Made-Up

A True Story of Beauty Culture under Late Capitalism

Daphne B., Daphne B., Alex Manley, Alex Manley

• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781770566828
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 COLE FOUNDATION PRIZE FOR TRANSLATION

A nuanced, feminist, and deeply personal take on beauty culture and YouTube consumerism, in the tradition of Maggie Nelson's Bluets

As Daphné B. obsessively watches YouTube makeup tutorials and haunts Sephora's website, she's increasingly troubled by the ways in which this obsession contradicts her anti-capitalist and intersectional feminist politics. In this poetic treatise, she rejects the false binaries of traditional beauty standards and delves into the celebrities and influencers, from Kylie to Grimes, and the poets and philosophers, from Anne Boyer to Audre Lorde, who have shaped the reflection she sees in the mirror. At once confessional and essayistic, Made-Up is a meditation on the makeup that colours, that obscures, that highlights who we are and who we wish we could be.

The original French-language edition was a cult hit in Quebec. Translated by Alex Manley—like Daphné, a Montreal poet and essayist—the book's English-language text crackles with life, retaining the flair and verve of the original, and ensuring that a book on beauty is no less beautiful than its subject matter.

"The most radical book of 2020 talks about makeup. Radical in the intransigence with which Daphne B hunts down the parts of her imagination that capitalism has phagocytized. Radical also in its rejection of false binaries (the authentic and the fake, the futile and the essential) through the lens of which such a subject is generally considered. With the help of a heady combination of pop cultural criticism and autobiography, a poet scrutinizes her contradictions. They are also ours." — Dominic Tardif, Le Devoir

"[Made-Up] is a delight. I read it in one go. And when, out of necessity, I had to put it down, it was with regret and with the feeling that I was giving up what could save me from a catastrophe." — Laurence Fournier, Lettres Québécoises, five stars

" Made-Up is a radiant, shimmering blend of memoir and cultural criticism that uses beauty culture as an entry point to interrogating the ugly contradictions of late capitalism. In short, urgent chapters laced with humor and wide-ranging references, Daphné B. plumbs the depths of a rich topic that's typically dismissed as shallow. I imagine her writing it in eye pencil, using makeup to tell the story of her life, as so many women do." — Amy Berkowitz, author of Tender Points

"A companion through the thicket of late stage capitalism, a lucid and poetic mirror for anyone whose image exists on a screen." — Rachel Kauder Nalebuff

" Made-Up is anything but—committed to the grit of our current realities, Daphné B directs her piercing eye on capitalism in an intimate portrayal of what it means to love, and how to paint ourselves in the process. Alex Manley has gifted English audiences with a nuanced translation of a critical feminist text, exploring love and make-up as a transformative social tool." — Sruti Islam

"The book will leave you both laughing in recognition and wincing at the reality of the beauty world's impact on our collective psyche." — Chatelaine

"[ Made-Up ] examines the intersection of beauty culture and consumer culture... Aided by the work of writers like Anne Carson, Anne Boyer, Amanda Hess, and Arabelle Sicardi... B. makes sharp observations about the ideologies behind both beauty [...] and consumerism." —Bitch Media

" Made?Up: A True Story of Beauty Culture under Late Capitalism is well worth reading." — Literary Review of Canada

"[ Made-Up ], newly translated by writer/poet Alex Manley from its original French, puts an intersectional, feminist lens on the author's personal fascination with the makeup industry; it also reckons with the cultural dominance of this fascination as she aims to square anti-capitalist principles with beauty-product obsession." —BitchReads: 11 Books Feminists Should Read in September

Schmoney.

The anarchist pop star had a baby with the son of a billionaire. It’s a little green-grey wad of cash and guns. Proof, for those who needed it, that she hadn’t really meant the things she’d said. ¹, ², ³

I think about the pop star’s baby with the billion-heir often.

I think about it, that little green-grey wad, the amalgamation of cash, of guns – about that colour at the intersection of wealth and violence, infinitely interlacing strands of the same fabric all come together. I try to understand the colour, to put the complexity of it into words. The green-grey wad, as murky as dirty water. Opaque, which works for it. That wad would love to cover up the banality of the truth: wealth comes from the barrel of a gun.

A wad isn’t just a crumpled-up thing – it’s also a stack of bills. Opulence, you see, presupposes scarcity – it blooms brightest in the garden of other people’s misery. That intimate relationship between money and violence. This baby was born a gunslinger.

The baby that Anne Boyer describes isn’t actually grey. More greyish. Nor is it green – more greenish. In fact, if you look closely, it’s an ever-shifting, mutable hue. Hence the ‘ish’es. It’s forever on the doorstep of another shade, metamorphosing, a decomposing organ. Did you know that a dead person’s kidney goes from brown to black? The trachea, which starts out white, becomes red, before landing on oliveish. Colour is movement – it traps us in the steps of a dance, one that no one is allowed to sit out.

1. TRANS. NOTE: Throughout the text, Daphné weaves a web of poetic references that appear and disappear without warning. The authors of these texts will appear as footnotes. Academic citations are introduced more formally within the text.

2. Anne Boyer, ‘No World But the World,’ Garments Against Women (Boise: Ahsahta Press, 2015), 18. A French-to-English translation via Daphné B.’s version; the original reads: ‘The anarchist pop star had a baby with the billionaire’s son. It’s a green gray blur of guns and money. It was proof for those who needed it that she didn’t really mean what she said.’

3. TRANS. NOTE: Daphné’s original translation of Boyer’s lines here is more of an adaptation, and her translation of ‘blur’ as ‘motton’ – and then weaving the term motton in later – didn’t allow for a straightforward use of the original. Thus, this text uses a translation of a translation.

For a long time, I believed that poetry was prophecy, that it could tell us about the future: coming deaths, impending technological breakthroughs, new elements pulling up chairs at the periodic table. But that’s not quite it. Rather, the images in poems are ones that necessitate – that must continue to necessitate – new words entirely. In which case, poetry isn’t prophecy but, rather, outside of time entirely. ‘It’s not a question of what happens – poetry is outside of time. In fact, ‘there’s a much greater likelihood that poetry happens to you, while many things that may seem more important than poetry won’t. ’⁴ That’s Jean Cocteau, speaking to the year 2000 in a YouTube video. In short, poetry isn’t current events – but nothing happens without it.

Did Anne Boyer know that the baby at the intersection of art and commerce she was writing about would one day be born, that, three years after her book came out, that little green-grey thing she’d imagined would be real-live tabloid fodder?

After all, the poet isn’t an inventor. She’s simply describing what’s already there. Because what is reality, like the green-grey baby, except proof for those who needed it?

In May 2018, the Canadian singer Grimes, self-proclaimed anti-imperialist, drew back the curtains on her new relationship with billionaire businessman Elon Musk, the twenty-third richest person in the United States. Before the great reveal, of course, she made sure to wipe the word anti-imperialist from her Twitter bio. A bit of an awkward signifier, after all, for someone who’s dating a guy publicly committed to colonizing Mars.

I knew Grimes as the princess of Montreal’s underground scene, ruler over dusty lofts and the chemicals we use to loosen up. She had greenish, blackish, pinkish hair; she locked herself in studios for days on end, without eating or sleeping, birthing new albums of experimental music. A cyborg, pop and metallic, bathed in clouds of shimmering soot, wielding a sword and speaking in snake-like tongues. Her songs sounded like a high kicking in, like the speed with which we came down.

I bring her up because we went to the same university, Grimes and I, because she was the friend of one friend of mine, and the lover of another. At one point, long before she was going out with one of the world’s most powerful men, before she was promoting her music on billboards that blared that global warming was a good thing, I used to feel a kinship with her. One of my exes told me about the parties she used to throw – her dingy apartment, the grunge in her bathtub, a blackish juice. It was grimy, he said. It was Grimes. Of course, that dinginess, that grunginess, that griminess isn’t new to me – it haunts just about every affordable apartment in Montreal. Even as I write this, there are rivulets of rain coming through the ceiling.

When news of Grimes and Musk’s itemhood broke, I was seeing a well-known sociologist. Thirtysomething, shaven-headed, rebel without a clue. The kind of socialist who can’t feel anything when he’s wearing a condom, you know the type. So radical, with his all-black outfits, his various pins and patches. He lived in Los Angeles, worked for a publicly traded company, and drove a Beemer. I remember how shocked he seemed when we discussed his beloved singer’s dirty laundry. A capitalist Grimes? It was more than he could take. He was dejected, practically disgusted. But I think maybe he was most disgusted by the Grimes he felt beating inside his own rib cage.

There’s nothing more repulsive than seeing your own weaknesses in another. That’s why we’re so revolted by corpses – we see in them our own fate. One day, that’ll be us: ‘A disgusting mess whose shame our loved ones will have to cover up from survivors,’ as Bataille puts it.⁵ To be disgusted is to be nauseated – a desperate spasm, an attempt to distance the self from the self.

What had Grimes done, in shacking up with Mr. Imperialist, if not render visible the inherent contradictions of the twenty-first century, the ones constantly threatening to tear us all limb from limb? Everything is both itself and its own opposite. Even the desires that drive me are contradictory ones. I both love and hate the idea of the world ending. In fact, I often catch myself awaiting the apocalypse, even opening the door for it a notch. I accept it as the ‘natural’ conclusion of the elastic experience of existence – one that’s already pulled taut and ready to snap.

Deep in the heart of my apartment, alone in a global pandemic, I won’t think about anything, except maybe buying myself a grapefruit-scented candle online. I’ll want my world to at least smell nice while it’s ending. I’ll learn how to dye my hair from YouTube videos. I’ll take the online test that lets you know how many Earths we’d need if everyone had the same patterns of consumption as I do. It’ll tell me: 3.6 Earths. I’ll apologize for that.

Hell, I apologize for everything. Sometimes even for apologizing. I’ve got 3.6 Earths in my gut and another one stuck in my throat. Some days, I beg for the end of the world the way Catholics ask for forgiveness. It’s soothing, in a way, to imagine my own end.

I think about my L.A. sociologist. I wonder whether he really thinks he can escape from the dissonance this century has trapped us all in.

If so, then pray for me, Saint Sociologist.

4. ‘Jean Cocteau s’adress a l’an 2000,’ viewable at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-t1Wo8JEdQ. My translation; original quotes: ‘Elle ne correspond pas à ce qui se passe; elle est inactuelle;’ ‘Il y a quelques chances pour qu’elle vous arrive, alors que beaucoup de choses qui semblent plus importantes ne vous arrivent pas.’

5. Georges Bataille, ‘La Mort,’ L’Histoire de l’érotisme (Montréal: Gallimard, 1976), 79. My translation. The original: ‘Ignominieuse pourriture dont nos proches auront le soin de dérober la honte à la vue des survivants.’

Made-up, ensconced in my bed,...