Oh, I really don’t like it when I have to heave my weary self back on my old, pious person horse and declare something a sad indictment on where our vanity has taken us. But this deserves a saddle-up: MAKEUP CLASSES AT HIGH SCHOOLS, SPONSORED BY A COSMETIC BRAND!!!
We debate the role of magazines and models and TV in making young women feel insecure about their looks, but we allow this.
32 all-girl schools around the country have signed up to this branded content. What next? Quadradic equations brought to you by some iphone app?
What’s the issue, you might ask. Young women access this kind of content daily. Makeup tips – rather innocuous, no? Actually, no. Guising this as learning in the school environment normalises the imperative to improve our looks. When information like this is laid on in a forum reserved for learning that’s compulsory we confuse things. Actually, no, we make it quite clear: that enlarging your eyes with a dot of white in the corners of one’s eyes, and emphasising one’s cheekbones with rouge applied below one’s apples is something we should be doing.
Am I ranting for no reason? What do we think?
