Pretty Smoothie
As photo editing techniques continue to flourish, and as the visual aesthetics of glass skin continues to proliferate on social media and in advertising, the smooth complexion craze poses new questions. Are we right in lamenting the Golden Age of natural beauty without filters and airbrushing? Can a person really be as blemish-less as the smoothie they post on Instagram? Let’s take a look in the mirror and examine the puzzle of representation and the notion of the beauty ideal.
Spanning from philosophy to visual art, from porcelain dolls to Hollywood stars, and from exalted feminine refinement to modern-day celebrity, the quest for ‘the ideal’ has taken us to a point where it’s difficult to tell what we should and shouldn’t expect of our own bodies. The art of imitation, the art of enhancement, and the art of concealing art all blend into one. Collage made by Polina of Iris (IG @apollinaria.polina). © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.
You feel a gentle breeze from the window stroke your cheeks, tenderly and playfully. You open your eyes, blink, and maybe rub your eyes to shirk any residues of sleep. You lift your blanket, swing your legs to the side and get out of bed. Tying the belt of the dressing robe around your waist, you shuffle in little clumsy steps towards the basin to wash your face. And then you look in the mirror.
What you see in the reflection is, of course, a very personal matter and depends on many things (for instance, what you got in your gene pool and what you had for dinner the night before). But there will be few of us who wouldn’t have been somewhat disappointed by the sight that met our eyes, at least at some point. Whether it’s flushed cheeks, swollen eyelids, oily nose, large pores, poorly-timed blemishes, a scar, or acne marks – any sign of roughness or rupture would’ve been regrettable (maybe even rueful). Why doesn’t the skin behave? Why isn’t it pretty? Why isn’t it smooth?
Available via IG @haileybieber © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.
At this point, some of us may feel inclined to indulge in self-deprecation. Advice from social media will be sought; new products, creams, cleansers will be bought; emotional battles with the stubbornness of our complexion will be fought; and many a dark thought will be thought.
Some others (or perhaps the same bunch of us) will start to scrutinise the impossibility of the glass skin trend. Who but the radiant Athena, the luminous Princess Diana, and the glowing Hailey Bieber could possibly obtain “skin so clear, smooth and translucent that it resembles a sheet of glass”? (Avant Skincare). And yet, here we are, surrounded by pictures of effervescent cheekbones and highly reflective cupid’s bows that, in all their silky splendour, whisper: ‘this is Beauty; this is Bounty; this is Brilliance’.
Some vloggers refer to this haunting apparition as the Smartphone Face. In her analysis of the clash between old-fashioned and contemporary ideals in period dramas, Laura Jane Atelier looks at the iPhone face with a distrusting eye. She expresses a nostalgia for the early modern and Victorian eras, when “faces had a rawness to them: beauty wasn’t sculpted, nor was it subjected to rigid symmetry [but was] unfiltered, un-retouched, and visibly a part of the real world” (Atelier, YouTube). The paintings of Rembrandt and Botticelli are key reference points here, where faces are soft-featured, well-rounded, but not at all perfect. For Atelier, it is the rise of Hollywood’s Golden Age that shifted the notion of beauty towards new, cinematic horizons. Yet, even here, Atelier continues, stars like Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, and Vivien Leigh exemplify “an enhanced, but still believable look”, their faces “polished, but not to the point of looking artificial”. Texture, lines, irregularity of features was not interfered with – so Atelier holds.
The funny thing about nostalgia, however, is that very often it clings onto a past that did not really exist. Rather, nostalgia reproduces a version of the past that occupies the imagination as something infinitely better, more peaceful, and somehow more ‘natural’ than the way we live now. The camera and the whole lot of technology we use now alter us so much, we think. In the past, there was no such thing as retouching. Or was there?
Enhancement – the journey towards Perfection – is our chronic human itch, which has bothered us since the time of Plato, who articulated the realm of Forms and Ideas, and beauty for Beauty’s sake (for example, in his Republic and Symposium). Every epoch had its own beauty standard, to which artists were never loath to commit their brushes, pens, and chisels. Precisely because a well-rounded face with round eyes and small lips was the desired effect in a model between the Renaissance and the Modernist period, these attributes found their way onto the canvases of Botticelli, Bouguereau, Winterhalter, and even the later John Singer Sargent. We can imagine the lengths to which a devotee of the muses might have gone if we compare the miniatures of George Eliot with her photographs (George Eliot Archive is a good place to start). As for a poreless complexion, the very nature of oil and other kinds of paint would preclude such details. Perhaps our anxiety about pores became so prevalent precisely because of the arrival of the pixelated image, high resolution, and shutter speed, which exposed every inch of our skin to the public eye. If anything, photoshop seems to be an attempt to redirect hyperrealism towards the familiar tendresse and haziness of the old masters.
Having said this, we probably still feel that Atelier’s concerns resonate with some of our own misgivings. The ubiquitous shine of our current beauty trend can sometimes be overwhelming, even blinding. We might as well aspire to be as pretty, rosy, fresh, and appetising as the smoothies we post on Instagram. What we have to be aware of is this: Beauty, the idol of perfectionism, always was, and representation has always been its faithful servant; but beauty, the fleeting charm of everyday life, is always a process of becoming, and defies representation because, like a live performance, it can never be the same twice.
