Beauty and Culture

Category

Vanities: Art of the Dressing Table

Let's face it: we humans love to dress up. Long before we were using metal tools, we were painting our faces and bodies, combing...

The “Yoga Body”

We see them everywhere: some are serene, blissful, meditating in drugstore fliers. Others - lithe visions of feminine happiness, stretching in yogurt and maxi...

Stealing Beauty: On Cultural Appropriation in Fashion

If there's any constant in fashion, it is that it always changes. And part of that change is fashion's taking of inspiration from every...

Faces: The Weird World of Nina Leen

In its heyday, LIFE magazine was a weekly window into the lives of Americans, sending photographers to capture images of news and lifestyle and...

Cole Haan Born in 1928

Authentic is a buzzword that's way overused, especially in advertising. When we see "authentic" statements next to obvious models, giving obviously faux attitude, we're...

Do Facial Expressions Rule Emotions? My One-Woman Experiment in the Field, Plus How Botox Could Help Depression

How do our faces convey emotion? Conventional thinking tells us that we smile because something made us happy, or we frown because we're annoyed...

Beauty Archetypes: Whores

Whore! It may be the lowest insult that can be hurled at a woman. Yet prostitution and promiscuity thrive as archetypes in beauty and...

Creating Characters for Epic The Movie: Why Perfection is Overrated (Even in Hollywood!)

One of the more fun and surprising things about blogging is getting invited to swag-erific events. Not very many - Wild Beauty isn't up...

A Week Without Mirrors, Plus a Review of Kjerstin Gruys’ New Book

In support of Kjerstin Gruys' new memoir detailing her year without mirrors, a call was put out for beauty bloggers to take a day...

A Week Without Mirrors: My Space vs Their Space

Less than three days into my week without mirrors (inspired by Kjerstin Gruys' Year Without Mirrors, I noticed that I was feeling really annoyed......

My Writing

Book Review: Toss The Gloss

Andrea Q. Robinson knows a lot about beauty - she's a legend in the cosmetics industry. As a student in an all-women's Catholic college,...

Is Photoshop an Enemy of Feminism?

There's been a lot of press coverage of Seventeen Magazine's "body peace treaty" lately, and I've been getting questions about it myself. What do...

Makeovers in the Movies: Now, Voyager

Makeovers are so often dismissed as superficial - nothing more than a quick romp through some stores and a beauty salon. But quite often...