Have you been feeling like you should probably pay someone to slice off part of your labia so you can conform to some 100% arbitrary "ideal crotch region" beauty standard that only matters to shitheads and 15-year-old boys whose entire understanding of sex comes from internet porn? Well, you're not alone!
On Sunday night, the utterly meaningless Miss USA pageant aired, and a soon-to-be-forgotten woman from Nevada won the title. But America's fickle fascination has been, for several successive minutes, fixated on a woman who didn't come close to making the final cut: Miss Indiana, a woman who audiences were relieved to…
Oh man, cosmetic surgery, right!?? Those people are so embarrassing. All consensually altering their bodies in an effort to feel beautiful and emotionally fortified after spending a lifetime in a grueling culture that hammers into them the message that physical perfection is all that matters and human worth has an…
"Not wearing makeup: is it feminism, laziness or the rise of cosmetic normcore?" wonders Slate. Huh. Good question: having a face and not smearing cosmetics upon it: is it a political statement, sloth, or, uh, some kind of weird fashion thing? Or could be it be some strange, unheard-of fourth option... such as being a…
Dove has moved their marketing strategy away from merely using "Real Women" as models and towards manipulating "Real Women" as part of totally unscientific experiments that prove nothing. The latest iteration of this project is Dove Patches, a patch for your arm full of a magic substance that makes you feel more…
Alexandra Shulman, the editor of British Vogue, is so bored of people asking her why models are unrealistically thin.
Remember Moesha’s best friend Kim? Well, Countess Vaughn, the actress who played Brandy's buddy on the late 1990's sitcom, was a big fan of lacefront wigs — just like many celebrities — but with disastrous results.
A woman working as an unlicensed beautician faces charges after a botched butt-enhancement injection resulted in the death of a woman.
How can we as a society tolerate you if you have the temerity to conduct your life in such a way that the appearance of your corporeal being actually corresponds with the number of years you've existed on earth? It's as if no one told you that the eight things you're doing nearly every day to feel better are…
Pop quiz: If a woman looks old + sexy and no one is around to validate her, does she still emit a breathy whimper? No really, in order to be sexy, who has to "agree" that you're sexy? Any passing stranger? A panel of Russian judges? The answer is one person, and one person only: You. The rest is sexy magic. And you…
Much virtual ink has been spilled over the past few days over the Oxford Dictionary's choice of "selfie" for 2013 word of the year. But I've noticed among the chorus of opinions on the social media self portrait an annoying trend: the selfie evangelist. Selfies are just dandy, they say, because they're a way for…
Sociologists like to say that gender identities are socially constructed. That just means that what it is, and what it means, to be male or female is at least partly the outcome of social interaction between people – visible through the rules, attitudes, media, or ideals in the social world.
No one has gray hair on purpose, k? Gray hair is only something old people or weird early agers have or people who don't know better. Something people have who've decided to not "fix" the problem everyone else can see plain as day. But Kate Middleton left her house recently with gray hairs and didn't plan in advance…
The compound used in chemical peels—the anti-aging procedure performed by dermatologists—is raising concern after a growing number of studies suggest it could be a carcinogen. It turns out that pouring acid all over your face could actually be dangerous. Huh.
Once, on a blind date in my twenties, a guy I instantly didn't like realized this and said something hilariously awful by date's end: "You're a bitch, and you're not even pretty enough to be a bitch." It's funny because I totally was pretty enough. No, it's funny because HE LOOKED LIKE AN AARDVARK. Actually, it's…
Like the eponymous witches of Roald Dahl's The Witches, all of the heterosexual women in the world have conspired together to hide their true appearances (talons; baldness; square feet) from all men. How deep does this conspiracy go? Well, according to a new study, the average woman will wait four weeks and one day…
If you're more partial to maximum makeup, people might want to make the sex with you, but there could be a detrimental effect on whether they like or trust you. Okay, science, tell us something sexist we didn't know already.
Ladies: things are wrong. Things are wrong with me, and they're wrong with you. Other (perfect) people don't have things wrong, but we do, you and me. And if we fix the things that are wrong by purchasing products and services, the wrongness will sort of drift away and we'll garner the admiration we so crave — or at…
Did anyone else miss the day when girls got good at applying makeup? I must've been out sick when some magical fairies came in and taught us how to apply tangerine bronze to create cheekbones and purple eye liner to make green eyes pop. When I put on those things, I actually look like a jack-o-lantern. And not a cute…
Young women's internet-fueled obsession with the "thigh gap"—which is that thing where your thighs don't touch and therefore it's "better" (cool made-up garbage, beauty myth!)—is raising concerns among eating disorder professionals. For most women, a thigh gap is a physiological impossibility, not a goal that's…
