Beauty Is Work: The Labor of Love Behind Femininity

I write about beauty because our bodies are one of the few things we have any real control over. Sometimes, it feels like the world is sliding from bad to worse. But the one thing that keeps me grounded is the ability to shape how I present myself.

It took watching RuPaul’s Drag Race to fully grasp how much thought, effort, and labour femininity requires. I gained a whole new level of respect for the work behind a feminine persona. It finally clicked that someone like YouTuber Minkey Mothabela can be so intimidating to me precisely because she knows how to do femininity. You can’t argue with her talent—and yes, it is a talent, a skill, whatever you want to call it—because the evidence is right there in her makeup, her nails, her accessorizing and her overall ease with and in glamour. It’s self-evident.

Maybe because drag queens and beauty influencers are consciously opting into femininity, I could clearly see the effort—and therefore, the value—in it. It should be noted that wasn’t always the case: After men returned from WW2, white American women were pushed back into the home because of the idea that men are supposed to be the families providers. The second wave feminist movement advocated for the equal rights amendment (ERA) which would make any discrimination on the basis of sex illegal. Unfortunately along with pushback came critiques of feminine hobbies and pass-times.

In her book Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture, historian Kathy Peiss, makes a compelling argument that the critique of makeup as

"compulsory work—so narcissistic, time-consuming, and absorbing as to limit women’s achievements"

really emerged during the 1960s feminist movement (Peiss,4). For many of them, looking a certain way was an unspoken expectation. Makeup, styled hair, a put-together outfit—these were seen as things women just naturallyknew how to do. So the effort and skill it takes to look that way was totally dismissed. Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and other second-wave feminists from the 60’s were absolutely right to push back against mandated femininity—the kind that traps women in domesticity, prettiness, and performance with no room for anything else. This era rightfully critiqued the idea that femininity is somehow natural (McClintock, 62). But that idea that femininity is a performance of gender, for me mutated into a criticism of feminine hobbies and interests—labelling them as frivolous, time consuming and distracting. Peiss confirms this mutated criticism when she says that contemporary critics of make-up are all too often ready to reinforce the stereotype of women who use make-up as foolish and vain (6).

Peiss so astutely pointed out that the wholesale dismissal of beauty practices in America came from a very specific social position: white, middle-class, American women for whom those rituals may have always been expected—and therefore, invisible. And at the same time for those who weren’t white or middle class, makeup wasn’t just a trap—it was a tool. It was an equalizer. They offered ways to self-fashion, to gain access, to show up in a world that would otherwise erase you.

Elizabeth Arden

Peiss highlights that the women who shaped the twentieth-century makeup industry were often working-class, immigrants, or women of color like Elizabeth Arden. She

“was a Canadian immigrant and ‘working girl’ who remade herself into a symbol of haute femininity” (Peis, 5).

  That deeply resonated with me. For women in America who aren’t white, middle/upper class, or citizens, makeup can be a great equalizer. It shifts power away from “natural beauty” or inherited status and toward developed skill, talent, and taste.

That realization changed everything for me. Femininity, I’ve come to see, is about the dedication to building a particular skill set—a skill set that women and femme people historically and continue to use to create cultural legacies and wildly successful businesses.

Peiss, along with RuPaul, gave me the language to respect the work of femininity. And more importantly, they gave me permission to enjoy it. I, like many feminine people have lived in the shadow of the criticism of femininity itself: the idea that make-up is a waste of time and money; that fashion and styling is frivolous and is mutually exclusive from intelligence.

When we shame femininity, we lose the value of industriousness and resourcefulness. RuPaul’s Drag Race regularly features challenges where queens must design full looks out of unconventional materials—candy, curtains, garbage bags. That same creative spirit is in stories we already know. I think of Cinderella, reworking her late mother’s dress into something new. I think of my maternal grandmother, who would knit school jerseys and sell them every new year.

That’s what femininity looks like to me.

And that’s also why someone like Minkey Mothabela means so much to me: I was best friends with her younger sister, and I’ve admired her for years. She started a YouTube channel around the same time I moved to the U.S., and I would watch her videos religiously. In her, I saw a version of myself I wanted to be—but felt too ashamed to fully claim. She did makeup, beauty, and content creation with such ease and confidence. She eventually was able to land a major ad campeign and is doing very well as a content creator. It was only through watching her that I began to realize just how much femme-shame I carried, but also how much I enjoyed fashion and nails and make-up.

In many ways, this whole blog was born so that I could write back to myself about what femininity is for me. The kind I am interested in is not frivolous— it’s a consistent dedication to the development of a tangible but specific skill set: a resourceful eye that can turn ‘cheap’ into classy; a hand dexterity that can beautify one’s own face and others; developing a discriminatory eye around what kinds of colors and shades work for a specific skin tone to putting a room together. 

Thank you for giving me your time.

Works Cited: Peiss, Kathy. Hope in a jar: The making of America's beauty culture. Macmillian, 1999.