What is 'effortless' beauty?
I recently wrote about my relationship with my bare face and why not wearing make-up always makes me feel scruffy, despite feeling good in my own skin. One thing I couldn’t squeeze into the word count is the dichotomy between the performance art that is beautification and the notion of ‘effortlessness’ that has become idolised - so here we go.
When I was growing up, ‘coolness’ and ‘effort’ were polar opposites. The goal was to just be and look good at stuff - the girl on the playground who simply was amazing at running was cool while the girls who tried hard were not. Cool girls had something to say without thinking about it. They were confident, embodied and, of course, effortless.
I can’t have been the only person who concluded that: in a recent edition of her newsletter Well, Actually, about the power of the cool girl, Lauren Clark wrote that the ‘it’ girls at school “seemed to have perfectly Ghd-straightened hair, the latest Jack Wills garb for non-uniform day, chatted to her boyfriend on MSN, effortlessly nabbed Oxbridge-worthy exam results and secured the most coveted WKD-soaked summer-holiday party invites.”
I think effort naturally becomes cooler as you age, at least intellectually and personally: you realise how good it feels to work hard before you succeed and failure, often, makes for the sweetest victory. But social media also changed our perception of effort. Viral gym routines being posted by fitness influencers proved that most women didn’t naturally have chiselled abs or rounded glutes – they worked overtime to build muscle. Get Ready With Me tutorials showcased how magazine-cover-adjacent glow was applied, rather than owned. While ‘effortless’ is still a word surgically attached to the beauty industry, we can now see behind the scenes of why celebrity skin seems so naturally airbrushed (surprise! They have dermatologists who they pay thousands of pounds to).
A recent rebrand of effort has gone viral though, dubbed the theory of ‘being high maintenance to be low maintenance’. It applies to self-care in a variety of ways, but the takeaway is one of preparation. Faffing around before bed to make overnight oats so you can grab them in the morning without stirring and cooking is one example, but largely the idea revolves around our physical appearance: in order to be someone who can roll out of bed and swan into the office with naturally glowing skin and bushy but not messy brows - aka look effortless - you have to put in prep work. Lash extensions or lifts meaning no mascara is needed; eyebrows laminated and dyed; fake tan drops in your moisturiser so your skin is blurred upon waking up; blow drys meaning you wake up buoyant; regular facials that glaze your skin to save you from highlighter.
The beauty and body care industries have long sold us the idea of ‘doing it for me’, but this trend is an explicit reframing of beautification for personal gain. It tells us that we can spend money, time and headspace to save money, time and headspace - and be effortlessly aesthetically pleasing.
To refer to any of this as ‘low maintenance’ is obviously sneaky: the hours spent in the beauty salon to be laminated and curled probably amalgamate to the same, if not more, time than you’d spend on them every day. But the biggest lie it sells is that it’s for our own benefit, rather than performance.
“While many of us would like to believe our beauty behaviours have progressed past the gaze of the other, they haven't. The gaze of the other has just become so deeply embedded in society - think: social media, selfies, TikTok, Zoom - that it can feel inherent to us. It feels like it's our own gaze that we're attempting to appease, our own self that we're attempting to actualise. It's not!” Jessica DeFino from The Unpublishable told me as part of my article.
I think that’s relevant here: if effortlessness is about being presentable, it’s about performance. Of course, some people fit in to narrow standards of beauty easier than others - those who are white, slim, rich - but this lack-of-burden beauty is usually still forced. There’s nothing wrong with achieving glowing skin from a regular facial or loving the look and convenience of lash extensions, but I’d argue we should be being realistic about the effort that’s going into our bodies - for our own and others sake.
Thanks for reading Gray’s Anatomy. I’d love it if you shared this newsletter with a friend who might find our chat about bodies interesting:
This is also a safe space to talk about body maintenance and effort - what do you do? What do you think of it? What would you like to change about your relationship with it?