Kristi Cooper is a 51-year-old assistant to the president who can’t wait to dye her roots at the earliest time pandemic-proof possible. However, Karen Parker, the 62-year-old director of the Midcoast Hunger Prevention Project, will continue to let her roots grow. She’s been through the awkward stage. “I’m anxious about it,” she told us, “but I think the time is now.”
In the course of the quarantine period, Parker began to notice the constant expenditure she was channeling towards the regular touch-ups she had to do. “Instead, I could be outside, I could be hiking, I could be in my garden, I could be reading,” she explained. “I asked myself, ‘What are your real priorities in life?'”
For each Karen Parker, there’s a Kristi Cooper. “I’m not going to lie,” Cooper told Cooper, “I can’t wait to get back into that salon chair and feel normal again.” Cooper has colored her hair once every three weeks for the last 30 years.
When hair begins to gray, and the last bits of pedicures fade away, we’re facing the real issue behind all that beauty care. Some people find it’s an opportunity for experimentation and enjoyment. Some have an unwelcome reminder of loss of access to products and services for beauty.
Women are particularly impacted because the pressure to be perfect in their appearance has always been more burdensome on women than on males.
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“There’s so much social currency around appearance,” said Elizabeth Daniels, a professor who studies bodies and image issues at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. “It’s not that women are forced to opt to be a part of it. It’s simply in the air you breathe.”
If past crises have given us any lessons, it is that the majority of treatments for beauty will bounce back.
Geoffrey Jones, author of Beauty Imagined: A Study of the Global Beauty Industry, explained that beauty was thought to be crucial during WWII. There was a time when the U.S. government deemed lipstick essential during wartime. “It was like armaments or something, a necessary good,” Jones said and said that the bright, luscious lips maintained a high morale.
In times of economic decline, consumers don’t cease buying cosmetics; instead, they start buying less expensive products. In the financial recession of 2008-2009, the sales of mascara and nail polish soared. In the Great Depression, it was lipstick.
Cosmetics “make people feel happy,” Jones added. “It makes them feel much better about themselves at a very difficult economic time.”
Jones isn’t sure what the most significant issue will be during the present crisis. Jones doesn’t know, but he’s certain it won’t come from lipstick. “Lipstick is going to do particularly badly because everyone is going to have these masks on, right?” Jones said. While some women might brighten their lips in preparation for Zoom sessions, Jones pointed out that many thousands of employees were furloughed and weren’t likely to use the video-conferencing application for work.
In such a stressful time, the concern for appearance could be seen as a waste of time and a waste of time. However, Hannah McCann, a lecturer at the University of Melbourne who specializes in the art of beauty, believes it’s essential to maintain normalcy. “Maintaining your beauty rituals is a way to feel like you are in control and not losing yourself,” she explained.
McCann has been keeping an eye on the latest trends in the world of online media and has noticed an increase in people searching for advice on how to beautify your home, including this homemade Banana “Botox” video that provides directions on how to turn pantry items to create a facial that purportedly tightens skin. (It was, for a short time, the top beauty-related YouTube video. YouTube.) Hair tutorials that guide haircuts and styling have also seen an increase on YouTube.
In addition, McCann has noticed -aside from the booming style of loungewear — that people are performing things with their technique, such as being self-deprecating, playful, and sharing their experiences with friends on the internet over their mishaps as well as success. “People are being much more experimental,” she explained and pointed out the wide use of vibrant hair dyes. “The chains have been let loose of what you’d ever be willing to ask your hairdresser to do.”
“If we see beauty as something we need to be freed from,” McCann said, “we totally miss the picture of how people are experiencing it.”
Although beauty standards may be relaxed, it is unlikely to stay the same when quarantine ends, according to Caren Shapiro, a psychologist in New York who specializes in women’s concerns. She believes that the beauty industry “are going to come in heavy-handed and bombard us with messaging that is going to undermine being OK in our bodies.”
In fact, in these conditions, Daniels, the body image researcher, believes that some of the unattainable expectations about beauty may actually be exacerbated. “I see so much anxiety about weight gain in quarantine,” she told the media. “People talking about ‘the Covid 15’ and so on that I think the pandemic is actually reinforcing expectations for thinner bodies.”
Virgie Tovar, a body-positive activist who is known for her work in fighting weight discrimination, has said that she’s seen a dramatic increase in health-related trolling as well as weight-crushing in the Instagram profile since the quarantine started. At a time in which the majority of people are worried about their overweight, she’s shocked to be the target of the increase in comments about fats. “People have always turned to weight-loss as a way to feel like they are in control of factors that are largely outside of their control,” she wrote in an email.
Some academics believe that the epidemic will inspire both genders to develop a more compassionate understanding of their body.
If health and the economy are at risk, people become more concerned about families, friends, and community, which can have a positive impact on body image. “When we are in that mode of wanting to help, it tends to suppress that more appearance-focused side of trying to look good in other people’s eyes,” said Allison Kelly, the acting director-executive for the Centre for Mental Health Research and Treatment at the University of Waterloo.
A focus on what our bodies provide for us could also assist in shifting the focus of our lives: “Getting connected to what feels good in our bodies instead of how many calories we are burning,” she added.
It’s nice that celebrities are taking note of and revealing their body shape on Instagram. In the group, Sarah Silverman, Kelly Ripa, and Tracee Ellis Ross have all shown their grays. “There is so much power that comes from seeing other people exposing these things that in ourselves we would have viewed as flawed,” said Kelly, who is the acting director of the Mental Health Center. “It invites more vulnerability in all of us and the possibility that we’ll be more comfortable with how our bodies look without all the work.”