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Technology, in fact, has made us less than oppositional: where beauty is concerned, we have deployed technology not only to meet the demands of the system but to actually expand these demands. The realm of what is possible for women has been exponentially expanding in all beauty-related capacitie…

There is an exaggerated binary fatalism to these stories, in which women are either successes or failures, always one or the other—and a sense of inescapability that rings more true to life. If you can’t escape the market, why stop working on its terms? Women are genuinely trapped at the intersecti…

[...] Today, as demonstrated by the cult success of the makeup and skin-care brand Glossier, we idealize beauty that appears to require almost no intervention—women who look poreless and radiant even when bare-faced in front of an iPhone camera, women who are beautiful in almost punishingly natural…

[...] Today, as demonstrated by the cult success of the makeup and skin-care brand Glossier, we idealize beauty that appears to require almost no intervention—women who look poreless and radiant even when bare-faced in front of an iPhone camera, women who are beautiful in almost punishingly natural…

Where women in mid-century America had been occupied with “inexhaustible but ephemeral” domestic work, beating back disorder with fastidious housekeeping and consumer purchases, they were now occupied by inexhaustible but ephemeral beauty work, spending huge amounts of time, anxiety, and money to a…