are held to a different standard than the latest summer box office fluff or even the “serious” films of November and December. Because they are journalistic in nature, docs are allowed to be quirky and relentless and violate taboos that would never wash in a typical Big Hollywood film. For example, take any romantic comedy. Are the main characters ever homely? Even remotely? We’re not talking about the quirky sidekicks; they’re allowed to be goofy-looking and have zero fashion sense. But the leads, especially in a film like “He’s Just Not That Into You” are uniformly gorgeous. When you look at films and TV series that all feature great-looking young guys and gals, you start to wonder if beautiful actors and actresses are a finite resource that we’re about to run out of.
But we digress. The point is, Hollywood rarely does ugly, and it certainly doesn’t do deformity. That’s why it was so wonderful to see the film “”Smile Pinki” win the Oscar for Best Documentary, Short Subject. The 40-minute film, which follows a poor girl in India who receives free surgery to correct her cleft lip, brings the viewer a microcosm of a larger world in which thousands of children from impoverished areas receive free surgery each year to correct cleft lips and cleft palates—birth defects which, in their own cultures, can mark them as pariahs and open them to discrimination and misery. The film is so deeply touching because Pinki, the young girl whom the film follows, is so beautiful even before she receives her new face from plastic surgeon Dr. Subodh Kumar Singh. Her smile is radiant throuhout the film, before and after.
But “Smile Pinki”’s victory highlights something more subtle than the hopeful trend that Hollywood will reward inner beauty as well as outer beauty. The film and the efforts to help the more than 4 million children around the world born with cleft lips and cleft palates reveal to us that beauty matters. These children, by and large, are otherwise healthy. Why make such a fuss over a face that doesn’t conform to our innate beauty standards? Doesn’t character matter more than anything else?
No, though it should. We haven’t come that far yet and perhaps we never will. We are still swayed by beauty and repelled by those who don’t fit the ideal, and this is especially true in the Indian provinces we see in the film, where children born with a defect are often shunned. Beauty does matter. It still suggests virtue and worthiness to us, and while we would never suggest that children born with a visible cosmetic problem should just live with it, the question should be, “Why is it so hard for them to do just that?” That’s not just a question for the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, but for the U.S. as well. We don’t exactly reach out to our disabled—the people who remind us that we’re all just a genetic dirty trick away from a missing limb or a cleft lip. We don’t make movies about them, and we should. We should celebrate their beauty, which is just as great as Kate Winslet’s or Hugh Jackman’s. Maybe one day, someone else will make a movie like “Smile Pinki” that wins Best Picture. Until then…
She’s the toast of the country and the object of admiration of millions of women, African-American and otherwise. She’s the new First Lady, Michelle Obama. Already, the nation is dissecting and obsessing over her appearance and fashion sense; her hair stylist, Johnny Wright, already has a development deal for his own reality show. Clearly, we’re on the cusp of a new era not only in style but in the concept of female beauty in this country.
We say that because for the first time, we have a black first lady, a fact which puts African-American features, hair and style front and center. For most of the past century, for mainstream America, female beauty has equated to a certain set of characteristics: Caucasian, tall, model-thin, large-busted, and charming. Intellect wasn’t really a requirement, and certainly African-American women—even stunning ones like Beyonce or Halle Berry—were sort of on the periphery. But now we have a woman at the crux of American social and political life who’s not only black, but curvaceous, strong-boned, educated, brilliant (she’s a Harvard Law grad and an author in her own right) and clearly just as strong as her husband. It appears that we’ve finally left the “delicate flower” image created by Jackie Kennedy in the past.
This was a process started by Hillary Clinton, who also refused to smile in the background when her husband was president, and caught heat for it. But she began the process of making the powerful, accomplished, highly intelligent woman into an icon of style, confidence and beauty. Michelle Obama is taking the baton that the new Secretary of State handed her, and she seems to be gaining speed. What does this mean for the American perception of beauty? For one thing, it means that for millions of African-American women, their form of physical loveliness will be more regularly in view. This may mean that the unique qualities of African-American hair (though Michelle currently wears her hair straightened, and it remains to be seen if she’ll allow it to become more “ethnic” as time goes on), complexion and body will hopefully become more a part of our lexicon of what is beautiful.
It also may mean that African cultural style, including traditonal clothing, may become something more than a curiosity but more part of mainstream fashion. The Obamas are already talking about adding art to the White House that reflects the African-American experience; can it be too long before the First Lady shows up to a state dinner wearing a kitenge (a Kenyan traditional sarong-like dress)? We think this is all incredibly healthy for our national Inner Beauty for several reasons:
At the simplest level, a generation of African-American women and girls are going to see themselves reflected in the nation’s most visible woman and enjoy having their own physicality and style widely regarded as beautiful, a boost for self-esteem.
As more Americans open their minds to the new ideas of beauty embodied in Michelle Obama’s charisma, strength and intelligence, we begin to see beauty in new areas and new people. And as we have said before, seeing beauty throughout life is a hallmark of Inner Beauty.
The greater tolerance of difference that we hope will come from having a black President and First Lady should make us all more loving and understanding of the differences between us.
Many pundits have already remarked on the ways in which the Obama presidency represents a watershed moment for the nation. Allow us to call Michelle Obama what we believe she is: the symbol and embodiment of a new era of more inclusive beauty for everyone.
Haven’t we been over this before? We mean the whole battle over smoking being cool. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, when we beauty docs were either little girls or not even twinkles in our parents’ eyes, smoking in movies and TV was all the rage. If you were a femme fatale, detective or tough guy, you had to be wreathed in cigarette smoke. But by the 1990s society and public health efforts had effectively countered the image of smoking as the essence of coolness, in part with smoking bans and advertising like the famous faux-Marlboro billboards where one cowboy says to another, “Bob, I’ve got cancer.” Essentially, we thought we had this smoking thing licked, but apparently—and disturbingly—we were wrong.
Now comes a study from the University of Staffordshire in the UK showing that Brits age 17-24 worry about the effects of smoking on their appearance but most don’t intend to consider quitting until they see visible signs of damage. Now, smoking has always been more of an issue in Europe, where it’s widespread, but this is a very dangerous attitude, especially if it’s reflected here in the U.S. First of all, damage to skin and teeth occurs at the microscopic level long before it’s visible to the naked eye. Second, and perhaps more important, smoking may be the single most damaging thing you can do to your general health, and as we’ve said before, health is beautiful. Health is a stage of the Beauty-Brain Loop, so if you negatively impact your health, you’re going to harm all the other aspects of your beauty.
Public officials in the UK have said that they intend to use the results of the study to create a series of new public service advertisements highlighting the ways in which smoking can damage the looks of appearance-conscious young people. Well done, but why wait? Let’s bring the news to the people right now! These are some of the major ways in which cigarette smoking damages your skin, hair, teeth, and overall exterior:
Smoking releases free radicals in your lungs, producing an inflammation response throughout the body. This affects the skin by accelerating cellular breakdown, producing wrinkles and the gray pallor commonly known as “smoker’s face.”
It reduces the level of oxygen in your blood and thus depletes the collagen in your skin. This can cause sagging and a premature aging.
The reduced circulation caused by smoking also causes the skin to become thinner, making fine lines and wrinkles more noticeable.
It yellows teeth and causes bad breath.
Smoking is also highly addicting because the nicotine and other addictive chemicals go right to the lungs and bloodstream, so it’s very easy to get hooked. Young smokers are very vulnerable to this rapid physiological addiction to tobacco.
We could go on, but why? It’s common knowledge that smoking is terrible for your body, inside and out. We’re not sure that any public service ads are going to dissuade youth, who always think they’re immortal, but it’s worth a try. If you think about the effect that smoking has on Inner Beauty (making you feel bad about being a smoker and not being able to quit) and on Environment (repelling other people who hate the smoke and ruining the area around you), there may be nothing more toxic to the Beauty-Brain Loop. We’ll keep an eye out for similar research in the U.S….and hope for better results.
We’re fortunate enough to be in Washington, DC with hundreds of thousands of our closest friends for the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States. It’s an incredibly exciting time, and when we think about Obama’s message of “Change,” it’s impossible for us not to put that in the context of our favorite subject. So at a time when change is on everyone’s mind, how will you change the way beauty impacts your life in the coming year?
In keeping with the political news that’s on everyone’s mind, we’ve organized our ideas according to our own imaginary presidential cabinet. If Barack Obama had these as his priorities, we don’t know how the economy would do, but we do know the entire country would look and feel fabulous.
State: In the spirit of foreign relations, you could reach out to people in your life with whom your relationships haven’t been as close as they could be and find the beauty in them.
Treasury: At a time when the economy seems to be in for a prolonged slump, get creative and find ways to get quality beauty and skin care products for less. Share your secrets with friends and invite them to share theirs with you.
Agriculture: Discover natural and organic cosmetics and beauty products. There are many sources for these; see our last posting about the Ecocert designation, which guarantees that your product is 100% natural.
Health and Human Services: Adopt at least one healthy new habit, such as working out five days a week, eating fish at least twice a week, or taking up meditation as a daily practice. Do something great for your body and watch it become more beautiful.
Commerce: Get into the community and bring your beauty business to locally owned businesses like hair salons and makers of handmade cosmetics. You’ll meet new people who will be grateful for your patronage, make new friends and feel like a part of the fabric of where you live.
Labor: Make your work environment more conducive to beauty by doing everything from getting an anti-glare filter for your computer to take the strain off your eyes, taking 15 minutes a day to walk around the building or do deep breathing, or simply filling your workspace with beautiful things.
Interior: Work on your Inner Beauty by taking a candid look at behaviors that have caused you pain in the past, such as jealousy, being passive when you should be assertive, or beating yourself up for little things. Vow to become more aware of these behaviors and work to turn them into positive energy.
Housing and Urban Development: Beautify the physical space where you live. This doesn’t to be expensive; it could be a matter of lighting, plants, music, fabrics and rearranging the things you already own. But a beautiful physical environment makes you feel more content, peaceful and in love with your own life.
Change will be on everyone’s mind as this exciting year moves ahead. How will you change yourself for the better? Please share your stories with us on Comments. And to paraphrase our new president: “Yes you can!”
A few weeks back, we blogged about a new reality show, “True Beauty,” premiering this year on ABC. Supposedly, the show would feature the usual collection of contestants who, while they thought they were being judged on their external good looks, were actually being judged on their “inner beauty.” Well, we’ve seen the premiere episode and it wasn’t exactly what we were hoping for. We applaud the producers, including Tyra Banks, for bringing the issue of inner beauty to the fore, but we had something different in mind. And since we try to be positive on this blog, we’re going to offer our constructive criticisms on how “True Beauty” could become a truer test of bona fide Inner Beauty.
Make the setting more natural. Right now, the show’s setup is pretty typical: take a bunch of people, stick them in a house, and let personal conflict erupt. Instead, we’d love to see the show be more natural and unforced. Follow the contestants around in their personal lives with hidden cameras and audio to see how they interact with others. Inner beauty is about self-esteem and seeing the beauty in other people and the world around you. Do the contestants treat themselves well or engage in damaging self-talk? Do they treat others with compassion and respect? Do they maintain a positive frame of mind? Those are questions you can’t answer in an artificial setting.
Expand the palette of people. This might not be able to happen until next season, but we’d love to see people who aren’t all great looking be on the show. The contestants right now are all varying degrees of gorgeous, and that doesn’t reflect reality. It sends the message that inner beauty only matters if you also have outer beauty, and that’s not a healthy message to send. Add a plus-sized woman, a geekier guy and maybe even a disabled man or woman to the cast next year and we think viewers will relate much better.
Take more time. The first contestant was expelled from the program after one week and after one not-so-beautiful act (failing to hold a door for someone). Even though it follows the the “Survivor” format of “knock ‘em down one at a time,” that doesn’t seem fair. Inner beauty is a matter of thoughts, attitudes and actions over a long period, not one isolated incident. Heck, even the most inwardly gorgeous of us is inconsiderate or mean-spirited from time to time. Again, we know this violates the “who’s going to be booted next” ethos of reality TV, but it would give each person a fairer shake.
We’re not TV producers, and we haven’t thought these ideas through completely, but we think that in general the result would be a “True Beauty” that was more true to its name: a test of the genuine inner beauty of a group of people. It would also send a more positive message to the audience: that real inner beauty is its own reward, even if you don’t win a spot on People’s Most Beautiful list.
Bettie Page, the “pinup queen” of the 1950 and 1960s, died on December 11 at the age of 85. In case you’re not old enough to remember (or weren’t an adolescent boy in the Baby Boom years), Ms. Page was the well-built, scantily clad dream girl of thousands of posters, photos and short films. In an era when overt female sexuality was just becoming something other than lurid and shocking, Ms. Page unashamedly celebrated her curvy form. High art she wasn’t; the sensibility of most of the work that featured her winking image was more in the pulp genre, kissing cousins to the “naughty girl, hard-boiled detective” dime novels of the day. But she became something of an obsession to millions of young men.
But in her totality, was Bettie Page good for women? We could make a convincing argument that she did nothing but support a stereotype of women by posing in settings that were pure cheesecake: wearing a leopard skin swimsuit with two cheetahs, or posing with a black man in face paint and carrying a spear. Hardly the stuff of feminist dreams. But at the same time, a famous series of photos shows Page on the beach in a beautiful, informal style, often completely nude yet completely unashamed of her beauty and sexuality. In many of these photos, she’s absolutely childlike, like a toddler playing nude at the beach because, well, who needs a swimsuit anyway?
It’s these pictures that remind us, as we dwell on the constant meaning of beauty, that even though it’s easy to dismiss Bettie Page as a symbol of the objectification of women, she was also a symbol of the liberation of women’s sexuality. Remember, much of her most famous work was done at a time when it really wasn’t OK for a woman to be overtly sexual. If she did, and she wasn’t ashamed, then she was a harlot. Bettie Page didn’t care what anyone thought of her; she took joy in being a lusty person without a hint of apology. That’s what made people cherish her. If she hadn’t had that innocence and delight, she would have been just another nude woman.
In the end, we think Bettie Page was good for women. She reminded us that even as we work hard to be seen as more than our physical beauty, it’s OK to flaunt what we’ve got from time to time…and enjoy it.
Now this is interesting. An upcoming new ABC TV show being co-produced by Tyra Banks and Ashton Kutcher called “True Beauty” turns the tired reality show cliche of “who’s hotter?” on its head in a way that we beauty docs can’t help but find intriguing. The show was unveiled recently after six months of secrecy. Read on:
Hosted and judged by TV personality Vanessa Minnillo, along with supermodel Cheryl Tiegs and Nolé Marin of “America’s Next Top Model,” the series will spotlight six females and four males who will live together as they undergo a series of challenges to determine who is the most beautiful. While the contestants think they are being judged solely on their outer appearance, the challenges are actually designed to test their inner beauty. At the end of eight episodes, a winner who is the most beautiful inside and out will receive a cash prize and a spot in People magazine’s 100 Most Beautiful People issue.
Perhaps the format is a little bit deceptive, but what a fascinating and challenging idea! Details aren’t 100% clear, but it looks like the contestants will be videotaped dealing with stressful or morally challenging situations and rated not on their physical appearance, but on their character. Participants won’t know about the actual judging criteria until they are eliminated. This suggests that the “most manipulative, scheming person wins” model that has dominated everything from “The Apprentice” to “Survivor” won’t be in play here. Instead, losing contestants are likely to see an ugly side of themselves.
One of the reasons we find this so interesting is this: in the same way that outer beauty is different for everyone (for example, some people find tall, curvy women irresistible while others prefer small and petite) the concept of inner beauty is difficult to define. So what qualities should the judges rate in determining who has the greatest inner beauty? We have some suggestions:
Kindness to others
Coolness of temper under stress
Honesty
Generosity
Willingness to listen
Authenticity (being a real person rather than a self-created TV persona)
Optimism
Emotional maturity
Odds are, a man or woman with all or most of these qualities is someone that any of us would want as a friend, colleague, partner or mentor. It will be fascinating to see if the producers of “True Beauty” can really focus on emphasizing what true beauty means, instead of focusing on “gotcha” moments that show people at their ugliest. Aside from bringing a breath of fresh air to a withering TV genre, that would also bring to light the genuine qualities of attractiveness and magnetism that we talk about. We’ll be tuning in…or at least running the Tivo.
