Why Mascara Matters
Hillary Johnson, who just started a "beauty blog" called JackandHill with the fabulous London-based Jackie Danicki, has such a smart post up, commenting on Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker review of Steven Johnson's book, Everything Bad Is Good For You. Here's an excerpt of Hillary's piece:

We have a bad habit of ranking activities in the most staid, conventional terms: reading is good for you, as is playing a musical instrument. Playing with friends is a lesser form of good, as is building model airplanes or sewing barbie dresses. Hanging out at the mall and the arcade--why, that's as unhealthy as refined sugar. Something to be enjoyed in extreme moderation. To me, this wisdom seems so blatantly conventional that it simply must be false.

Talking and thinking about beauty is fun, much the way playing a video game is, and I have a hunch that it's also good for you.

Part of the reason we think beauty is like sugar comes from our collective European history. The entire fashion world today operates exactly the same way Louis XVI's court did--then, beauty was associated with idleness, which in turn was a sign of privelege and wealth. Your shoes were designed so you couldn't run in them because never having to run gave you status. We've jetissoned that economic model, but we still cling to the idea that beauty is exquisitely desirable, yet somehow also morally distasteful and shallow to our liberated, protestant sensibility.

The mincing dandies and dandiettes who populate the style industry today are as ruthlessly invested in propping up this status quo as were the royals. A couple of years ago, I went on a travel junket with some other journalists, all from women's fashion magazines. While in the airport waiting for our flight, I pulled out a copy of the Economist and started reading it. One fashion editor actually gasped and exclaimed over how "intimidating" it was that I was reading that. She blurted this out, without the least bit of calculation, and I think she was genuinely apalled and flummoxed. And threatened. In her world, things like this just didn't happen. The ivory tower of fashion expertise depends, like the royal court, on maintaining a monolithic front of single-minded coolness. It wasn't exactly that she was threatened by my being smart, but that she was threatened by my being allowed to sneak into her exclusive, elite world of fashion when I wasn't a true believer.

Now think about this: These dumb, brutal Marie Antoinettes are the people who tell you who and what is beautiful and stylish. It's scary. I say, off with her head!

I sometimes refer to Hillary as "The Beauty Intellectual." She writes about makeup sometimes, for LA Times Magazine, and manages to fill her pieces with insights as interesting and trenchant as the ones in the blog link above. In between ruining my eyesight reading obscure anthropology journals, I'm a big fan of superficiality myself. Here are a few of my words on it, from a recent column, "Leave Dull Enough Alone":

Superficality gets a bum rap -- as if you can't gossip about some movie star's cold sore and still lead a meaningful life. (Take it from me: You can be both deep and deeply superficial.)