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THE SCARY TRUTH ABOUT THE BEAUTY BLACK MARKET YOU NEED TO KNOW RIGHT NOW, SOMEONE IS BUYING A LUXURY LIPSTICK SPIKED WITH PAINT THINNER, ARSENIC, POSSIBLY WORSE. BY JESSICA MATLIN | 05.12.15 | COSMOPOLITAN When Autumn, 21, found her favorite mascara, Laura Geller GlamLash, listed on eBay for halfprice, she jumped on it. Her retail high didn’t last long. “I noticed the tube was missing the brand’s lips logo, and the brush’s bristles looked uneven,” she says. Still, she applied it. “It felt like sandpaper on my lashes! The brush was so scratchy,” she says. “My eyes immediately started burning and were irritated for the next five days. My doctor felt it was an adverse reaction to a product.” Autumn assumed it was a fake and filed a complaint with eBay. “Cosmetics counterfeiting is a global epidemic,” says Gregg Marrazzo, senior vice president and deputy general counsel for Estée Lauder Companies. He leads the company’s Intellectual Property Group, which focuses on anticounterfeiting — a reality for many
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in-demand brands, including MAC Cosmetics, part of Estée Lauder’s portfolio. A few of its most hotly counterfeited products are Studio Fix Fluid foundation, Spice Lip Pencil, and Ruby Woo Lipstick. Marrazzo cites a recent case in which a group of bloggers outed an Australian department store for selling faux MAC products. The store paid out $1 million and ran corrective advertising. While companies are concerned about knockoffs — it hurts their image and profits — these copies can have much more dire consequences for consumers.
THE PRODUCT PIPELINE “About 90 percent of these counterfeit items come from China, where manufacturing is cheaper and there’s a copycat culture,” says
Bob Barchiesi, president of the International Anticounterfeiting Coalition, a D.C.-based trade organization. “It’s horrifying,” says Karen Buglisi Weiler, the global president of MAC Cosmetics (whose team provided the photo here). MAC is one of the rare beauty brands bringing awareness to this issue. Many companies (including Laura Geller), when approached for this story, declined to comment. It’s easy to understand why they wouldn’t want to publicize these counterfeiters or admit that their brand identity has the potential to be (or has been) hijacked. Some cynics may wonder if MAC is simply trying to redirect dollars back to their channels. The company counters: “This isn’t just a MAC issue.
It’s a public health and safety issue,” says Buglisi Weiler. She isn’t kidding. “Counterfeit cosmetics sometimes contain harmful or even carcinogenic ingredients, perhaps not intentionally designed to harm but because the counterfeiters feel no obligation to protect the consumers they are defrauding,” says David Farquhar, supervisory special-agent unit chief at the FBI. In unsanitary working conditions, the products can be contaminated with bacteria and waste — even urine and E. coli have been found in some formulas. Unsurprisingly, people have cited rashes, dermatitis, eye infections, and aggravation of conditions such as acne and eczema as being linked to suspected counterfeit products. Prolonged exposure to some of the chemicals found in these cosmetics could have a toxic
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effect on your organs, says Ranella Hirsch, M.D., a Cambridge, Massachusetts, derm. “We’re not talking about a knockoff designer bag that you carry around on your arm,” says Buglisi Weiler. “You’re purchasing products that you put on your eyes and lips, which you may ingest.” Even if you buy a counterfeit lipstick — and come out unscathed — it’s not a victimless crime, says Barchiesi: “In some cases, the proceeds support organized crime and the funding of terrorist organizations.”
PROTECT YOURSELF There’s no crime in wanting a deal, especially on high-end beauty products. (We get it.) However, there are things you can do to stay healthy while saving cash. “Consider the three Ps,” says Barchiesi, “price, packaging, and point of sale.”
PRICE If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. “Think of it like a $20 Rolex watch,” says Barchiesi. “At that price, it’s fake.” However, he acknowledges that counterfeiters’ prices aren’t always that disparate, which makes things trickier. Check the retail price online.
PACKAGING Scan for red flags including misspelled product names and haphazard packaging. The beauty-blog community can help: They name and shame many bogus items — from Urban Decay’s Naked Palettes to Benefit’s BadGal Lash Mascara — calling out exactly what to look for. “Like many companies, we are struggling with our products being counterfeited,” says Urban Decay’s legal team. “We have a
program in place with U.S. Customs and Border Protection that intercepts these shipments from time to time, but it most likely catches only a fraction of the amount eventually shipped into the U.S.”
POINT OF SALE Sites like eBay can be tricky. You’re largely placing your trust in the seller. However, eBay works extensively with brands and law enforcement to root out counterfeiters. Even if you’re heading to a brand website, check that it’s the official one. People will create fake sites to trick shoppers, using similar URLs and the brand’s copyrighted photos. Recently, the MAC team successfully shut down more than 110 phony MAC websites run by a counterfeiting ring and was awarded a $90 million judgment. Offline, be extra cautious at street fairs, mall kiosks, and outdoor vendors, hot destinations for counterfeit MAC, according to Lew Rice, senior vice president of global security and trademark protection for Estée Lauder Companies. Off-price chains like Marshalls and others are in a completely different class and pose virtually no threat. Asked how it ensures merchandise is legit, TJX, which owns Marshalls and T.J.Maxx, wrote that it sources products from “department-store cancellations, a manufacturer making too much product, or a closeout deal when a vendor wants to clear merchandise.”
BOTTOM LINE The safest places to shop? A brand’s official store or website or a reputable retailer you’d trust with your health.
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CAN PUTTING ON MAKEUP B FEMINIST AC AUTUMN WHITEFIELD - MADR ANO’S NEW BOOK EXPLORES THE BIG QUESTIONS ABOUT BEAUT Y. BY ALANNA VAGIANOS | 06.20.16 | HUFFINGTON POST “Makeup can help people say, ‘This is who I am,’” author Autumn Whitefield-Madrano told The Huffington Post over the phone last week. As someone who has written about beauty for almost two decades at women’s magazines, on her own blog, and most recently, for her book Face Value, WhitefieldMadrano is a bonafide expert on the complexities of beauty, self-image and self-love. When Whitefield-Madrano spoke with women in her life, she found that many felt an inner conflict about caring about beauty. “There was this apology that was riding alongside this
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entirely human desire to look good,” she said. “I wanted to untangle that juxtaposition of wanting to look good, but feeling badly about it.” So Whitefield-Madrano started interviewing women. She spoke to all types of women — a nun, a bodybuilder, a burlesque dancer, a little person, a dominatrix, and more.
routines foster competition or sisterhood? Can beauty routines be about more than just “looking pretty”? And, is wanting to “look pretty” such a bad thing? HuffPost spoke to WhitefieldMadrano about beauty culture, feminism and how the two intersect with women’s everyday lives.
HP Why do you think it’s
She wanted to know how beauty shapes women’s lives, even women who don’t necessarily wear makeup everyday or go to the salon weekly.
AWM When I was speaking
She wanted to get answers to big questions: Can putting on makeup be considered a feminist act? Do women-only spaces dedicated to beauty
with women for my book I found that they had this inner conflict and guilt about caring so much about beauty. Certainly there are women who are unabashedly in love
important to discuss the role of beauty in our daily lives?
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with beauty and in love with the products, but I found that a lot of women who consider themselves a little more “serious” — for lack of a better term — had guilt about caring about those things. The word that came up a lot was “ justify.” They would justify why they cared about beauty. There was this apology that was riding alongside this entirely human desire to look good. I wanted to untangle that juxtaposition of wanting to look good, but feeling badly about it. Before I started speaking with other women, I thought I was the only one who felt that way. I moved to New York to intern at Ms. Magazine and I was in this hot bed of feminism, and then I worked in women’s magazines for most of my career. While women’s magazines are feminist in their own way, there was this juxtaposition because I thought, “Well I’m the one in this weird conflicted space about beauty.” But it wasn’t me, it’s a lot of women—most women I would say.
HP If women don’t wear makeup, it’s considered “brave.” If we wear too much makeup, we’re asking for too much attention or the wrong type of attention. Why do you think beauty and sexism are so intertwined?
AWM I think it’s because most of the people wearing makeup are women. Anything that a lot of women do and most men don’t automatically becomes tainted. It automatically becomes frivolous or silly. I don’t think we’re going to see that change until we have a big historical shift back to when men were also dabbling
in these things. It wasn’t that long ago that men were wearing makeup — we’re talking Aristocratic men. They used to wear makeup in ways that women are now. At one point, the fashion in Europe was for men to wear very over-the-top makeup and women to have much more subtle makeup. Even then, people thought, “Well at least men are owning that they’re wearing makeup, whereas women are so deceptive. They want you to think this is what they look like naturally.” There’s no way for women to win. Any funnel for sexism to come out, I think it finds a way.
your best—whatever that might mean for you—allows you to be able to present yourself to the world in the way that you want to be seen, that’s only going to enable you to do better work in the world. A lot of people spoke about beauty in that way, a much more creative way than just, “Well I have to do this because it’s expected of me.”
HP It’s also a way to express yourself and that in itself can be empowering. AWM Absolutely. I’m seeing
people who believe that you can’t be a feminist and love makeup?
a lot more creativity and play among millennials. That within itself isn’t necessarily a feminist act, but I think that it speaks to the fact that makeup can help people say, “This is who I am.”
AWM I would acknowledge,
HP What role does beauty
first of all, that there is to some degree an inherent conflict that I don’t want to pretend doesn’t exist. The fact is is that beauty and beauty routines do cost a lot of time and money—and that does take away from the larger goals we might have collectively as women. That said, that’s almost an ideological point, because when I talked to feminists for my book that’s not what they were personally reporting. It was almost like an intellectual quibbling that they were having with themselves. But it’s not like these women were like, “I’m spending three hours a day on my makeup but I can’t go out there and work for social justice.” Again, it’s a human desire to want to look good. We’ve taken it to this extreme and we’ve definitely slanted it more towards women which is undeniably problematic. But if looking
play in female friendships?
HP What would you say to
AWM By in large, the women that I spoke with didn’t treat beauty as grounds for competition or jealousy — they saw it as a way to communicate with other women. That’s part of why beauty salons have such a historical significance; women created bonds at beauty salons. It really is a woman-only space. The easiest way to break the ice with another woman is to compliment her, for better or worse. I don’t know how many times I’ve walked down the street and a woman will say “Great dress!” and it gives me this little boost and it lets me know that we’re kind of in this together.
HP It’s definitely this secret space that women don’t realize is there until we start speaking about it.
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AWM Exactly! I’m even think-
HP You interviewed so many
ing of the relationship between beauty consumers and beauty professionals. I open the book mentioning this makeup artist friend of mine. I was interviewing her for my blog when I first met her and at the end of the interview she invited me over to her house so she could give me a makeover, so I could see what the experience was like. It was like a two-and-a-half hour process, and by the end her hands had been on my face, I felt her breath on my cheek, her body has been against mine— and that’s an intimacy that if you’re a heterosexual woman you don’t often have with other women. Beauty is a real portal to that. There’s an intimacy there that I find really touching.
women from all types of backgrounds. What were some of the differences in their perceptions of beauty? Were there any common themes?
HP In your interviews, what role did you see beauty culture play in the lives of women who aren’t straight and cisgender?
AWM I interviewed a genderqueer person for my book and she doesn’t wear makeup. I don’t think she’s ever worn makeup but she told me about going to a barbershop with other genderqueer women and what an experience that is, and how it helped her learn to navigate that space. To see her face light up when she was talking about her shared experience with other butch women at the barbershop made me realize, OK this isn’t something just for girly-girls. We all can bond in this way. I know that a lot of trans women report in their transition into womanhood that beauty routines and those shared experiences—and being able to do it openly—was something they had been looking forward to since they were children.
AWM I went into it a little naively thinking that women who fit that conventional beauty type would have a different experience than those who were more average-looking, like most people. And I didn’t find that to be the case at all. It wasn’t a simple relationship. It seemed both very individualistic and very collective, all at once. What I will say is that women of color talked about how the beauty standard for their race in particular had affected them. As women we all have certain standards that we’re “supposed” to reach. And then African-American women have another standard that’s an umbrella under this larger standard. And white women have theirs, and Latina women have theirs, and so on and so forth. That was the biggest thing that jumped out at me. There were also differences in age groups. Older women I found — and this is supported by statistics — tend to become more comfortable with how they look over time. And that was reflected in the embrace of the juxtapositions that go along with beauty. I found that younger women were still really wrestling with these questions.
HP It’s unfortunate that older women almost become “invisible” as they age in our culture. It’s even more unfortunate that I look forward to getting older simply to get
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a reprieve from our harsh beauty standards.
AWM Yes! And that’s what some of the older women I spoke with said. They reported exactly that. That yea it kind of sucks to get older because they didn’t even realize the sort of privilege that comes with being a young woman. But there was also a relief that goes along with it. They said to me, “Wait, if I’m finally—after a lifetime of being judged on how I look—not being judged on it as much.” There’s this sense that they can breathe a bit more. I think it’s wonderful when we see older women being celebrated for being beautiful, but at the same time I don’t want to the new standard for older women mean that we all need to look like 85-year-old model Carmen Dell’Orefice. That’s not the answer to solving the problem that older women become invisible in our culture.
HP In regards to the media’s recent “femvertising,” such as Dove’s Real Beauty ads, how do you think this type of media affects women’s self-esteem and beauty image?
AWM That’s a tough one because I think you can argue both sides. When I first saw the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, it was maybe 12 years ago. The women were in white underwear and they were either lightly retouched or not retouched at all and I was like “Finally!” It felt so great. But as it’s become more popular I’ve become a lot more skeptical. Instead it feels like the message is not only do we have to look beautiful, but we have to feel beautiful. And I
find that really problematic. There’s been a backlash against that which is really a reflection of how women are affected by it. It’s like, wait a second, this is not the answer. The answer to broadening the scope of beauty is not simply saying, “Now you have to feel beautiful and look beautiful!” That said, there’s also a huge relief in seeing people who look a little more like you represented in media.
HP What role do you think social media plays in women’s body image and perceptions of themselves?
AWM Surprise, it’s complicated! There’s two conflicting theories out there. One is that everyone’s posting selfies on social media and many people are using the photo-retouching software and everyone’s tagging their selfies with #Flawless or “Feeling great!” And of course that means we’re just becoming more and more narcissistic. But the other argument is that it’s actually making people feel worse about themselves. I would argue that both of those points are right. I think that with social media you can use it and abuse it. I’ve
seen a lot of creativity when it comes to self-presentation on social media. I find that really encouraging. That said, I’ve also seen people posting selfie after selfie and to me the message is really clear that they simply want some affirmation. That’s not the end of the world, and it’s not a terrible thing — but I don’t want us to fool ourselves into thinking that because there is this positive vibe on social media that it means that we totally love ourselves, and we feel great and beautiful and it’s that simple. There’s definitely a murkier story there for most people.
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ALICIA KEYS AND THE ‘TYRANNY OF MAKEUP’ BY PENELOPE GREEN | 09.14.16 | NEW YORK TIMES 14 | MODERN MAKEUP
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Alicia Keys performed sans makeup at the Democratic National Convention in July. Her willingness to do so caused a backlash against her, and then a backlash to the backlash. It was the Friday before Labor Day, and Alicia Keys, the 35-year-old pop star, was on the “Today” show performing for the program’s summer concert series — she’s about to release a new album, and she wrote the theme song for “Queen of Katwe,” out next week. There was a lot to talk about. But instead, Ms. Keys spent most of her time talking about makeup (and not wearing it) with the anchors Tamron Hall, Billy Bush and Al Roker, who were doggedly wiping the pancake off their faces. “You’re all crazy,” said Ms. Keys, swabbing Ms. Hall’s cheeks. “This isn’t even what it’s about!” “It” is #nomakeup — a meme, a movement, a cri de coeur — that has been roiling social media for months. If you missed the kerfuffle, it started in May, when Ms. Keys wrote an essay for Lenny, Lena Dunham’s online magazine, about the insecurities she felt being a woman in the public eye, and the roles (and makeup) she put on over the years to armor herself. She wrote about the anxiety she endured if she left her house unadorned: “What if someone wanted a picture? What if someone posted it?” And then, when she went without makeup or
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styling for an album portrait, she felt liberated, and the act became a metaphor. “I hope to God it’s a revolution,” she wrote. In the months that followed, Ms. Keys was seemingly everywhere — always without makeup, always beautiful — performing at the Democratic National Convention, on “The Voice” and the MTV Video Music Awards, at the Tom Ford show during New York Fashion Week. That’s a nice story, right? Inspiring and kind of sweet? Feh. “Makeup-gate 2016,” as The New York Post and others called it, has grown only weirder and louder, as Twitter was at first ignited with Alicia Keys supporters, and then flooded with a backlash against her. And then with the backlash to the backlash. #Nomakeup was empowering and brave. No, it was annoying, incendiary and invasive. Ms. Keys’s (mostly female) detractors howled at her disingenuousness (surely she had spent thousands on skin care?) and her deceit (surely she was wearing tinted moisturizer?); some slammed her for not looking pretty enough (though they used coarser words than those). Late last month, Swizz Beatz, Ms. Keys’s husband, took to Instagram with a video defending his wife: “This is deep,” he said, clearly incredulous. “Somebody’s sitting home mad, because somebody didn’t wear makeup on their face?”
Don’t be surprised that this is news, said Letty Cottin Pogrebin, the second-wave feminist activist and author. “It’s all so familiar,” she said. “Alicia Keys could be taking a page from the no-makeup orthodoxy of the women’s movement 40 years ago. I’d never heard of her before this brouhaha, but now I’ll follow her anywhere. What she’s doing is pop-consciousness-raising. She’s not just talking about the tyranny of makeup. She’s talking about female authenticity. She’s challenging the culture’s relentless standards of feminine conformity and the beauty industry’s incessant product hype.” (Ms. Pogrebin said that while she was reading Ms. Keys’s essay, an ad popped up for some kind of skin cream.) Why is it, wondered Linda Wells, founding editor of Allure magazine, that fashion is considered self-expression and makeup is self-absorption? Or something more pernicious? Ms. Wells recalled “The Beauty Myth,” Naomi Wolf’s 1991 book in which she argued that contemporary ideals of beauty, proposed in large part by a male-dominated cosmetics industry, were enslaving women and holding them in thrall to all manner of restrictive practices, from makeup to surgery to eating disorders. “I get the argument, but I don’t agree with it,” Ms. Wells said. “To me, we’re not all passive victims. Make your choice, like Alicia Keys. Decide what makes you feel confident and enjoy it.” Furthermore, Ms. Wells said, Ms. Keys’s gesture is coming at a particular moment, when the internet is flooded with YouTube videos on how to best present yourself … on the internet. “It’s tutorials about contouring and highlighting, except now it’s called strobing, and there’s something else called baking, which is basically a thick coat of powder,” Ms. Wells said. “It’s a very extreme look — we haven’t had highlighting since the ’80s. It’s this sort of extreme grooming geared for the selfie culture, and then someone like Alicia Keys comes out and says, ‘I’m not going to do it,’ and people are losing their minds.” Whose makeup is it anyway? In the late 1980s, Andrea Robinson, then the president of Ultima II, recalled the response of her male bosses at Revlon when she proposed an extension of her brand called the Nakeds, nude-toned makeup designed for women who didn’t want to look
as if they were wearing any. As Ms. Robinson remembered: “They said: ‘Why would a woman want to wear mud on her face? Makeup is about fantasy, it’s about color.’ What they didn’t say was that it was about their fantasy, their sense of color. The idea that women would want to look like themselves, and wear makeup for themselves, was crazy to them.” Once introduced, the Nakeds broke all sorts of sales records, she said, and sold out over and over again. Hundreds of women wrote her in gratitude, Ms. Robinson said, including Jean Harris, who wrote her from prison: “She thought we had the right idea, that women should not overpaint themselves, and use their simple beauty.” For the record, cosmetics executives aren’t worried that #nomakeup will have women hurling their lipsticks into the Dumpster. “It’s a makeup moment,” said Jane Hertzmark Hudis, group president of the Estée Lauder Companies, adding that her industry is experiencing “explosive growth,” with “prestige” makeup sales up 13 percent last year, according to the NPD Group (sales driven in large part by concealers, as it happens). Sales of all beauty products reached $16 billion in this country in 2015. Nude colors are consistent best sellers, Ms. Hudis said. Just ask Bobbi Brown, the makeup artist turned cosmetics mogul who built a company, as Ms. Robinson did, around nude makeup, and whose corporate manifesto right now is #bewhoyouare. “It takes a lot of guts to face HDTV without makeup,” Ms. Brown said of Ms. Keys. “But I get it. It’s all fine. Choose who you want to be. Personally, I like to have a little concealer. But obviously it’s more than about makeup. I don’t think people understand how difficult it is for women like Alicia Keys to worry about the way you look every second. It is the ugly internet we live in. Let’s be nice to people, and not be so judgey.” There is a sense you just can’t win. When Kim Novak appeared on the Academy Awards in 2014, there was much snark regarding her clearly augmented face. Laura Lippman, the crime novelist who was then 55, was appalled: Who were these internet trolls who would weigh in so viciously on an 81-year-old’s appearance? In solidarity with Ms. Novak, she
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posted a selfie of her face “as is” and invited others to do the same. It was a different sort of #nomakeup moment. “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, is how I felt,” she said. The response, she said, was overwhelming: thousands of “as is” photos from all sorts of people, including one man, she said, who photographed himself on a hospital gurney the day he had a minor heart attack. It’s just complicated, said Sheila Bridges, the interior designer. Given an alopecia diagnosis years ago, she decided to shave her head rather than contend with wigs or weaves, a private act that has subjected her to constant, uninvited
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public commentary. Also, people have been moved to pat her head. “Historically, beauty has been our currency as women,” Ms. Bridges said, “and when you do something that is inconsistent with societal norms, people get upset. It reminds me of when Gabby Douglas won her gold medals at the London Olympics.” It was 2012, and the 16-year-old was taking home two gold medals for her performances, but much of the conversation around that historic event — Ms. Douglas was the first AfricanAmerican woman to earn the Olympic all-around title — was about how her hair was pulled into a ponytail and secured with clips. “There was
a tremendous backlash,” Ms. Bridges recalled, “and all these terrible tweets, and what was so disturbing for me was that the majority seemed to come from other black women. I’m like: ‘Are you kidding? She’s one of the world’s best athletes, and we’re talking about her hair?’” Gail O’Neill, a journalist and former model, said that for some, Ms. Keys has become a Rorschach test, and the disapprobation for the singer’s personal choice comes from women who are measuring themselves against it. “When women start applying makeup as preteenagers,” she said, “by adulthood, that mindless habit can result in a mask we don’t
even know we’re wearing until someone like Alicia decides to remove hers in public.” People who do things outside the herd scare people who are in the herd, said Anne Kreamer, a journalist who stopped coloring her hair at 49, and wrote about her experience in her 2007 book, “Going Gray: What I Learned About Beauty, Sex, Work, Motherhood, Authenticity and Everything Else That Matters.” “It was the women who were the most critical,” Ms. Kreamer recalled, as if by doing without herself, she was taking something away from them. In her book, Ms. Kreamer noted that in the 1950s, fewer than 10 percent of women dyed their hair, as compared with 40 to 75 percent in the mid-2000s; she also surveyed some 400 women, of which 15 percent said they’d had some sort of plastic surgery. As she wrote, darkly, “Extrapolate the trend line, double the available technologies, and imagine the choices and pressures our great-grandchildren may face.” In 1983, Ms. Pogrebin wrote an article called “The Power of Beauty” for Ms., the magazine she helped found. She was galvanized to do so when a friend had a chin augmentation, and then blossomed, emotionally, as a result. What’s the proper feminist response, Ms. Pogrebin asked herself, to such an extreme renovation: to offer congratulations, or wincing disapproval? If a feature distracts people from what they feel is their true selves, how can you argue with their alteration of that feature? But then again, as Ms. Pogrebin pointed out, whose notion of attractiveness motivated the change? “We can argue about what is attractive, but not that we wish to attract,” she wrote. The solution to not making ourselves crazy, she suggested, is to propose a broader definition of beauty, one that celebrates its impact but reduces its tyranny. Meanwhile, the churn about women’s looks continues. Last week, after Hillary Clinton’s performance on NBC, Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, took to Twitter to chastise the former secretary of state … for not smiling.
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PHOTO GALLERY | NEW YORK DAILY NEWS HALF-DRAG: DRAG QUEENS SHOW OFF DUAL IDENTITES... | 23
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These drag queens aren’t afraid to showcase their dual identities, and they’re getting a little help thanks to New York photographer Leland Bobbe. In a project entitled “Half-Drag ... A Different Kind of Beauty,” Bobbe sets out to capture both the female and male sides of New York City drag queens, having his subjects pose only halfway in drag. With half of his face done up in dramatic makeup and the other half showing off his natural-born male state, Crystal Demure poses for the photographer to showcase what’s underneath his drag queen persona.
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Bobbe first came up with his idea after meeting drag queen Sabel Scities at a carnivalthemed Workbook party. This shot was the first in his series of half-drag photos, and the response to the photo caused the photographer to delve further into the idea. “I got great feedback on the image so I decided to reach out to other drag queens using Facebook as my main means of communication,� he wrote on his blog.
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Kittin Withawhip looks like he could be a glamorous drag queen one minute, and a regular looking man walking the streets of New York City the next.
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