AndrewFowler

My PhD research centred on beauty vloggers, namely, young women who regularly produce beauty content on YouTube for a living � it�s their jobs. In my work I demonstrate how although the beauty vlogger appears solo in front of a camera, they rarely work alone. The UK (and many other countries) has a sizable beauty vlogging industry, which (in addition to YouTube and brands) also features a proliferating number of intermediaries, managers and �i ndustry experts�. A significant element of the beauty vlogging ecology is the � networking event �. These events are highly feminised and ostensibly centred on leisure: they often featuring a �tea party� or �cocktail� theme, but are branded through post-feminist logics of girl-boss empowerment. In highly decorated rooms, often around a high-end centrepiece cake, stakeholders give lectures, and successful vloggers and influencers speak on panels. Beauty and lifestyle brands horseshoe around the peripheries of event locations, giving out products ...

Colourism, skin shade prejudice involving the preferential treatment of people with light skin within and between ethnic groups , affects the life chances of people of colour around the world and fuels the multi-billion dollar global skin lightening industry. Evelyn Glenn (2008, 289) argues that in India there is an �almost universal� preference for light skin and � in terms of sheer numbers, India and Indian diasporic communities around the world constitute the largest market for skin lighteners.� Focusing on the USA, Margaret Hunter (2007) argues that people with light skin earn more, stay in school longer, live in better areas, and marry people of a higher status than those with darker skin from the same ethnicity or racialised group. Photo by Adam Jones, Ph.D./Global Photo Archive/Flickr According to the World Health Organization (n.d.), 77 percent of women in Nigeria, 35 percent of women in South Africa and 59 percent in Togo are reported regularly to use skin lightening products ...

In a recent study, researchers Bruch and Newman (2018: 1-6) investigated the �desirability� of both male and female online dating users. Bruch and Newman determined, through analysing over 200,000 messages between online dating users, that women�s sexual desirability is at its highest at age 18 whilst men�s sexual desirability peaks at age 50. After these two ages, desirability declines for both groups. Why is this the case? One explanation offered by Bruch and Newman is that desirability varies with educational level (Bruch and Newman 2018: 2). For instance, highly educated men are perceived by women to be highly desirable. However, the same is not true of women. According to the study, women are most attractive to men when they are educated to undergraduate level, but their desirability decreases as they reach postgraduate levels of study (Bruch and Newman 2018: 2). This research has sparked a considerable amount of debate, all seeking to answer why average desirability varies with a...

This post discusses beauty as an ethical ideal as defined by Heather Widdows in her book Perfect Me: Beauty As An Ethical Ideal, particularly focusing on the actions required to meet that ideal, and what happens when you are prevented from doing them. Before going into my argument, I want to clarify that this post does not wish to criticise people with disabilities or chronic illnesses who engage in beautifying behaviours; none of us are really free from beauty as an ethical ideal, including the author, so it would be wrong to condemn anyone who takes part in it. Part of the complexity of beauty is that these practices can genuinely be tools for bonding, self-expression and empowerment; to totally denounce them would be nonsensical. The aim instead is to consider how some of these behaviours support the concept of beauty as an ethical ideal.  Beauty as an ethical ideal involves actions � meaningful pursuits towards a goal. These can include: �maintenance� or routine behaviours to e...

[This piece was originally published in Healthy  magazine] We�re encouraged to think of �looking good� as a moral imperative - if you don�t have a great body then there�s a sense that you must have let yourself go ( Widdows, 2018) . While appearance is key to how we present ourselves to the world, most of us are unnecessarily self critical and our relationships with our bodies suffer as a result. There are a number of issues at play here, primarily our urge to measure ourselves against others (social comparison theory). While some measures such as academic achievements are objective � qualifications prove what you can do � comparing appearance is subjective, and difficult to get into proportion. This works in tandem with self-discrepancy theory, which suggests we have three views of the self: the actual, the ideal � what we aspire to look like - and the ought � what we think we ought to look like. Evidence shows that our view of the �actual� self is distorted by the other two views...

Selfies have often been associated with the ongoing influence of beauty ideals as an aspirational imperative ( MacCallum and Widdows, 2016 ) but simultaneously have been criticised as forms of narcissism ( Burns 2015 , Walker Rettberg, 2014 ).   In fact, selfies are a diverse form of self-representation that includes images which their creators characterise as �ugly�. This is perhaps surprising given that �ugly� carries strongly negative connotations. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the adjective as: Offensive or repulsive to the eye; unpleasing in appearance; of disagreeable or unsightly aspect A word sketch of �ugly� in the British National Corpus confirms that the evaluative negativity of the adjective in its contemporary use, showing that it is used typically to modify unpleasant creatures ( brute, ogre, beast, troll, monster ) or an insult ( motherfucker, bastard, bitch ).   Why then would a person characterise their selfie with the modifier �ugly�? In the mainstre...

�The beauty ideal is not an evil taskmaster, but it is an ethical ideal and powerful and only when we recognise it can we begin to address it. What we need is beauty without the beast� Friday 1 st June 2018 saw the official launch of Professor Widdows' new book � Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Idea l�, published by Princeton University Press, at the University of Birmingham.   Perfect Me is the culmination of nearly ten years of research in the philosophy of body and beauty for Professor Widdows. The book explores the changing and ethical nature of the beauty ideal, where the pressure to achieve the �perfect� body has become increasingly more dominant, more demanding, and more global than ever before. Guest speakers for the launch included Dr Clare Chambers (University of Cambridge), and Professor Alison Jagger (University of Colorado at Boulder and University of Birmingham) who each summarised the arguments in Perfect Me before highlighting its most significant aspects. ...