Godong
We’re living in a unique moment when brands are being forced to act in response to a wave of customer demands for more and better: more employee diversity, better shade ranges, less problematic shade names, fewer whitening products, and more shelf space for Black-owned beauty brands. This is not a movement that grew overnight or out of the ether. Makeup has long been used as a method of protest and generally as a tool for political means, by all arms of the political system. And beauty has been used as a tool for community care and weaponized as a symbol of inauthentic political participation. Beauty is how we negotiate aesthetics as a character judgment in the world, and we judge people everywhere we go, from battlefields to magazine covers.
Time and time again in histories about women on the front lines, you can find nurses and factory workers talking about how their lipstick or perfume kept them sane in discomforting situations. In Heather Marie Stur's book Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era, she shares the story of nurse Lily Lee Adams, who wore Chantilly perfume because it “made her patients think of home.” On the other hand, in journals from Holocaust victims and survivors, many recalled the use of makeup and perfume by those who tortured them. One woman became infamous for it: Irma Grese, the “Blonde Beast of Berkenau.” She manipulated those who were doomed to die by her hands by coming to them perfectly made up and expensively perfumed, to remind them of what they had been robbed of. After they were forced to revisit hope for one last fleeting moment, they were sent to die. It’s proof that hope can be weaponized by anyone, and that’s what makes it so dangerous and volatile.
For those who have the resources to acquire beauty, it is still a secret grace given to those afforded very little. For example, in her visit to a Lebanese refugee camp, writer and activist Celine Semaan observed for The Cut in 2018: “At times, it was the only mechanism available to feel control of one’s self. . . . beauty is something we can control, love, and celebrate. It is at some of the worst times, all we have left.” What is left doesn’t have to be product driven, and by necessity it rarely involves anything one might get at Ulta. Holistic products for skin care and cosmetics are far more common, like almond oil and homemade sugar wax, rosewater face mist, and lip balm made from crushed fruit. Self-care as self-preservation may have become cannibalized into a corporate slogan, but for the most vulnerable the bare fact of it still rings true.
For many decades, brands have had a hand in the prospect of linking makeup to protest. In World War II, Elizabeth Arden, and others, came out with shades like Victory Red; in 2019 the brand came out with a lip color collaboration, of which 100% of the proceeds went to the United Nations group UN Women, an advocacy organization for gender equality. Philanthropic efforts have been part of many brands’ DNA for decades. After the 2016 election, Lipslut garnered press for pledging portions of profits to issues and causes that tied to each of its collections. To date, according to documentation Lipslut provided to Teen Vogue, the brand has raised $190,000 for various organizations, including She Should Run, Planned Parenthood, and the ACLU.
In June 2020, Bloomberg reported that more than 100 employees and staff of the Estée Lauder Companies sent a letter to the current chairman, William Lauder, demanding chairman emeritus Ronald Lauder be removed from the board due to “concerns about his impact on race relations within the company,” as the news outlet described it based on its review of the letter. Ronald was not removed, but in response, the company pledged $10 million over the next three years to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., Equal Justice Initiative, and The Young Women’s Leadership Schools. The company has also been providing updates on its progress in reaching specific benchmarks brought up over the summer. In a statement to Teen Vogue, the Estée Lauder Companies said, “Any one individual’s political decisions do not represent the views of the company. And as a company, we stand firm on the values in which we were founded: respect for the individual, equality, and inclusion.”
There have also been several significant movements in the fashion and beauty industries that plug in to socioeconomic inequities. Black-led activist initiatives like #PullUpOrShutUp, created and led by Uoma Beauty founder Sharon Chuter, and the #15percentpledge, led by Brother Vellies creative director Aurora James, are some of the most impactful movements in the beauty and activism space in years. Less than two weeks after the movement was established, Sephora signed on to the #15percentpledge to ensure more shelf space for Black-owned businesses, and clean-beauty seller Credo launched a mentorship program for BIPOC-owned beauty brands to help them enter the retail space.
How exactly to solve the inequities among creative industries is an evolving conversation. As the Los Angeles Times reported, an inclusion report released by the Writers Guild of America found that under 20% of executive producers and showrunners for TV were people of color. Black writers told the LA Times how it’s hard to get promoted in Hollywood, even if they get “in the door.” Also, it has largely been Black women who have directly addressed the pain points of the industry when it comes to access, resources, nepotism, lack of diversity, and much more.
But what about makeup as protest, literally? Well, for one, the first wave of feminist suffragettes loved red lipstick for its shock value and adopted it as a sign of rebellion on their marches for the right to vote (and, unfortunately, during their racist segregationist advocacy). Elizabeth Arden herself marched with the suffragettes and handed out red lipstick. U.S. House Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has made headlines for her use of it as a symbol of her New York heritage and to honor the women who came before her. The very right to go to a beauty salon has been politicized as a bipartisan issue when it is ultimately a concern of public health that disproportionately impacts poor Black and brown workers.
Beauty vloggers have jumped into the conversation and used their platform to educate consumers while using makeup, and many of them do so effectively, like the now-viral TikTok makeup tutorial by an American teen that was really a call to action on China’s treatment of its Muslim population, and the Thanksgiving Makeup Tutorial That Has Nothing to Do With the 566 Federally Recognized Tribes. The makeup videos that fail at this are the ones that commodify blackness as an identity that people can easily wipe off their face after participating in it as a meme, like the allyship charade of donning half blackface in “solidarity” with #BlackLivesMatter. As Ragini Nag Rao wrote for the now-defunct Rookie in 2015: “Beauty is insidious. It co-opts the language of whatever flavor of empowerment is in vogue.”
For many people, beauty as empowerment is used in an act of refusing to be undone by the world. Doing your makeup on a day when you feel like garbage can be a declaration that you will not let your spirit be destroyed, and that you also value the statement of a cut-crease eye look (even if you don’t have pants on for your Zoom call). When you’re on the streets protesting, beauty can be used to anonymize you if you follow the tenets of antisurveillance makeup camouflauge techniques. But in uprisings amid a pandemic, where police can throw tear gas and pepper spray protesters, makeup can also be a health risk. Oil-based products on your face can exacerbate the effects of gasses and sprays lobbed at you. But that doesn’t stop plenty of people from wearing a cat eye behind safety goggles on the front lines, including myself; sometimes we need beauty to help us navigate the scariest, ugliest parts of our day.
Even if makeup can be a liability on the front lines of protesting in the U.S., it is still a powerful statement in all sorts of contexts. In North Korea, CNN reported on young women daring to wear makeup to protest against the state. In 2018, the Independent reported that in South Korea, some women chose to not wear makeup to protest against the patriarchy. It is contextual and political wherever we go, whoever we are, and however we use it. One person’s coping mechanism is another person’s survival strategy is another person’s reminder that fitting into society’s definition of beauty isn’t the point of living; the point of living is to define beauty for ourselves. These are not all the same thing, though they are all part of the conversation. There’s no one right way to be beautiful or use makeup, and there are infinite ways to politicize it, which bestows it with uniquely violent and hopeful potential.
Makeup is a magnet for political power, whether it comes in the form of corporate empowerment, a political agenda, or a grassroots protest. It is power, however fleeting; hold it carefully.