The Beauty Experiment

Extreme Experiment

What led you to do such an extreme experiment?

It was a perfect storm really. My husband’s job had plunked us down in the foreignness of Hong Kong and unfamiliar economic milieu of the expatriate class. At the same time I was struggling with the identity whiplash of new stay-at-home motherhood and questioning my professional ambitions. So I was carrying all this, along with a bagful of groceries, one day, when I saw myself in the window of a fancy clothes shop and my inner voice said “You look like crap.” I knew that inner voice—I think a lot of us know that inner voice—but for the first time in my life I wanted to tell her to go to Hell. The experiment, and the book, sprang from that urge.

Stop Trying to Be Beautiful?

What do think women will find helpful in this book and take away with them?

Do you think everyone should stop trying to be beautiful? Not at all. If this book has one message, it’s that empowerment isn’t the same as good grooming or a killer wardrobe. Yes, looks are important for certain biological and psychological reasons, and I sort some of these out in the book because they’re so funny and maddening, and link us all as mammals and human beings. But appearance is only one thread in the tapestry that makes us strong and valuable as women—or men. I did my experiment to take a close look at these other threads, and I did find some weaknesses, some I had to accept, some I’ve done work to change. Is seems so obvious to say, but I think it’s easy, when feeling lost or powerless, to confuse a looks-centric pop-culture version of female power with the kind of power that comes from self-acceptance, health, and a view of our complex world that is both realistic and compassionate. If we start with that most honest baseline, there’s nothing we can’t do.

Beauty Craziness

There’s a confessional quality to the book, places where you really call out your own “beauty craziness,” as you call it: the bad wax jobs, the diets. What was your aim?

Some of my favorite writers are people who can delicately flay their own cultural milieus, but let the reader come out alive, along with the hero or heroine. I’m thinking Jane Austen, Zora Neal Hurston, Muriel Spark, Nabokov. I tried to give the book an anthropological feel—the comments of a participant-observer like Margaret Mead—with the subject being me in my own freaky twenty-first century tribe. Our emerging world culture is so contradictory, especially when it comes to women, that it needs keen-eyed, but also empathetic, critics. I wanted to hang myself out to dry so we could all laugh and then move forward.

Money

There’s an interesting financial aspect to this book, talk about that.

Well, I had this grandiose scheme when I started the experiment—that I’d save up all the money I’d usually spend on beauty products and new clothes and donate it al to a good cause in the end. African schoolgirls were my cause du jour, since I’d seen the challenges they faced during a college semester abroad. But as my experiment went on I found my plan had serious problems—namely I didn’t feel entitled to give away money that wasn’t mine, meaning my husband had earned it. As a no-income housebound caregiver, I had zero financial traction, which led me to think about the plight of those hundreds of millions of women in the world who were stuck in exactly the same way. I did finally find a way to make the donations I wanted, but I had to work to reframe my notion of value and partnership, and I had to develop a set of tools to make that happen. The good news is that some of these tools are available for anyone to use on my website: Phoebebakerhyde.com.