There are many ways to perceive beauty, however many women feel compelled to pray at the alter of the beauty industry and groom ourselves to within an inch of our lives. Anna Magee, got tired of the grooming grind and decided to give up grooming for a month. She went cold turkey with everything from blow-drying her hair to acrylic nails and waxing and she detailed her month-long experiment in the Daily Mail.
I think this is a great project and while I may be a slave to foundation, I don't do much else in the way of extreme grooming. Ms. Magee was clearly spending a good portion of her day trying to change her appearance to one only generally resembling the one she was born with, and I applaud her taking a public stand on how overwhelming it can be to feel the pressure to constantly look perfect. Some days I just feel lucky to be dressed.
Ms. Magee discusses how her new "groombargo" was both freeing and a little scary. She writes about how much more comfortable she felt down at the pub without her usual layers of stuff, but she just couldn't see going to a business meeting without her make-up. At the end she decided that she could come to a comfortable compromise between the grooming she enjoyed and what she would rather do without. It became more about her choice and less about what she felt was required and that is how it should be.
It is important for women to call the beauty industry on the amount of work and anxiety that they create due to the unrealistic ideals they perpetuate. It is bizarre to think that the expectation is that all women should be walking around perfectly groomed all the time. We need to be able to go to the shops wearing our yoga pants without feeling like we need to hide under a bag.
This is why one of the best ad campaigns in the beauty industry is the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. This is an ad campaign based on the idea that we need to change the way beauty is defined and Dove has put up billboards featuring a more diverse set of body types than are usually seen in ads used for the beauty industry.
Dove also gives funds to programs that work to help girls develop stronger self-esteem. I know they want to sell their stuff, but they are doing a service by highlighting an important message about how the industry, to which they belong, manipulates women into thinking they need to live up to an unrealistic ideal.
However, the best part of this campaign is the films. This one shows the progress one model goes through from normal person to glamour gal when all the grooming products are used and then after all that her image is altered by a computer so that the person you see in the ad never even really existed.
