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Fall 2004

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The Changing Face of Beauty

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The changing face of beauty
Redefining what it means to look and feel good

–Carol Cambo




	Miss Fall River Michaela Gagne '04 (photo by Ben Barnhart)

MICHAELA HIDES THE FACT THAT she’s a beauty queen. Katie studies what it means to be fat in a thin-obsessed world. Kathy made her name selling beauty products, only to find they held empty promises as she aged. Each woman’s UMass Amherst experience helped form her ideas of what it means to be beautiful. It also led them to challenge those ideas in surprising ways. Here are their stories.

JUST OFF MANHATTAN'S FIFTH AVENUE, less than a block from Central Park, I enter Skinklinic by crossing a tile walkway between two reflecting pools flanked by a fountain. The soft whoosh of water erases city noise. Visitors waiting to meet Kathy Dwyer ’71, CEO of the high-tech skin spa, relax on suede couches in the sleek sitting area of her company’s flagship store and headquarters. Inside the glass-enclosed foyer, a tray of dainty sandwiches cut into triangles rests on the bar beside bottles of spring water and brewed green tea. Attractive employees, all with nearly flawless skin, tend to visitors.
From a translucent lilac-colored hallway, Dwyer emerges in a fitted grey skirt and green blouse. She’s tall and slim, her batik ivory-and-emerald pumps adding a few inches. Her hair falls in spunky wisps, framing a pretty face in bold highlights. Her skin glows.

“I had 26 years in hair and skin care. I knew what products could and couldn’t do,” says Dwyer, who held top positions at Avon, L’Oreal, and Revlon. “When I was 47, I wanted to do more for my own skin.” Dwyer began seeing a dermatologist for medical treatments. “I found that removing the visible signs of aging was possible. I went from wearing foundation every day to not at all. I liked what I saw.”

What Dwyer didn’t like was the inconvenience of a doctor’s office: the notoriously long waits, the medical setting. Dwyer envisioned a hybrid—part spa, part medical office—relaxing, professional, efficient, yet not too feminine; she wanted male clients to also feel at home. At the top of her game, “at the tender age of 51,” as she puts it, she left her post as CEO of the beauty products giant Revlon, wrote Skinklinic’s business plan, and began raising funds for a launch. “I had done a turnaround, I had done an IPO. I needed to do something new,” she explains. “I saw the future of skin care and knew this could work.”

Skinklinic’s menu of services reads like a chemistry textbook. Want to rediscover your youthful glow? Try microdermabrasian. Using a device like a fine sandblaster, a specialist sprays tiny crystals across your face, mixing gentle abrasion with suction to remove the dead, outer layer of skin. Erase crow’s feet and wrinkles around the mouth with Botox, tiny injections of toxin that relax stress-weary muscles. Cheeks falling? Lips thinning? Precise injections of collagen, silicone and just-FDA-approved Rystalene fill in divots, smooth wrinkles, and plump up areas that are beginning to sag. Don’t forget lasers. Intense pulsed light (IPL) therapy treats sun-damaged skin, removing age spots, brown pigments, and redness caused by broken capillaries.

Beautiful skin doesn’t come cheap. Services range from $150 to $1500 a treatment, and on average effects last four to six months. The price tag begs the age-old question, what price vanity? Yet human beings have always looked for ways to stave off the ravages of time.

Skeptical, I try a simple glycolic peel.

Tara, a registered nurse (everyone on the staff is a medical professional), spends several minutes analyzing my face, asking about my beauty regimen (“soap and water”), and zeroes in on my furrowed brow. “Years of deadlines,” I explain. She spreads glycolic acid gel on my face. She explains the active ingredient is a synthetic version of a naturally occurring fruit acid. Tara accurately describes the sensation as “stingly,” like miniature pins and needles. She watches my face for the full two and a half minutes, “reading your skin,” she says, “so you won’t leave looking like a lobster.” After wiping off the product, she applies cold compresses, aloe, and moisturizer. Less than 20 minutes, start to finish. She holds up a mirror.

One look, and I believe.

I’m not convinced other people will notice, but I see a marked improvement: fine lines have disappeared and my overall skin tone looks much healthier, more even. “I’m not just saying this,” Tara tells me. “Kathy is my hero. She really lives what she says. She’s walking proof.”

Dwyer says that as a UMass Amherst student she was prone to breakouts. “Back then we were told a good tan would help acne,” she says with a laugh. “We’d go out there with the baby oil and the reflectors.” She was always into looking her best, “but that means on emotional and physical levels, too.”

For Dwyer, that has come to include eating right, lifting weights (“I’m stronger now than I was in my thirties”), and getting enough sleep. And, at age 55, she is not only the owner of Skinklinic, she’s a customer. She urges me to touch her cheeks, which are enhanced with Rystalene. They feel and look normal. She points to her slightly puffy upper lip. “My lips were imploding,” she says of a recent collagen treatment. I ask her where she draws the line, and she tells me it’s firmly on this side of the scalpel.

“I still look like Kathy Dwyer,” she says. “Most people would rather repeat treatments versus having to undergo invasive procedures.” Though Dwyer is the first to admit that the market would hardly seem to need more skin-care products, key to the Skinklinic program is a line of cleansers, moisterizers and creams, “skinresults,” that contain 10 to 20 times the active ingredients available in over-the-counter brands. “People want results immediately. That’s what we can give them.”

She’s every woman’s best girlfriend, the one with the ultimate bag of beauty tricks. Women want skin that’s good enough that they don’t have to wear a lot of makeup, she says, just some eye makeup, something on their lips, no fuss. “We don’t have the time,” she says. “I think most of us simply don’t want to have an age, a number, pegged on us.”

Dwyer believes what we see in the mirror is only part of the story. “We forget that skin protects our vital organs. So when it’s healthy, it’s doing a better job of it,” she says. “I love to help people, and women in particular, recognize the beauty they have. I really believe that sometimes you look good, and that makes you feel better. Sometimes you feel good, and so you look better. It’s a circle.”
http://www.skinklinic.com/

KATIE LEBESCO'S OFFICE AT MARYMOUNT Manhattan College is about a dozen blocks from Skinklinic, but in attitude, it might as well be halfway around the world. To bridge the gap you walk north on Madison Avenue past gamine mannequins pouting in boutique windows, thread the throngs of stylish shoppers, and pass a Skinklinic advertisement proclaiming, “Aging is a process. So is stopping it.”

Just around the corner from LeBesco’s office, a Loew’s cinema marquee offers Supersize Me on the big screen. The irony is not lost on LeBesco ’98G, whose new book, Revolting Bodies (University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), is about the struggle to redefine fat identity, an examination of the fat body as a revolutionary, political statement. “Actually, that movie is difficult to respond to. It’s a slippery argument,” says LeBesco, a professor of communication arts at Marymount Manhattan. “On one hand, I think it’s great the way it takes on the fast-food industry, but it’s troubling in that it implies fat people are all fast-food junkies.” LeBesco cites herself as a nonconforming example. She says she eats fast food maybe once a month.

LeBesco is not thin. Defining what she is becomes more of a challenge once you’ve read her book and consider how American society interprets what’s healthy, beautiful, and normal.

“Right before I went to Amherst for graduate school, I lost 100 pounds,” says LeBesco. “I was working on a project, and began to question my own sense of what’s not considered valuable, in terms of bodies. I was examining the politics of sexual representation, and began to see how fat and sex were intertwined.” She writes in Revolting Bodies:

I was concerned that my weight loss would be read (against my intentions) as “finally taking care of myself,” “getting a body to match that pretty face,” “overcoming my need for protection from my sexuality,” or any of the other host of “compliments” people pay those who successfully lose a considerable amount of weight.

LeBesco realized she had, surprisingly, emerged from her own weight-related experiences with a fat phobia. Thus began a personal campaign to reposition the fat body as healthy and powerful in her own mind. She sincerely complimented fat people. She didn’t fret if she gained weight. The book took shape out of those efforts and her scholarly work at UMass Amherst.

For her dissertation, LeBesco studied two Internet discussion groups between 1995 and 1998. “I looked at what fatness means in our culture, and how the Web was used to convey, or disrupt, that idea.” Though it was early in the Internet Age, the Web had already emerged as a successful tool in provoking people to rethink what’s beautiful. “Fatness carries a visual stigma,” explains LeBesco. “One doesn’t have to be in public on the Web. Cyberspace provides a protective environment for users.” Scholars call such users “disembodied bodies.” She discovered Web-based communities who believed the consciousness of fat to be a political issue—an idea, LeBesco admits, that has yet to be widely accepted.

LeBesco looks at fatness from a communications perspective. “We construct our realities through communication, not just through the media, but also through interpersonal communications. We create collective understandings,” says LeBesco. In her book LeBesco examines how fat is represented in medical discourse, in the retail sector, in the popular media, even as a race issue.

For the chapter devoted to sexuality and beauty as they relate to fat, LeBesco scoured mainstream books and periodicals for challenges to the notion that thin is beautiful. She came up virtually empty-handed. Overwhelmingly, wrote LeBesco, “Fat women are depicted as ugly, disgusting, sometimes laughable objects of derision, or as pitiful victims of bad genes and psychological anomaly, whose greatest ambition is to lose 50 pounds and thereby solve all their problems.”

She studied more than 300 articles from 1986 to 1993 on the subject, and located only three that vaguely challenged the traditional view that fat is ugly. LeBesco found more substantive challenges in alternative publications that focused on improving the self-perception of fat women; some even incorporated themes of enjoying fat. But these types of publications exist at the margins and don’t typically reach a very wide audience.

Medical discourse regarding obesity, she says, is a prime example of how mainstream communication subverts the fat community. While evidence suggests that being overweight is the result of many factors, from environmental and cultural to societal and psychological, “obesity is popularly attributed to gluttony and lack of exercise,” says LeBesco, “both things related to the individual’s lack of control.” That leads to the stereotyping of all fat people as lazy, even a threat to “normal” people.

LeBesco suggests a more productive approach would be to target efforts at diffusing the stigma. While obesity carries health risks, studies show that yo-yo dieting can have adverse affects on the heart and that 98 percent of people who lose weight eventually gain it back. “If you’re a fat person and you go to the doctor for a cold, they tell you to lose weight,” says LeBesco. “Instead, they should look at what you’re eating and your activity level to make sure you’re doing the right things to boost your immune system.”

“Fat phobia is at a fever pitch,” says the author. “When the director of the National Institutes of Health gives a Thanksgiving Day address equating obese people to the 9/11 terrorists,” says LeBesco, “there’s work that needs to be done.”

Will we ever accept fat as normal, even beautiful? LeBesco says we have a long way to go, especially when there’s talk of searching for a fat gene. “If scientists can isolate a fat gene, that means it can be eradicated,” she says. Marymount Manhattan awarded her a grant to study the history of eugenics—the breeding for desirable genetic traits—as it applies to both fat people and gays. “There are a lot of similarities,” she says. In her research for the book, LeBesco says she came across a shocking statistic: 11 percent of people surveyed would terminate a pregnancy if they knew the child would be obese. “I don’t completely trust that number,” says LeBesco, “but it does make you think.”

And that is what LeBesco, a career educator, is ultimately asking us to do: rethink and broaden our own ideas of what’s normal, what’s beautiful.
http://www.mmm.edu/

WHEN YOU APPROACH FALL RIVER, Mass., from the west, you see sooty smokestacks puffing in the distance. Here, nearly 75 percent of residents are of Portuguese descent and waterfront mills represent the first step toward the American dream. The beauty of this city is complex, not easily understood at first glance. The same is true of its reigning beauty queen, Michaela Gagne ’04.

“I don’t like the stereotype of pageant contestants being anorexic or starving themselves,” she says. “It’s not about being thin. It’s about being fit. And looking good because of that.” Still, she says, friends have chided her for watching what she eats. “I tell them no, I’m not on a diet, I want to live a long life.”

Michaela calls herself a jock. “Soccer is my absolute favorite sport,” says the former high school team captain. She was captain of her basketball team too: “I played forward, usually. I loved to jump and get breakaways.” Star and captain of the track team, she still holds freshman and sophomore 100-meter hurdle records and the school relay triple-jump and 100-meter hurdle records. In her bedroom, maroon and white varsity letters from Durfee High School dominate the bulletin board. Sports trophies crowd a top shelf.

Below the trophies, unceremoniously stored in a pink plastic box, is the rhinestone-encrusted evidence of her other life: the Miss Fall River crown. In late June, she vied for the title of Miss Massachusetts.

“I don’t usually tell people I’m a beauty queen,” says Michaela. “And when they find out, they usually don’t believe me.” She’s got the looks, the poise, the honors grade point average, but Michaela’s selflessness is at odds with the stereotypical narcissistic “crownhead”—the term she and her fellow contestants use to describe themselves.
It makes sense once you learn the details of Michaela’s serendipitous rise to beauty royalty. At the outset of her senior year in high school, a routine checkup revealed a possible heart syndrome. She sat out basketball and track seasons until further testing confirmed the diagnosis. She has Long QT Syndrome, a rare heart condition that can lead to sudden death. Surgery to install a defibrillator would ultimately deny her a chance to try out for the UMass women’s soccer team.

To make use of Michaela’s sidelined energy, her high school guidance counselor suggested she try out for the Miss Fall River pageant. “I guess it appealed to my competitive nature. ‘Miss Fall River’, kind of a joke,” she says, rolling her eyes.

“She walked funny onstage,” says her mom, Denise, of her first pageant. “And she was a wreck for the interview. We had encouraged her to do this ‘safe’ activity, then she nearly has a heart attack beforehand.” Despite her wobbly high-heeled debut, Michaela placed third. That same year she was first runner-up in the Miss Bay State pageant. She took two years off during college, returning to capture the Miss Bay State title in 2003 and the Fall River crown for 2004.

Outfitted with a defibrillator, Michaela had planned to play UMass soccer her sophomore year, but the team’s planned expansion didn’t materialize. “So, I did intramurals, got into weight lifting,” she says. “Looking back, it was a blessing. A friend was on the team and she had a hard time carrying a full course load. I was able to concentrate on the other parts of myself.”

Michaela concentrated in graphic design, electronic digital imaging and photography, but for her senior BFA thesis she sought a more hands-on experience. She focused on her curiosity about adolescence, piqued by her part-time job as a residential counselor for troubled children and as a girl’s youth basketball coach alongside her dad. “In basketball, fifth-graders just wanted to please us. They’d try anything.” A year later, “girls would be gossiping in the middle of a drill. They were more interested in how they looked than how they played,” remembers Michaela. She was intrigued by the dramatic change.

Working with five high school girls from Amherst during two semesters, she designed a project influenced by art therapy. (This fall, Michaela begins work toward a master’s degree in art therapy at Lesley College in Cambridge.) First she met with the students regularly, just to talk. “We began with topics like clothes and boys,” says Michaela. “But as we got to know each other, we talked about religion, sex, family life.” In the second phase, Michaela initiated art projects. Each girl traced the silhouette of her body on foam core and used this as a canvas on which to represent herself. “The works varied from realistic paintings to elaborate collages,” says Michaela. In another project, each girl was given a mirror and a black marker. Michaela asked them to answer the question “What do you see?” She got back poetry, snapshots, and lyrics; facial features in outline. As well, the girls kept journals of their experience. In her final paper and gallery show, “Me… and Who You Think I Am,” journal excerpts give a glimpse into the adolescent female mind as it concerns appearance:

“Most are like, ‘I don’t like my hair, my boobs are too small, or too big…and I’m too tall or too short.”

“I think physical appearance is a big problem at our age…they have this, like, subconscious competition where you gotta have the size zero pants and nice everything and be super skinny, and these girls are sitting there eating like a bit of lettuce and water.”

Michaela was surprised to learn the Amherst girls, children of relative privilege, had the same issues as the young women in the residential facility, who were products of abuse and neglect. “My own stereotypes were broken down,” she says. “I saw girls shared the same questioning nature, the confusion of being between childhood and adulthood.”

Obsession with appearance crossed socioeconomic borders, too. That was no surprise to the reluctant beauty queen who doesn’t wear makeup most days of the week and maintains she was the tomboy of the two Gagne sisters.

We persist in calling them beauty pageants, though many, including Miss America–affiliated pageants like Miss Fall River, calculate 70 percent of a contestant’s score on talent and interviews. Each woman has a platform. Michaela promotes public awareness of Sudden Arrhythmia Death Syndrome. “In the interview you have to say what you’ve done, why it’s important to you. That’s easy for me. I’d do this community service work without the pageant. It changed everything, knowing that anytime in the previous ten years I could have dropped dead on the soccer field.”

Michaela says she’s proud of her pageant accomplishments but gets tired of defending them. “I feel most beautiful after a soccer game, or a long day of work. But when I was in the Memorial Day parade and little girls were waving at me, that was good for the ego, too. I just don’t want to be so easily defined.” http://www.missmass.org/

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The changing face of beauty

The changing face of beauty: more images