Tag: beauty

Summer Brennan talks about femininity and suffering, beauty and biology, and the startlingly dark turn she found herself taking when writing about women and power in her new book ‘High Heel.’

Jennifer Baker considers the ways in which hair removal rituals, begun in her tween years, have helped her achieve body acceptance and connect with her own desire.

Born from irritation and intrusion, luminous and complex, surprisingly durable: pearls are rich with symbolism and saturated with pain.

Chaya Bhuvaneswar contemplates the powerful evolution of a woman’s beauty over time.

Sometimes it takes a touch of darkness to create something alluring.

Nina Coomes unpacks the origins and legacies of the Japanese word hafu, or half.

There’s big money for fashion and beauty companies in encouraging the women of the world to emulate the French Girl.

Meet the lifestyle and wellness hawkers of 13th century Italy: the Monks of Santa Maria Novella.

Mehreen Kasana reveals the many true and beautiful meanings that you’ve never heard of behind “takbir” — the expression of Muslim faith, “Allahu Akbar” — literally, “God is great.”

In Racked, Noël Duan — A former beauty editor — reflects on the differences between the definition of beauty in America and in China during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, where an “unadorned woman was a symbol of liberation from a patriarchal capitalist system.”

I had many problems with Purity, Jonathan Franzen’s new novel. The book had me hooked and turning pages from the first. There’s plenty of intrigue–a murder; the mystery of the title character’s parentage; unfolding backstories that link assorted melodramatic subplots, far-flung over geography and time. But to a large degree I was racing through it […]

This was a precursor for what would become the protocol by which models were paid for the rest of the century, but as Natálie [Nickerson] put it to Eileen [Ford] in their late-night Barbizon conversations, the system was back to front. According to Eileen, Natálie told her, “Models were treated as if they worked for […]

As she neared fifty, determined to keep going, she became almost grotesque, answering her own needs and the wiles of directors eager to exploit her. In Nicholas Ray’s odd, beautiful, impassioned Western “Johnny Guitar” (1954), she’s Vienna, a tough businesswoman who runs a saloon and constantly faces down groups of armed men. Vienna is both an […]

What is [death]? It’s a fact that human beings—no matter who they are, no matter how healthy or strong or beautiful they are—are going to age and become weak and ugly by a certain standard, and die. And I think that’s a terrifying idea for people to get their minds around. It’s a very strange […]