Selling the 'Natural'

I click on the ad, and a giant face invades my computer screen. The image appears as a simultaneous zooming-in and zooming-out: the model’s features are larger than life but stripped of detail, her poreless skin punctured by demurely parted lips. Stare at the picture too long and it becomes grotesque, unrecognizable—like writing the same word too many times and realizing the arbitrariness of its character combinations. “Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s Maybelline,” the image teases, refusing to betray the source of that ineffable “it.” The text seduces with the intimation of natural beauty, the promise that the model’s looks are real, authentic, and fully hers—then punctures its own illusion. Perfection and porelessness are, after all, impossible. The natural can only be posed as a question, as an indeterminate “maybe” rather than an affirmative reality. In its ambiguity, artifice becomes immaterial: indistinguishable from nature, makeup and Photoshop themselves become natural.

This paradox grounds the modern beauty industry, which goads women to buy in order to look more like themselves. These ads, hawking goods like “Clean Makeup” and “TruBlend Microminerals,” entice women to wear products in order to appear as though they are not wearing makeup at all. More than simply selling beauty, cosmetics companies are pedaling authenticity itself. Beauty, the message runs, can only be beautiful if it is effortless. Enlisting external aid is fine, so long as that aid reflects the natural and remains invisible. By this reasoning, Photoshop and foundation become problematic only when their effects are too obvious—when they assert their presence, rather than reveling in their own negation.

The makeup industry is not the first to commoditize authenticity. Take, for example, indie music, which derives its identity by opposing the alleged mindless conformism of the mainstream. To listen to [insert esoteric name here] is to refuse the proverbial “shoveled shit” of the major record label. Obscure musical tastes serve as markers of sovereign choice and, therein, as guarantees of authenticity. The problem is that, in branding the alternative, indie becomes mainstream. Marketing its own version of “cool,” indie music is often produced by media conglomerates and premiered on primetime television. The cultural outsider—in this case, the affluent, white college student—now constitutes a niche market whose cache corporate executives seek.

Advertisements geared toward the university demographic seem to share indie’s sensibilities. Eschewing conformity and mass-manufactured coolness, they tell us to be unique, to follow our own grains in the wood; Levi’s “Go Forth” campaign comes to mind. But there’s the rub: Coolness comes not from authenticity—that self-conscious choice of individual identity valorized by indie culture—but from consuming, à la Urban Outfitter’s prefab chic. The indie and commercial are not autonomous; given indie’s status as a style cultivated through material goods, such autonomy is impossible. As in the Maybelline commercial, authenticity is revealed as a product, a mere object for sale in the market.

Whatever names the concept assumes, the status of the authentic as a credible cultural alternative is under attack. The problem is not necessarily that the authentic has sold out, but that the mainstream has bought in—in the case of the cosmetics industry, by literally packaging the natural and selling it en masse. Playfully posed, Maybelline’s catchphrase sounds innocuous enough. Yet, in its conflation of the real with the ideal, the slogan belies its ostensible innocence. Predicated on an understanding of the real, it transforms the ideal—the model’s made-up face—into the measure of the real itself. Flawlessness, attainable only through artificial means, becomes more natural than nature.

Prompted by fear over the loss of the real, French parliamentarian Valérie Boyer recently introduced legislation that would require images produced for the public sphere—from advertisements to campaign posters—to disclose their digital enhancements. If Boyer has her way, a written disclaimer will undermine the perfection of these pictures, much like the surgeon general’s health warning on cigarette packs. Imagine inserting the proposed phrase—“photograph retouched to modify the physical appearance of a person”—below Maybelline’s famous slogan. The allure of the “maybe” would be lost, the model’s beauty disenchanted: Whatever that “it” is, its origins in makeup and Photoshop would be affirmed.

By asserting the insincerity of the image, without then showing the image in its unmodified form, would the disclaimer merely perpetuate Maybelline’s mystique? The warning reads, in some sense, as a rearticulation of Maybelline’s catchphrase. As the ad declares, the model’s beauty may be artificial, but who cares? Substituting the terms “born with it” and “Maybelline” for “real” and “unreal,” the ad articulates our anxieties over the blurring boundaries between the two and allows women to appropriate this ambiguity for their own ends. Puncturing without a positive solution of its own, the disclaimer comes across as empty words. Our imagistic angst, it seems, can only be resolved (or, more likely, exacerbated) with time.

Courtney A. Fiske ’11, a Crimson editorial writer, is a social studies concentrator in Lowell House. Her column appears on alternate Wednesdays.