Beauty Culture Studies

Abstract

The star's image flickers into view in the dark space of the theater. Her face is white, cosmetically enhanced, and overexposed to such an extent that it glimmers across the screen rather than suggesting solid flesh. The faces of makeup tutorial producers fill smaller computer screens and flicker because of YouTube's low resolution and sometimes-staccato delivery. Mary Ann Doane suggests that close-ups generate “fascination, love, horror, empathy, pain, unease.”1 Close-ups also convey beauty practices. Richard Dyer describes how light beautifies Lillian Gish, “bringing out the fairness of her hair; the use of make-up too gives her face a seamless white glow.”2 Dyer links this lightness to the articulation of whiteness and goodness, a topic that is picked up in considerations of the relationship between beauty culture, lightness, whiteness, and racial norms. Studies of the development of lighting and cinematography, including Patrick Keating's work, indicate the ways in which binary gendered white subjects are produced within films.3 In the 1930s, these techniques helped constitute the glamorous white star as beautiful. Carol Dyhouse traces the relationship between beauty and film industries and glamour.4 Anne Helen Petersen argues that film …