Face Value

The Hidden Ways Beauty Shapes Women's Lives

Autumn Whitefield-Madrano

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781476754055
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

"A fascinating look" ( The Boston Globe ) at how we think and talk about beauty in the twenty-first century—and the unexpected and often positive way that beauty shapes our lives. For decades, we've thought of beauty as a negative influence in our lives. We feel insecure in the face of retouched, impossibly-perfect images. We worry primping and preening are a distraction and a trap. But in Face Value, journalist Autumn Whitefield-Modrano dispels this one-sided beauty myth and examines the relationship between appearance and science, social media, sex, friendship, language, and advertising to show how beauty actually affects us day to day.Through meticulous research and interviews with dozens of women across all walks of life, she reveals surprising findings, like wearing makeup can actually relax you, you can convince people you're better looking just by tweaking your personality, and the ways beauty can be a powerful tool of connection among women. Provocative and empowering, it celebrates a relaxed brand of feminism, one in which it's equally okay to feel fierce in your fake eyelashes and confident when going makeup-free. Face Value is "an immensely valuable work, one that seamlessly—and impressively—combines the tropes of the academic lit review and the memoir and the work of cultural criticism into an engaging, and timely, follow-up to The Beauty Myth " ( The Atlantic ).

1

The Pencil Test

Quantifying the Unquantifiable

It should be a long story as to why I found myself standing with nickels between my upper thighs, knees, calves, and ankles. But the story isn’t long at all: I’d read that the ability to hold coins at these juncture points (and not, of course, at any other place along your shapely gams) was a way to determine whether you had nice legs. I’ve also lain a ruler from my rib cage to my pelvic bone to see if the ruler touches my belly flesh (if it does, your middle could supposedly use some slimming), measured the distance between my eyes (it “should” be equidistant to the length of one eye), walked in wet sand to see how close together my right and left footsteps fall (“try walking with your feet closer together for a sexy sway!”), and placed a pencil underneath my breast to determine whether I was sagging yet (ahem). I’d collected these tidbits pretty much unintentionally, through reading magazines and books primarily aimed at women. I knew none of these algorithms were definitive, and that some were downright capricious (didn’t the thigh gap controversy indicate that having nice legs meant not being able to hold a coin between your thighs?), but seeing an unambiguous measure of beauty written down in black and white immediately made me want to test what I was made of. I’d like to be able to report that I tested myself in these ways to prove their folly—I mean, what grown woman actually lies down with a ruler across her hips just because a magazine told her to? It wasn’t that, though. I wanted to see if I passed.

Perhaps it seems like inverted logic to try to objectively measure qualities based in sensory appreciation, not facts and figures. In a way, though, that was exactly the point. Regardless of whatever truth it might contain, there’s something unsatisfactory about that whole “eye of the beholder” bit. It’s so assuring, so nice, so subjective. But beauty as a lived experience doesn’t always feel subjective, particularly when you suspect you’re lacking in it. A strictly subjective approach—eye of the beholder, whatever floats your boat, to each her own, and so on—can feel pat, even dismissive. The term beautiful woman may conjure a thousand different women, but who hasn’t been curious to know whether the average person would place her among those ranks? A yes/no answer to beauty, which all my little tests purported to issue, was both reassuring and provocative. With a test, the question was out of my hands, as well as the hands of those who might be favorably biased or dubious about my allure. It now belonged to an objective third party, one that didn’t care about aesthetics or the beholder but rather just the facts, ma’am. Beauty was now in the hands of science.

In 2013 alone, researchers conducted thousands of studies involving personal appearance. Whether in the “hard” sciences (“Influence on Smile Attractiveness of the Smile Arc in Conjunction with Gingival Display”), the “soft” sciences (“The Effects of Facial Beauty in Personnel Selection”), or somewhere in between (“Middle Temporal Gyrus Encodes Individual Differences in Perceived Facial Attractiveness”), few aspects of beauty have escaped researchers’ investigations. While some of these studies have a distinctly contemporary feel, inquiries into the aesthetics of us Homo sapiens are hardly new. From the Aristotelian concept of the golden mean and its role in human beauty to the supposedly ideal human proportions of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man to the “Anthropometric Laboratory” of Charles Darwin’s cousin Sir Francis Galton, researchers have longed to pair rationality with beauty.

It’s not that scientists are any more intrigued by beauty than the rest of us; the discipline’s fascination with appearance echoes that of the population at large. What separates the scientist from the layperson is, ironically, the very thing that might help us reconcile the science of beauty with our lived experience: an understanding that science is conditional. Scientists tend to position their work as one contribution to a larger body of knowledge, as opposed to establishing a pure fact in and of itself—and as research in any one area develops, so too must our baseline understanding of that field. After all, the brightest scientific minds on earth once believed in spontaneous generation (the idea that, say, flies grew from rotting meat or moths from neglected clothes). It was observable fact. Today, of course, we understand this to be an example of how the “facts” of science can shift with our knowledge—but we might still be loath to apply that understanding to the “facts” of today. Yet when it comes to something as loaded and intensely personal as beauty, that’s an understanding we must keep in mind if we’re to make any sense out of the sea of data that’s been collected on the way we look. At its best, the science of beauty may be able to illuminate why we find beauty where we do. But its lingering contribution may be the mere fact of its existence: The enormous pool of data tells us that we’re eager—verging on desperate—to understand beauty and its draws. The fact that we keep searching for answers within the sciences indicates that we’re unwilling to settle for easy, clichéd answers about the human drive for beauty.

Numbers Don’t Lie (Right?)

Beauty is a concept, not a fact. But unlike with other concepts such as justice, truth, and honor, we believe that if we just investigate beauty thoroughly enough, we can come up with an objective measure of it. And in some ways, these measures can actually help us relieve beauty of some of its weight. The idea that beauty is an ineffable mystery is in many ways a misogynist trap, a way of circumscribing women to the realm of the mystical instead of allowing them to roam on terra firma, warts and all. This matter-of-fact approach characterizes the work of psychologist Nancy Etcoff, who probably didn’t intend to drive legions of women to their tape measures and calculators with her work. Her 1999 book, Survival of the Prettiest, published eight years after The Beauty Myth, served as a response to Naomi Wolf’s claim that the beauty imperative was a social construct meant to curb women’s growing power in the world. Etcoff, an award-winning researcher and Harvard instructor, took a different tack, attempting to demonstrate that our conception of beauty is hardwired within us. The human eye, she argues, is drawn to physical characteristics that supposedly signal prime ability to propagate the species. Symmetrical bodies and facial features, the female waist-hip ratio of the classic hourglass figure, clear skin: All these, Etcoff explains, are tied to health and fertility. The entire human race finds these attributes beautiful not because anyone tells us to but because our Darwinian drive to reproduce propels us toward them. “[O]ur thoughts and our behaviors are ultimately under our control,” Etcoff takes pains to make clear, but we simply can’t help what our eye is drawn to.

The book made a splash, garnering favorable reviews from leading news outlets and going through several printings. It also gave women a scale they could use to measure aspects of their own beauty. When I asked around, I wasn’t surprised to find that I wasn’t the only woman who, upon learning the evolutionarily preferred waist-hip ratio (an hourglassy 0.70, for the record), did a few quick calculations. Turns out my hips are a hint too small for me to propagate the species (one could also say my waist is a hint too thick, but I’m happy to play my own spin doctor here), leaving me feeling somewhat as thirty-eight-year-old Cara did upon doing the same thing: “Not only was I not close to the ideal, but I wasn’t even sure I was doing the math right! I felt more stereotypically stupid than evolutionarily beautiful.”

But for every woman whose waistline theoretically destines her to dateless Saturday nights, there’s another who learns she’s been blessed with the perfect proportions. “I calculated my ratio in college after I read about it in a magazine, and it turns out my ratio was damn near perfect,” reports Aliyah, thirty-five, a math teacher in the Pacific Northwest. “It was the first concrete reason I could find to help explain to myself why on earth men suddenly seemed to find me more attractive than I’d ever found myself, having grown up far from any beauty ideal. It was the beginning of a slow, decade-long shift in my perception about my physical self. And I think I allowed myself to believe it because it wasn’t subjective. It was math.”

The biological basis of beauty has, in the public mind, become fact. And why wouldn’t it? Unlike The Beauty Myth, there were ostensibly no political underpinnings to Survival of the Prettiest; this is science, people, entirely based on facts and figures, arrived at by people whose worldview is shaped around impartiality and objectivity. I mean, you can’t argue with the data, right?

Yet plenty of researchers have done just that, with data of their own, bringing into question the supposed facts about beauty that we’ve come to accept as truth. Let’s look at one of the most oft-repeated claims about beauty: that facial symmetry is integral to good looks. In 1994 university researchers—including Judith Langlois, one of the field’s preeminent scholars—found that while a degree of symmetry is a component of attractiveness, “symmetry does not solely determine perceived attractiveness in a range of normal faces with no craniofacial deformities.” So if you’re noticeably lopsided, your chances of stopping traffic dwindle, but the rest of us are doing all right even if our right eye is a couple of millimeters higher than our left. Langlois and her colleagues were hardly alone; at least two other studies the same year reached similar conclusions.

Another given of female beauty—the much-vaunted 0.70 waist-to-hip ratio (WHR)—turns out not to be such a given after all, once the data is examined more closely. The pioneering study on WHR, Devendra Singh’s 1993 longitudinal survey of the measurements of Playboy centerfolds and Miss Americas, found that the overwhelming majority of the women’s WHR fell within .02 points of 0.70. The study was widely reported, including in outlets such as Newsweek, Time, and even the Weekly World News, opposite a piece about blood banks for vampires.

Yet according to researchers Jeremy Freese and Sheri Meland, the study is an “academic urban legend.” Upon examining Singh’s data in 2002, Freese and Meland found that the 1993 study omitted nearly a third of all Playboy centerfolds from the years studied (1955 to 1965 and 1976 to 1990). Singh attributed this to unavailability of data; indeed, Freese and Meland found access to the missing measurements on the Internet, which was in its infancy at the time of Singh’s research. As for the pageant contestants, the data had been rounded to the nearest half inch by Singh’s primary source—insignificant when buying a pair of jeans, but quite significant when calculating specific waist-hip ratios to within 1/100 of an inch and drawing conclusions from the data. When all the measurements were accounted for and recorded accurately, the results didn’t match those of the initial study. Only nine of the fifty-nine pageant winners had the WHR Singh claimed dominated the pool; similarly, only 31.4 percent of the centerfolds fell between the WHR of .68 and .71. Moreover, Singh had claimed that WHRs remained constant over time, even if the actual measurements themselves changed due to fluctuating fashions in women’s body size. Freese and Meland found that the measurements and the ratio changed: The classic girdled 1950s look was reflected in the lower WHR of the measurements from the mid-twentieth century; as the years passed, the ratio increased. (Think the undulating Jayne Mansfield versus the willowy Gwyneth Paltrow.) Other researchers also found results contrary to the original report. And despite interpretations of Singh’s research that claimed female WHR was more important than the overall size of a woman’s body in attracting men, in 1998 psychologists at Texas A&M University found that weight and relative body size mattered more to men than waist-hip ratio, findings echoed in numerous other studies—including cross-cultural studies that skewer the notion that there’s such a thing as a universally attractive WHR.

Let’s also not forget that some of the data may have been artificially manipulated: Measurements of the Playboy centerfolds were self-reported. As Freese and Meland point out, this theoretically works in favor of Singh’s conclusion, since centerfolds would have incentive to fudge their measurements to fit a preconceived ideal (36-24-36, anyone?). But that’s just it: If the models are reporting dimensions to conform to a predetermined ideal, so too would the conclusion drawn from that data.

And yet the idea that there’s a perfect waist-to-hip ratio has filtered into women’s own beauty preconceptions—I’ve seen it referenced again and again, with little regard for these counterarguments. (A headline from Glamour’s website: “Dressing for Men? Avoid the Empire Waist,” the idea being that “At all times, they want to see your 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio a la Cindy Crawford.”)

The list of popular beauty maxims challenged by various researchers doesn’t stop at WHR, of course. Have you heard that babies gaze longer at faces rated attractive by adults? This doesn’t necessarily imply that children are born with innate knowledge of attractiveness per se—it could be that conventionally attractive faces are just more face-like because of their regularity, so babies seize onto them more readily. Or how about the one that says that the average face is considered the most attractive? Scientists in 1999 found that actual faces, as opposed to computer-generated composite faces, with features close to the mean size of populations studied were usually rated as average in attractiveness, not highly attractive. The “average is beautiful” effect applies only to generated composite faces, in which one person’s flaws are canceled out by another’s; in truth, the average face is, well, average. Then there’s the study that ostensibly proves most people are attracted to faces that exemplify stereotypically masculine or feminine traits—that we prefer girlie girls and manly men. In truth, the relationship remains unclear at best: Clinically speaking, a woman who prefers a jaw of stone when she’s at her most fertile might gravitate toward a more baby-faced man once she’s past that stage of her menstrual cycle. Underneath many of these studies is a fact that’s problematic for all sciences: The majority of people who participate in studies about appearance preferences are undergraduate students at the universities hosting the research—students who are disproportionately educated and middle-class. It’s like studying a campus on Saturday night and determining that North America’s favorite recreational activity involves beer bongs.

The social sciences get even murkier. Economist Daniel Hamermesh made waves in 2011 by analyzing five earlier studies measuring the impact of looks on life satisfaction and happiness. Of the five studies used, four relied on attractiveness ratings furnished by one person. That is, the bulk of the data about what constitutes beauty in this widely reported aggregate study was decided by one person alone. In one of them, the people doing the rating were elementary schoolteachers rating their own seven- and eleven-year-old students. In the lone study that had multiple people rating subjects’ attractiveness, a panel of twelve people based their assessments on high school graduation photos taken thirty-five years prior.

It’s troubling that a major study proclaiming the connection between beauty and happiness boils down to the opinion of only a handful of people, so a logical solution would appear to be to follow the scientific model and have beauty quantified by a larger pool of respondents. Surely if forty people rate a number of faces, we can trust that we’re getting an accurate opinion by consensus, right? Perhaps, but that solution also presents a paradox of beauty research: When a large number of people rate beauty, the prevailing result is going to be what we as a culture have agreed is beautiful, not necessarily beauty as we experience it individually. At best it captures the average of beauty, not beauty itself. These studies are of conventional attractiveness, which may be related to beauty but doesn’t constitute the fascination, intrigue, and sheer pleasure of the latter. Even the truth behind the “average is beautiful” fallacy of beauty—that computerized composite images made of several individual faces are consistently found more attractive than most individual faces—supports this. A composite face may be appealing because it is familiar, not because it is riveting.

And let’s not forget that our perception of good looks may be more fickle than we’d like to believe. A 2011 report in Psychological Science demonstrated that men who had rated pictures of women on their looks were apt to change their ratings after seeing what they believed to be their peers’ estimation of the women’s beauty. And no, the men weren’t just caving to peer pressure; MRI scans showed that the responses of their brains’ pleasure centers were neurologically altered upon seeing other men’s assessments. We may all have our preferences that stay level throughout our lives, but the fact that other people can so directly influence our brains’ recognition of beauty makes it seem ever more like a construct, not a biological given.

At day’s end, beauty is all about what gives us a visceral pleasure and fascination—so to a degree, what we collectively determine is beautiful really is beautiful. And it’s not like we should look at the conflicting evidence about physical appeal and decide to throw it all out wholesale. (If anything, the contradictions contained within the science of beauty can serve as a guide to being appropriately skeptical of any science that attempts to classify human behavior by sex and gender.) Much of this research has its place in helping us understand why we humans do what we do—an endeavor that becomes all the more intriguing when investigating something as intangible as beauty. In fact, the enormous number of studies on attractiveness makes me wonder if the shroud of mystery that surrounds beauty is exactly what makes us want to decode it. Is it possible that beauty is seen as so genuinely powerful that we’re willing to spend enormous resources on its investigation? Or is it that we’re hungry to figure out whether beauty is as meritocratic as the beauty industry would have us believe (try hard enough, buy enough products, and you can be beautiful too!...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Author’s Note
• Introduction: Beyond the Beauty Myth
• 1. The Pencil Test: Quantifying the Unquantifiable
• 2. Hotties, Foxes, and Cankles: Why We Use the Words We Do
• 3. Lipstick Isn’t Cubist: The Artifice of Beauty
• 4. The Eye of the Beholder: Sex, Dating, and Romance
• 5. The Prettiest Girl in the Room: Bonding, Competition, and Other Women
• 6. Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Media?: Skinny Models, Idealized Images, and Why Maybe It’s Not Such a Big Deal
• 7. “Like” Me: How Social Media and 24/7 Surveillance Are Shaping Women’s—and Men’s—Self-Image
• 8. “Don’t You Know You’re Beautiful?”: The Therapeutic Beauty Narrative
• Conclusion: Skin Deep: Looking Beyond Beauty
• Acknowledgments
• About Autumn Whitefield-Madrano
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright