Talking point
There’s a new mood in beauty, says former Cosmopolitan and Elle magazine editor Farrah Storr – and about time, too!
Something huge is happening. In changing rooms, at beauty store counters and on TV adverts. It is happening on social media, in teenagers’ bedrooms and in the mirrors that women look into every morning. Beauty is being reclaimed. The way we see it, the way we hear it, but most of all the way we feel it.
You must have noticed it. Armpit hair in adverts. Hyperpigmented faces gazing at you from shop front images. Young women parading gloriously thick legs and juicy bums on Britain’s streets. People talking about wanting to look fresher, more luminous, the best version of themselves as opposed to an approximation of how they looked in their 20s.
I was a half Pakistani woman coming of age in the early 1990s. ‘Heroin chic’ was my bible – girls as thin as Biros, pale, almost translucent skin and hair that hung long, straight and limp. I watched my sister navigate the 1980s with similar trepidation, where big hair, toned bodies and Christie Brinkley were held up as the epitome of good looks. And then there was my mother, who lived through the impossible 1960s and 1970s – Twiggy, Farrah Fawcett and the dawning of cosmetic surgery – and, as such, spent a lifetime on Ryvita and Shape yogurts.
I never saw anyone who looked like me – singer Tanita Tikaram was about the closest you got in Celebrity Land, but no one held her up as a great beauty. And so I aspired to look like what the western world told me was beautiful: slim, pale, perfect. It was a task which, some 25 years later, has left me with body issues, skin as thin as tissue paper after years of chemical peels and eyebrows that never quite grew back.
Of course, as anyone of a certain age knows, beauty, and our concept of it, has always fluctuated. Nothing is quite as vulnerable to cultural change as the way women are taught to see themselves. If the 1920s were all slim hips and emaciated eyebrows, the 1950s put paid to that with sensuous, hourglass bodies and thick, dramatic brows. If the 1960s vogue was slim-hipped androgyny and cute pixie haircuts, then the 1980s pushed back with muscular, athletic bodies and bouncy perms. It is true that every decade has had its own exacting feminine ideal, but it is equally true that every decade has done its own, quiet work to lay the foundations for the shift in beauty standards we have today.
It is all too easy to forget that women such as Barbra Streisand, Grace Jones and gap-toothed Lauren Hutton did much to break beauty stereotypes. Or that Yves Saint Laurent, in the 1970s, was one of the very first designers to put black models with natural hair on the catwalk. And while everyone knows the name Estée Lauder, few are aware of cosme
