If you want to envision yourself in some fire eyeshadow looks, curvy women are, as usual, not as #blessed as the rest of the female population.
Take a second to think of some fire beauty campaigns featuring a curvier woman. Back in 2000, Sophie Dahl’s naked bod was in that Yves Saint Laurent. You know the one when she maybe, probably had sex with a ghost, but most of the time, we’re entitled to NOTHING. Makeup companies hardly ever serve up different kinds of faces size-wise.
We’re used to waiting for the occasional bone thrown our way, obviously. Most of the time high fashion offers us what must be working for them — different kinds of models who fit into a sample size. With clothing, that’s par for the course. Every day is a winding road of YOU CAN’T WEAR THIS PROBS. The latest threads you want still just aren’t wide enough to accommodate women who wear larger hot pants. But what’s the delay for beauty?
The fact that beauty campaigns are almost always body diversity-free isn’t just enraging like the fashion industry’s reluctance to design and showcase body diversity. It’s puzzling. It’s also telling — in case you wondered, everyone’s still locked and loaded on board with the idea that we want to buy a universal tube of orange lip gloss because we want to look like the slim people do when they roll it on, probably. So beautifying slim people in fragrance, makeup, and hair product ads must be working.
Young women who are on the curvier side — and women who aren’t even — desperately need to see different face shapes in beauty ads. Sure, there are YouTube tutorials and those digital voices are important, but we want to see a curvier woman wrapped in a rose bloom and dipped in gold body glitter or something. (No, Dove does not count.) We need to see curvy luminous women at the height of luxury, and there’s nothing stopping a beauty company from doing this.
Considering we can now see actual curvier women in bikinis, ( the getup previously reserved for women whose thighs don’t touch,) in Sports Illustrated and Swimsuits for All, beauty needs to start playing catch up. If we can have Denise Bidot impregnating a rock in her leopard bikini with her cellulite, then we can have a curvier woman demonstrating how nail lacquer looks on her hands. Speaking of Denise Bidot and her ability to smolder everyone to bits with her eyes, she wants a beauty campaign — she told us so and just look at her wicked hair. (Worth noting: great to see a trans women or two in a beauty campaign because that’s incredibly rare, and that’s a great step in the right direction for humankind.)
Fashion is fashion, and we’ll continue to make our case for more sizes. We know clothing companies are hurting themselves when they don’t make clothes for curvier women. But beauty products (when you’re not calling one shade of peach “nude,” or peddling an exclusionary hair look,) are for everyone. There’s no reason why beauty companies shouldn’t get with the program. Not to mention that if a full-body shot were just way too radical a fashun concept to swallow, what’s wrong with showing a head shot of a curvier model with lustrous hair?
Life-affirming that brands — even independent ones like Malia Milla that aren’t strictly curvy girl lines — are showing off some size diversity in their campaigns. But lipstick rolls quite easily on everyone and we’ve yet to see some body diversity.
MAC campaign, glam makeover.
We need better narratives too. Not to say that MAC, a brand that has a proven track record of really making the inclusion effort didn’t make everyone feel feelings with their makeover of this beauty who got the charity case treatment. But plenty of women are happy with their sizes, so how about a deliciously hot luxe beauty campaign? Let’s do one when we’re not crying because someone actually told a curiver women she’s beautiful.
We’ll be over here waiting for the day when curvier women can envision themselves in a Virgin Suicides type scenario in a field of flowers. Or we’ll take a headshot with some cool hair. Come on people. Cosmetics should be easy.
