Can Beauty Be A Source Of Joy?

For the love of beauty

Growing up, my mum was never much into makeup, and it showed in the lack of beauty products in our home.. But whenever my older cousins and aunties would come round, it was as if my very own Sephora had arrived. I would sneak off into the bathroom with their makeup bags, ecstatic, and spend hours playing with the products and experimenting on my baby face. I should have known then, I was destined for a future in beauty.

In those moments, it was all about fun, there was a sense of freedom and joy at being able to go through their makeup bags and discover the different products. There was no thinking about the end result and how to use makeup to enhance my face. Today, beauty is a multifaceted issue. It's no longer just about play; it's a complex social phenomenon. Society's beauty standards can be divisive, restrictive, and quite frankly toxic. Yet, on an individual level, beauty can be a source of immense joy. Even beauty icons like Hailey Bieber and Kylie Jenner, often at the centre of beauty standards debates, clearly adore beauty.

I remember when Kylie Jenner first started posting makeup videos on her socials, there was this childlike excitement as she essentially played and experimented with her makeup products. In 2019, speaking about the success of her beauty brand, she tells ELLE, “I don’t really do it to make money or think that far into the future if this is going to be super successful. I just knew my talents and was passionate about makeup and lips and lipsticks.” (Take this with a pinch of salt, of course, money and building the Kardashian/Empire played a massive role)

Similarly, it was an early love of beauty that was a contributing factor in nail artist Anouska Anastasia calling. “It’s a passion that turned into a career. My relationship with beauty started at a very young age; I was interested in the first free makeup kit I received from a magazine. It’s amazing to think that a passion I had as a little girl turned into a business,” Anoushka tells me. When it comes to nails, there’s nothing better than a fresh set; it brings instant joy.

One of my clients recently said to me, ‘My life is a mess, but at least my nails look great.’ Also, being able to create custom designs for clients is amazing because it’s so personal to them,” Anouska adds. You only have to glance at Anouska’s feed to be filled with bright glee. “I think when it comes to my own content, I’ve always strived to make content that I know I would enjoy, and in turn, I’ve connected with an audience who enjoys it also, which makes me so happy,” Anouska explains.

Via Anouska’s Instagram

Something I firmly hold onto is that beauty brings people together and fosters communities - I’ve been able to see this first hand, being a part of organising beauty charity sales to raise funds to help displaced women. It’s empowered all those involved and I’ve felt so much hope from it. I’ve seen up close how much people want to be part of something that positively changes the lives of others, and beauty has been at the centre of that. 

Johanna Ralph, assistant merchandiser also values the unifying element of beauty. “The best thing about beauty is the shared experience. I’ve bonded with so many different people, reminiscing about having to collect every MAC lipstick, or wanting every Naked Palette! Makeup isn’t just makeup; It’s a whole history, similar to fashion. You can bond with someone like no other over a discontinued or reformulated fave… that pain hits differently!”

Beauty is also used to foster imagination. “It’s a creative thing to experiment with my features. It’s playtime for me. It’s synonymous with the clothes I choose to wear, my look, and my style. It’s for me; I’m not thinking of anyone else,” Rukshana Yousafzai, who has long used beauty as a tool for joy, tells me.“When I was younger, I used to paint flowers onto my face because I was creative and because I could,” Rukshana shares. “And because I could” feels so incredibly powerful and freeing. 

Luce Pemberton, freelance beauty agrees “I think at the core of beauty, it’s a creative outlet, an art form and a blank canvas every single day. You really can wake up and decide to lighten your brows, choose a grey, green or pink colour palette, bronzed or blushed, liner or no liner. It’s like picking your persona for the day, it’s just really fun,” Luce adds. “I have this signature eyeliner that I do, I call it ‘Luce’s parallelogram liner,’ and people actually recognise me for it. I think that it’s really cool that I’ve created something that defines me that I wasn’t born with”

In its current depiction, beauty is robbed of its ability to bring joy into our lives. It’s co-opted by big corporations and an industry set on monetising our love for beauty. Preying on low self-esteem and ensnaring us to want to be more “beautiful”. 

What happens to us under this constant pressure to be more beautiful? Jessica Defino explains to me, “beauty is sort of this natural inherent human longing, it’s important to us, and it should be. I think about beauty, freedom, truth and love. These are the things that the human spirit craves and will always crave. We can’t really do anything about that.”

Jessica goes on to say, “we have created a world where beauty has been flattened only to the physical dimension. So this natural longing for beauty has become flattened, physical, and focused on the self rather than focused outward, and of course that is a problem. Especially when the standard of beauty is, by all definitions, impossible to attain pretty much.” 

This creates a binary, of the beautiful and the not beautiful, Jessica describes this as the inequality of beauty. “When I say the inequality of beauty, I mean that, it’s largely a project of sexism. You look at the beauty industry and it is mostly focused on women. I'm talking about the sort of, like, measurable effects of pretty privilege. We see beautiful women getting better jobs, higher salaries, better legal outcomes, and better social treatment.”

“I think this is like a widespread public health issue, and the way to start solving it is has got to be part of a bigger collective political movement, really, focusing on solving the inequality of beauty versus the insecurity of beauty, and once the inequality of beauty is addressed, the insecurity will naturally follow that pattern” Jessica puts forward as a key step.

I’ll admit there are times when it feels like we’ve lost control over the beauty discourse. For the big corporations, beauty will always be a lucrative business, and while some may argue beauty as an expression of joy or self care is another marketing ploy, I know many of us engage in it simply for the love of beauty. Whether we’re bonding with a stranger over our favourite products, or feeling grateful for a fresh set of nails in a time of chaos, we have the power to control the narrative of beauty, the control it has over us, and the meaning it brings to our life ( of course to a certain degree, the beauty noise be noising).

Also published in OFF CHANCE