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A new study purports to show that women start feeling old at 29. But take it with a grain of salt — the study was commissioned by funeral home. More »
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Two candidates for student body office at Concordia University stand accused of looking "like beauty pageant contestants" in their ads. But that doesn't really seem to be the problem, as far as we can tell. It looks more like these ladies have made the mistake of campaigning while female. More »
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A reader sent in an exchange from the Sephora blog, and it raises some interesting questions. More »
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A new book recommends that we prosecute appearance discrimination as strictly as we do racial or gender bias. But is that even possible? More »
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I remember my grandfather musing that, thanks to dentistry, medicine and relative affluence, people simply weren't "ugly" the way they had been when he was a child in early 20th century Arkansas. (It should be noted that he was known in said hamlet as "Moe Joe the Dog-Faced Boy," a name he carried for the next 80 years.) Well, The Times claims that whereas beauty has dominated the limelight for the past few years, now people are getting interested in the physical Other - classical "ugliness" — its societal perceptions, ramifications, and history. New ordinances protect against look discrimination. New shows claim to celebrate "ugly pretty." But...we've never defined beauty more narrowly! Can we punish this discrimination on the one hand and all tacitly celebrate it on the other? More »
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When you're a child, your parent can seem like the earth, moon and sun. That's why an off-hand remark can inadvertently affect a child for life. In this month's O: Oprah Magazine, writer Lisa Dierbeck talks to comedian Margaret Cho, pro basketball player Tiffany Jackson, opera singer and controversial gastric bypass recipient Deborah Voigt, and actress Cindy Cheung about how their parents' actions and words impacted their body image. For Cho, her father told her after a dance recital she participated in at the age of 9 , "You're the fattest ballerina." Our girl Margaret continues, "It so destroyed me that I never wanted to dance again. He wanted to prepare me for a world that was not going to accept me because I think he experienced so much racism. He'd say, 'You're not pretty. And you're not going to be pretty.' I absolutely believed him." And parental action can be just as damaging as parental words. More »
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