THE UNe OF BEAUTY

WHEN ELLE CONTRIBUTING EDITOR JESSICA ANDREWS MOVED AWAY FROM HOME, SHE DISCOVERED THAT MAKE-UP RITUALS WERE MARKERS OF CLASS. BUT WHAT HAPPENED WHEN SHE TRIED TO BEND HER BEAUTY ASPIRATIONS TO FIT INTO A NEW LIFE?

- JESSICA ANDREWS

I have been drawn to beauty products and their glittering promise of transformation for as long as I can remember. During my teenage years, my best friend and I went out in Newcastle every Saturday night. We got spray tans a few days beforehand, shivering in paper knickers as a beautician coated our limbs in orange-gold. We spent hours getting ready in my room, drinking sickly rosé and dusting bronzer across our cheeks, our hair extensions fixed in heated rollers. We wore heavy, smokey eyeshadow with thick false lashes, squeezing ourselves into tight bodycon mini dresses and strutting across cobblestones in platform heels, our hair bouncing in silver clouds of hairspray, spare tubes of eyelash glue stuffed in our handbags. My hyper-feminine look was partly inherited from the women I grew up with: my mother gets her hair done religiously every six weeks, regardless of whether she can afford it. She refuses to leave the house without wearing make-up; we would spend hours wandering around the shops together, smudging eye shadow across our wrists. Beauty tips and tricks were a shared intimacy between us. My grandmother always said, ‘I’m just putting my face on’, as she applied her thick Leichner foundation at the kitchen table every morning before her shift at the local fish market, a ritual that encapsulates a particular kind of working-class pride.

For me and my friends, our beauty habits transformed us into classy, glamorous women, but when I went to university at King’s College London, I found my fake tan and false eyelashes were no longer symbols of power. I encountered an understated set of middle- and upper-class beauty standards, and I began to understand my own look as stereotypically working-class.