Optimal Beauty Standards

What does DIY beauty culture demand of us?

This full beat asks how much it truly costs us to be DIY girls in an increasingly expensive world.

Knowing that we could have our services done in a way that would allow us to get back to work faster makes sense in a society that demands our every waking hour be used to work. Automated beauty technologies certainly exist in the form of AI lace wig designers and robotic lash technicians. However, despite their availability, many women still opt to complete their beauty services at home and by their hand. A quick search for DIY + beauty + tips generates thousands of step-by-step routines for applying individual eyelashes, acrylic nails, sew-ins, and so on. Often these videos begin with some variation of “I’m never wasting two hours at the salon again,” or “There is no reason you shouldn’t be able to do your own ___.” The videos are presented as helpful alternatives to save money and lessen one's dependence on stylists but often do not save participants more time. So, why aren’t automated beauty services the most significant means of having beauty work done?

beauty work: the process of “enhancing” one’s appearance with the use of makeup, hair products, and other styling tools

Please know that I am not advocating for an overthrow of human beauty service providers in favor of beauty robots (my attitude toward robotics leans irrationally towards Will Smith in I, Robot). The increase in DIY beauty, despite the availability of more efficient technologies, reflects the reality that established beauty standards are largely unphased by growing economic hardships. Women’s access to beauty has always been a means of translating social capital into legitimate capital, necessitating their survival. According to Drs. Samantha Kwan, Mary Nell Trautner “Physical attractiveness is associated with a number of positive outcomes, including employment benefits such as hiring, wages, and promotion…”¹ In this period of late capitalism, inflation, rampant unemployment, and stagnant minimum wages have made accessing innovative beauty technologies difficult. However, despite these growing economic issues beauty is still a requirement, so to meet its standard under these uniquely devastating conditions, we turn to DIY. This means that the demands of beauty do not ever stop, they require the participant to optimize herself so that she might meet them. 

late capitalism: the final stage(s) of our dwindling capitalist systems 

DIY girlies are not only rewarded for “doing” beauty work but for sharing the laborious processes with their followers. Jia Tolentino writes “The ideal woman, in other words, is always optimizing. She takes advantage of technology, both in the way she broadcasts her image and in the meticulous improvement of that image itself” (64). In some of these videos, viewers watch videos uploaded at 2x their actual speed, of women carefully applying individual lashes, waxing their entire bodies, and laminating and tinting their brows. We are watching a 90-second long video video of a woman doing tasks that we know amount to hours. The comment sections often reflect this reality “period,” “it’s hard being a DIY girl but we get it done,” and I’m trying to get like you,” fill their comment sections. To expound on Tolentino’s image of the “ideal woman,” meets all beauty standards, regardless of her financial state, by optimizing herself into an all-encompassing beauty service provider. At her highest level of optimization, she is both the client and the beauty technology she needs.

In the germinal feminist text “Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway imagines the possibilities for feminists who use technology subversively and to forward more progressive ideas. She imagines this ideal woman as a cyborg, a "machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction" (149).² Haraway’s cyborg is a tabula rasa, a slate wiped clean of sexist structures and traditions. Decades later Haraway’s vision is more than distant. Women optimize themselves to efficiently and accurately perform and display the results of “necessary” beauty work so that they might remain or excel in their current social position.

Learning to do things for oneself as a means of self-sufficiency is fine and DIY beauty is not new. I do not believe that women’s decisions to beautify themselves are only in service of external validation and increased capital. But our being expected to perform beauty work with rapidly disappearing leisure time and funds is enraging. The growing rate of DIY as a means to “keep up,” especially if one cannot afford professional services, illuminates the uniquely dismal state of our world.³

1. Accessing scholarly articles for free is difficult and time-consuming, so I copied that directly from the abstract (which is an academic no-no) but I am no longer tied to an institution so…

2. I cited the third chapter of my dissertation here which explores how a brilliant cyborg character is discarded once her tech “disables” her. If you want to read it and can’t access it, let me know. 

3. It is important to note how dangerous it can be for beginners to perform some of these services at home and without the supervision of a professional, so be careful out here.