Was She or Wasn't She?

Jessica Simpson is on the cover of this month’s Marie Claire (April, 2010). This cover has made the national news and is a subject on the talk show circuit because she claims that she wore no makeup and that the photo editors did not photoshop her cover image. Demi Moore and Kim Kardashian have made the same claim about some of their recent photos and Britany Spears attests to letting thigh dimples show these days. You can view the cover of Marie Claire, if you haven’t already seen it, and a series of makeup-less Jessica photographs. You can also listen to her brief testimony for MTV about her new makeup-less stance, swearing up and down that she’s without a stitch of eyeliner or blush. Comments to articles and videos of this Jessica news seem mostly to either question her makeup-less claim or assert that she’s beautiful without all that airbrushing and retouching.

Okay, okay, but what about The Price of Beauty? Is beauty actually (becoming, maybe, in the near future, a la Jessica Simpson?) less than the massively expensive branding that it used to be — for 2010 women? Or are we (the everyday unretouched, virutually always unmadeup) just reveling in female celebrities’ flaws — the more the better, right? — that motivate us to stand in the absolutely longest checkout line in the grocery store so that we can study every last image in The National Enquirer issue featuring “The Cellulite of the Rich and Famous”?

And why the fascination — for those of us who admit to choosing the longest checkout line when that issue of The National Enquirer stares from the magazine racks? Does Foucault still have a hold on us (technologies of the body are bad, bad, bad for feminism)? Do we believe the way too simplistic notion that mediated retouching of female celebrities’ images leads to eating disorders in young girls and women (so showing them “naked,” dimpled, unphotoshoped will serve as an intervention)? Besides, we’re on the way to web 3.0; airbrushing out scars, pimples, dimples, and age markers might begin happening automatically to all of our images without even as much as a click.

Why the fascination with makeup-less Jessica? Tech can make her up to look like she never does; isn’t that what’s fascinating?