Culture – Beautifaire

7 Sep

A temporary history of how teeth have been represented

Welcome to Beauty School, the corner of Dazed Beauty dedicated to learning. From guides to histories, that is where we make clear past subcultural movements and educate our readers on current trends and various goings-on. We’ve come a great distance since those sexist toothpaste ads from the 1950s. Or have we? While the blatant sexism may need gone, you’ll still see ads with impossibly unattainable beauty standards. Picture a model with chiselled movie star looks and a set of blindingly white teeth as symmetrical as a butterfly. Ah, that Colgate smile! The dominant image of perfect pearly whites hasn’t modified all that much in 70 years. Yet while you peer behind that façade you’ll observe an entire recent beauty landscape. Dental...

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6 Aug

Emma Dabiri: ‘Beauty culture is a mirrored image of

by Beauty Tips

Beauty, Featured

Emma Dabiri: ‘Beauty culture is a mirrored image of

How do our surroundings determine our relationship with our body image? Growing up Irish and Nigerian, creator and broadcaster Emma Dabiri’s concept of beauty has long been defined by Eurocentric standards and what was deemed most desirable on the time (big boobs and a thigh gap). But on a journey of self-reclamation, she has learnt that beauty isn’t a physical entity, but a way of being. In her latest book, Disobedient Bodies, the creator of Don’t Touch My Hair and What White People Can Do Next unpacks age-old notions of beauty and divulges how the expectations and demands around it are completely contradictory. Disobedient Bodies grapples with the complicated and messy history of beauty, and the way our always evolving (yet...

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5 Aug

Wellness culture is making us nervous sick

by Beauty Tips

Beauty, Featured

Wellness culture is making us nervous sick

Hypochondria has been around for hundreds of years – but is the expansion of the wellness industry fuelling an increase in ‘the nervous well’ and making us all anxious? 27-year-old Cecily* has all the time struggled with “debilitating” health OCD. “It can make me feel like I continually need reassurance on a regular basis that I’m not going to die,” she says. While Cecily has grappled with these feelings since being diagnosed with a chronic illness at 15, she feels as if society’s mounting obsession with ‘wellness’ has exacerbated her existing anxieties. Notably, at one point she became fixated on tracking all of the health data available on her Apple Watch. “I used...

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4 Aug

How AI cat memes saved me from toxic gym

by Beauty Tips

Beauty, Featured

How AI cat memes saved me from toxic gym

As toxic ‘gym bro’ content on social media fuels a self-esteem crisis amongst young men, AI-generated cat memes helped change the way in which I take into consideration my body The Christmas before last a member of the family asked me to talk to their son. He’d turn into obsessive about going to the gym and getting a six pack. Why? Because that’s the way you get girls, he told me. He was 11. Sharing a room with him that 12 months, I saw first-hand how innocent Minecraft videos on YouTube auto-played straight into toxic fitness content...

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