Since time immemorial human beings have adapted what nature has given. Virtually everywhere on earth it's illegal to walk around naked in public. We cook our food, live in houses, communicate via the Internet, fly around in aircraft and have sex without a thought of reproduction. For millennia women have painted their eyes and men shaved off their beards. In the last decade young men in certain affluent countries have started to beautify their faces as well (though historically this is nothing new), as well as acquiring body-piercings, toning their skin and dyeing their hair. There's nothing abnormal in any of this — the fashionable young are merely following in the steps of their ancestors in attempting endlessly to improve on nature. Human beings adapt and invent as if by instinct. It's our most distinguishing characteristic.
Beauty Up is an independent-minded study of the Japanese beauty industry. The author, Laura Miller, stubbornly refuses to see any profound significance in most of it, but she's very well-informed nonetheless. And she asks some cogent questions, in particular why during the last 15 years or so men in the developed world have started to adopt many of the strategies previously confined to women, generally abandoning the older male ideal of the hairy and moneyed monster grudgingly confined inside an ill-fitting business suit.
In order to understand her answer to this, we have to appreciate just who Laura Miller is. Nominally an academic working in Chicago, she more interestingly defines herself as "an unreformed hippie," albeit one who for most of her professional life has studied "inbreathed fricatives, diminutive suffixation, and other aspects of linguistic anthropology." But during a stay in Kanazawa in Japan she became interested in the nation's beauty parlors, magazines and very extensive personal practices. This book is the result of that fascination.
Her early experience led her to adopt the ideal of personal liberation, and subsequent academic life pointed her in the direction of challenges to traditional gender roles and power structures. In addition, she describes herself as being physically far from the American ideal (at least as perceived in Japan) of the long-legged, big-busted blonde. She was shorter than most of the Japanese women she interviewed, she says, and is descended from Afro-Mestizo-Spanish ancestors. As a result of all this, perhaps, she regards Japan's beauty industry with a considerable degree of skepticism.
Essentially Miller rejects the idea that East Asians in general are simply trying to copy the West. In this context she mentions Taiwan's weddings culture, citing Bonnie Adrian's Framing the Bride: Globalizing Beauty and Romance in Taiwan's Bridal Industry (Berkeley, 2003). That book, she says, demonstrates that supposedly international ideals of female beauty are modified in Taiwan to suit distinctly local ideals. The ancient practice of "pulling the face" — twisting taut strings across the cheeks in preparation for the application of bridal make-up — is incidentally subjected to scrutiny there as well.
In answer to her big question as to why sales of cosmetics and other beauty products have rocketed in the past decade and a half, to both women and men, she rejects the claims that it's something to do with the rejection of patriarchy and old-style male dominance. Little personal liberation is going to come from whitening your skin or shaping your eyebrows, she concludes. The beauty industry may enable individuals to perform "a minor ritual of rebellion" (albeit at considerable financial cost) but it does little to challenge ancient hierarchies. Instead, she argues that it's best explained as a product of capitalism's need to make people spend more, for instance on eating more than they need, then on expensive diets to get rid of the excess fat they've so unfortunately acquired.
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