Beauty - Up To Standard

Excerpts and Editorializing On The Beauty Norms I Grew Up With To Accompany Episode 6 of Actual People

This week I look backwards at my relationship with beauty. (or wherever you get your podcasts, search “Actual People” and go to “Face Mask…”) To gather my thoughts, I looked through the memoir bits of my unpublished ‘magical realism memoir’ to find vignettes that describe the aesthetics of late 70s and 80s Miami, the era and place where I first oriented myself with beauty and began to form my own burgeoning self image along with its embedded lookist tendencies and sometimes harsh self assessment.

There was a clear beauty divide between the 70s and 80s. The 80s were pure female objectification - high waisted unitards and come hither looks - which butte up against the patchwork muumuus and hairy armpits of 70s feminism and what we talked about around the dinner table as a family with our frequently thumbed through copies of Free To Be You and Me and Our Bodies, Our Selves.

The onset of the 80s coincided with my parents divorce and my father’s hedonistic party days with lots of young model girlfriends, fast boats, and big parties. My mother followed suit and got herself a ‘boy toy’ 20 years her junior but this part is about my dad because the women he chose and the attention he focused on them while I was a growing girl was problematic. At the same time, he always loved me specifically for my intelligence and often told me ‘school is your job.’ Grades mattered.

He would also say, ‘Do as I say, Not as I do.’ This would also inform my beauty edict.

I tell the story in the podcast of how he threw one of his girlfriends a 21st birthday party. She looked a lot like nineties supermodel, Claudia Schiffer, and wore an electric blue skin tight leather outfit which she bought from North Beach Leather in the Aventura Mall, a fancy mall in North Miami. I found a throwback picture from North Beach Leather and included it in the collage above.

Before that, my father went and lived in the Mutiny after leaving our house. It was only for a few months but I remember feeling that it was slightly scary in my 8 year old body (exact age unclear). I write:

In an article about the documentary Cocaine Cowboys, the Miami Herald called The Mutiny Hotel “The Den of Iniquity.” It was there where the cocaine business found a social club to nurture itself into a culture and an epoch seared into our collective unconscious by Miami Vice and Scarface. 

When my father moved out, he took a room on the ground floor there.  It was burgundy and gray with black lacquer accents, a color combination I associated with intrigue, glitz, and just all around swankiness the likes of which I’d never seen before.  The effect was a strobe light of glamour and sleaze, a chimerical apotheosis that allowed pitch darkness to glow with light as could only happen when shiny black met with recess lighting, dust, and rhinestones.  The best example of this effect was captured in the state-of-the-art Michael Jackson video ‘Rock with You’ where the king of pop floats in an exalted urban stratosphere kicking his white pant legs out with expert knees.  Despite the excitement, I was also deeply frightened by its implications – the depths of night, strangers, short term lovers, broken glass, smeared mascara, confusion, and a clash of voices chuckling at jokes about illicit and incomprehensibly unwholesome activities.

1980 was the year of the Mariel boatlift, the mass immigration of Cubans that arrived on Miami shores which was the inspiration for Scarface.

The Mutiny was in the movie Scarface and was the first place we’d spend Sundays with our dad eating brunch at the pool. This was the exact same time period.

Before this, we lived in a modest one story house in Coconut Grove with lots of folksy, musical instruments lying around, long white shag carpeting, a coffee table book of Annie Leibovitz photographs, and indigenous art. My mom had a dark room. I went to a Montessori school. We ate bulgur wheat casseroles. We got Jean Naté bath splash at Christmas. We used No More Tears shampoo.

Almost from one day to the next, there was a complete scene change. You’ll have to listen to the podcast to hear my story about putting a silver stiletto into the trash compactor.

The episode in a way is a cataloging of the beauty artifacts that I encountered growing up that formed my world view of beauty before critical thought kicked in (which only does so much). I asked Chat GPT to make me a list of items I mention in the podcast episode. Here’s that list (amended):

• Miami

• Aspen

• Mariel boatlift

• North Beach Leather

• Scarface

• The Mutiny Hotel

• Hollywood Wives by Jackie Collins

• Maya Angelou

• Joan Didion

• Susan Sontag

• Banana Republic

• LL Bean

• Lancome

• Clinique

• Elizabeth Arden Eight Hour Cream

• 450 SL Mercedes

• Jocelyn Wildenstein

• Au Bar

My mom was more down to earth in her beauty choices. Think Elle Magazine instead of Vogue if you want to get fancy. She bought classic beauty brands Lancome and Clinique. She wore too much bronzer. Terracotta by Guerlain. She wore Elizabeth Arden eight hour cream. She wore beige lip gloss that matched her car, which was a beige 450 SL Mercedes. She was big into body lotion. Head to toe after every shower. By 1983, she had a frosted shag haircut and wore wraparound sunglasses with tiny rivets. I looked them up online and I think they were made by Porsche.

My father’s second wife could do a mean smokey eye. She was a French soap opera actress with perfect wide eyes for makeup. An earlier girlfriend told me to always pour Johnson’s baby oil on my legs right out of the shower to keep my gams moist. Ah petroleum!

A staple of my tween years were half used pots of pink lip gloss mixed with grains of sand sitting in the center console of my dads car.

I wore black eyeliner lined inside the rim of my eyes. I wore black nail polish. I used temporary colorific colour mousse in my hair to turn it magenta. It never washed out. I wore huge crosses and rings on every finger. I wore thong bikinis with fringe coming out of the butt. All of my friends did.

The pretty women that filled my father’s tables at places like The Strand in Miami and Mr. Chows in New York and the Caribou Club in Aspen didn’t talk about the headache inducing things I liked to talk about, the why why why of everything, they were fun and light hearted. They talked about sex and money. They let the ‘men be men.’

In the podcast I talk about the blank malleable expressions of pretty women on album covers and in fashion shoots and how that look gave way to more defiant expressions that seemed to say to men, I really don’t care what you think.

Growing up I really really really really REALLY wanted to be a fashion designer. I loved everything from street style to couture though I could live without resort collections and boring RTW. I liked the edges. Ultimately, I didn’t want to do the thing - sew, drape - and I didn’t get into Parsons anyway but I wanted to be in control of the image message instead of having it control me.

Part of me wondered, why can’t I be more docile, girly, and fun? The other part was proud that I wore jeans most days and eschewed the dry bar for a pencil in a bun.

One big realization that I came to eventually in my life is that one should actually do things they like waking up and doing and not pursue things that they can only think about doing in the abstract.

But it’s not because I didn’t love beauty. I love makeup even if it seems to just disappear on my skin and I don’t rally have the wide neutral features that makeup favors.

My own grandmother was to me, the ultimate beauty and fashion icon, regardless of whether the public at large knew of her. All of her adult life, she hosted parties and she dressed ‘to the 9s’ for every occasion - all very unique almost costume like hand made clothes often from a store called Camille in Coconut Grove. Some of her outfits were signed by the designer but all this is for a fashion episode so I’ll shut up. She was very glamorous though. She clearly influenced my father's social proclivities. Other than never going gray, she never had plastic surgery and just wore red lipstick and always did her nails.

These days, I’m a single mom living out of big cities. I get my hair colored and after reading the book Flawless before interviewing author and NPR Host Elise Hu for the next episode, I ran out to Sephora and bought a few new fun things but my upkeep is pretty minimal. My father has died. My grandmother has died. My nightlife years in New York are long gone. There is little in the way of glamour in my current single momhood life. My staples are James Perse and Madewell. I try not to eat too many cookies. I do yoga and walk around a lake.

I watch what is happening in beauty. Over time, as we become more inclusive paradoxically, we have become more extreme in beauty habits. In Love is Blind (which is very addictive) every one of those women - all in their 20s and 30s - have had copious amounts of fillers and work done. they cake on the makeup.and wear beauty queen style gowns. I’m often shocked by their retrograde ideas of how marriage works. We are going forward but also embracing what Elise Hu calls “The tech gaze” which has us augmenting ourselves as a matter of course. (You will learn more about the context of this and its evolution in next week's interview.)

At same the same time, go into any American big box store or the grocery store, mall or any plane for that matter and you'll see teenagers in PJ's and slippers. People don't dress up like they used to, the boomers would say.

Things are turned around. The streets is a dress rehearsal where the real performance takes place on that tiny screen you hold in your hand. I have a conflicted relationship with lookism I admit to having lookist tendencies, because it was such a part of the fabric of my childhood. I've definitely conflated physical beauty with merit or admired people, male and female, based on the symmetry of their features and physical beauty.

I come from a world of maximalism, but pruned myself into a kind of minimalism. Only my favorite books are on the shelves. Only my favorite bowls are in the cupboard. There's nothing beyond the essential. My real happy place is a cabin in the woods by a lake but perhaps in that cabin on the lake, I'd be wearing a couture gown and under that glittering gown, I'd still be wearing jeans. I guess that’s my beauty edict. Halfway in. Halfway out. Keep my power.

Now go listen to the podcast on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Amazon Music, or anywhere you get your podcasts. It’s called Actual People. Subscribe today!

I’ll leave you with the me from the ‘tech gaze’ of ChatGPT…

P.S.I asked ChatGPT to recreate my tween years out at a nightclub /restaurant with my dad and it said: “I'm here to help create images based on your requests, but I must follow guidelines that prevent me from creating images that include children in contexts that aren't appropriate for them. A nightclub scene with alcohol and a focus on adult activities is not a suitable setting for a child.” Tell that to my dad in the 80s..