Christian Bale is Patrick Bateman, and he is peeling a very thin, very tight, very translucent mask off of his face. The mask slides off when meticulously pulled with militant precision, yet holds on to the skin, pulling and contorting Bateman’s perfect, pore-free face. He is beautiful. The scene is terrifying. Bale, a method actor, had spent months studying the likes of Katie Holmes-era Tom Cruise, to truly perfect the look of a person intensely smiling with absolutely nothing going on behind their eyes. It shows.
The year is 1945 and Joan Crawford is getting ready to be seen in public. She stares into the mirror, taking stock of every new wrinkle, every fine line, any visual flaw that could somehow expose the illusion of timeless beauty that she had so carefully crafted and constructed since her days as Lucille Fay LeSueur from Abilene, Texas. She clips her hair back with bobby pins, as far back and as tightly as they will go, until the skin framing her face is pulled back too. This is a trick also favored by Lucille Ball, who knew all about about the sharp headache that this technique creates. Lucille took things a step further, twisting her hair around toothpicks, before sticking said picks into a mesh wig cap. Joan takes a deep breath, and plunges her face into the bucket of ice blocks in front of her, where it will stay for at least six minutes to give an appearance of a tighter, younger face. She will repeat this 25 times this day, and the next. Somewhere else in Hollywood, Marilyn Monroe is applying bleach to her pubic hair, as instructed by her studio.
“Beauty is pain”-the sweet Serbian woman who threads my eyebrows smiles at me, as I whimper underneath her. Here I am, in a crowded German department store, red in the face and paying someone to perform an act that essentially feels like my face is being carved open with razor blades. It's a sentiment I think about later, when I’m face down, ass up and spreading my butt cheeks on a cold table while a patient Russian waxer asks me to please swear just a little bit less. I can hear other women yelping across the salon, a feeling akin to being in a dog kennel for adults.
Perhaps it's not even the pain, I think, as she applied her seemingly never-ending supply of wax to my genitals. Maybe it's because this - the swelling, the yanking, the redness, the discomfort - is just so deeply removed from everything that I find comforting about beauty. Beauty is a promise, a promise that hey, if you try this tip, this hack, this cream, this treatment, you will aesthetically improve, and thus, so will your life. I’ve enjoyed the comfort of beauty as far back as I can remember, way before an age where I even knew how to confidently apply liquid eyeliner in a club bathroom after too many bottles of questionable alcoholic beverages. Beauty, as an industry and concept, existed in my seven year old mind exclusively as a book that my grandmother dutifully toted around with her. It was a 1977 edition of Vogue Beauty, and the smiling blonde woman on the cover was joyfully splashing her face with something that could be milk or cold cream, who knows. The Vogue Beauty book promised all kinds of remedies that made me, a seven year old, fully pumped at the idea of having crows feet one day and then banishing them with just the right amount of facial massage and a homemade ointment from my garden. I would do light exercises in an all-white, full body leotard, skip ice-cream on Sundays to maintain my physique, and wear purple eyeshadow to accentuate my green eyes, as per the color chart provided in Chapter 7. I would be beautiful, or at least the pre-pubescent version thereof, which was really just a combination of the model on the cover of the Vogue book and the Childlike Empress from Neverending Story. Beauty is hope, beauty is a promise. It’s the notion of putting some lactic acid on those problems, soothing away those anxieties with a brow gel and battling existential dread with a Mario Budesco rosewater face mist. A Glossier ad, Sephora packaging, a brand-new Clarisonic fresh out the box.
But the reality, as exemplified by Patrick Bateman and his dead eyes, is that beauty is, in fact, terrifying. And no figure, past or present, fully exudes this ethos quite like Sisi, Empress of Austria. Any fledgling beauty writer worth her DIY bath salts has written about strange and mysterious beauty rituals from the past, normally in the format of a listicle, almost always with a headline challenging the readers ability to believe. Now, Sisi of Bavaria, Empress of Austria, had a beauty routine that would put a Kardashian or Hadid to shame, but for whatever reason never makes these lists. A Google search questioning the origins of beauty will be quick to tell you that Ancient Egyptians used charcoal to make eyeliner, and how 18th century-era debutantes were so into skin-whitening that they used lead-based powder to achieve an ivory visage, effectively poisoning themselves. But did you know, dear reader, that Sissy slept without a pillow on a metal bed to maintain her posture, while covered in cider-vinegar soaked rags with the aim of preserving her slim waist. A leather mask lined with raw veal rested on her perfect face. As the ruler of Austria and later Queen of Hungary, Sissy was considered by both royals and commonfolk as the epitome of beauty. Not one to rest on her babe laurels and genetics, our girl Sissy put in extreme amounts of work to ensure that she was in fact, the hottest girl in the European monarchy, compromising both health, comfort and general sanity in her quest for perfection. Ice cold showers in the morning, which later aggravated her arthritis, was the first step in the empress’ daily routine. Three hours was then set aside for hair, which would be pinned and coiled to her head, and almost always induced debilitating headaches. Her hairdresser was forbidden from wearing rings, her hands instead clad in white gloves while working with Sis’s auburn locks. Any stray hairs were placed in a silver bowl for inspection afterwards by the empress. Her hair was washed every two weeks with a combination of egg and cognac, and on this day any and all other activities were cancelled. She was sewn into her dresses to avoid creases and added bulk, she dined not on steak but simply it’s juice. Her beauty was deliberate, calculated and based on the reaction of her mother and her court-terrifying. In the same manner that Joan Crawford refused to be seen in public after 1974 ("If that's how I look, then they won't see me anymore." she remarked after unflattering photos of herself surfaced in the press ) Sissy would not sit for portraits after the age of 32. Their faces forever frozen in time by a combination of ice cold water and commitment.
A social media specialist once told me -sincerely and enthusiastically-that the modern consumer requires “thumb-stopping” content on Instagram. Over the course of the next few months, the word went from mantra to must-do, as the company I worked for at the time feverishly tried to create posts that would stop those thumbs. To some people however, this comes naturally, and in 2013 thumbs everywhere were brought to a halt by an image of Kim Noel Kardashian smiling sweetly up at her selfie-cam, her face and the towel next to her covered in blood due to the Vampire facial that she had just had done. She is beautiful. The image is terrifying.