Women have been at the whims of beauty for centuries — from bounding their feet, blackening their teeth, perfecting the art of bloodletting, applying lead-based foundation, and poisonous eye makeup.
A woman’s desirability has been catalogued for centuries through art, etiquette handbooks, magazines, and, more recently, on almost every social media app.
So, what’s adding one more exclusionary beauty ideal to the mix really going to change?
On Nov. 16, 2024, comedian Suzanne Lambert posted a video on TikTok about “how to do your makeup like a Republican” for the next batch of women to be publicly ridiculed.
With 6.2 million views, this infamous look consists of no skin preparation, streaky foundation, bright concealer, clumpy mascara, and uneven eyeliner and is topped off with matte, neutral lipstick. Lambert refers to the look as “matte and flat,” as if it were “applied in the dark,” and should give off an “is she awake?” effect.
Award-winning author and professor Renee Englen explores our society’s obsession with women’s appearances in her book Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls and Women. She writes about how our “beauty-sick” culture hyper-focuses on a woman’s desirability and how this sickness gleams. Englen suggests, “When women’s emotional energy gets so bound up with what they see in the mirror…”
Englen dates this malaise to childhood, when young girls are taught their social currency relies on their pleasing countenance. The remedy, she explains, isn’t simply growing up but rather can only come from deliberately severing bonds with societal norms that bound women. This illness takes form in the images we see and language we use to describe women and, more recently, through a mock tutorial on Republican makeup.
Appearing on CBS News’ “America Decides,” Lambert defended her tutorial by emphasizing that humour has always been leveraged to critique politics and underscored the double standard with how the public treats men’s versus women’s political commentary.
The comedian, who dupes herself as a “Regina George liberal,” states that the thought behind this trend is to “shame and embarrass” Trump supporters. She encourages those who align with her to fight and challenge those who have voted against the rights and freedoms of marginalized identities, citing abortion and anti-transgender legislation.
I find Lambert’s anger in her fellow women justifiable and, quite frankly, necessary. However, if this trend intends to embarrass Republican women because of their preferred cosmetic style, then is the end goal of modern makeup compliance? And if all Republican women were to subscribe to topical beauty trends, what societal change would that bring forth to rectify the damage these women have just cosigned?
As of today, there are countless TikToks of women on both planes of the political spectrum poking fun at the way their political adversaries apply makeup. Englen’s beauty-sick doctrine emphasizes that those who shame or only praise women for their appearance both feed into beauty sickness and this obsession keeps women “facing the mirror instead of facing the world.”
She laments that impacting our societal fabric is more challenging when we’re so engaged in changing our outward appearance. She adds that a beauty-sick culture will always find a way to rope a woman’s appearance into any conversation, no matter how irrelevant it may be.
A woman stripping herself of her old, tattered ways of accentuating her beauty for shinier, prettier methods will only reinforce the concept that women must not just be beautiful but perform beauty. In an era where legislators are backpedalling on laws and regulations that aim to protect marginalized peoples, women should be spending their time inching closer to the desired reality, which is actively being ripped away from them.
In a chapter imploring women to turn from the mirror and face the world, Englen writes, “We cannot live our lives fully when our appearance is constantly under evaluation. We cannot make progress toward our goals if we believe that all possible success and happiness hinge on the result of that evaluation.”
All in all, we must work to break this beauty-concerned fever by engaging in feminist discourse and ideologies, educating the women in our community, and taking opportunities in which women are polarized to push for progression.