Tag Archives: Beauty Schooled

May 29, 2012 · 3:07 pm

Sunday Scraps 61 (Delayed on account of flames)

1. YOGA: A student project pokes fun at the ubiquitous Lululemon bags with a spoof product. From positive affirmations to “Your worth as a woman depends on people looking at your butt.”

2. DIET: From iVillage, a collection of stories about people who figured out how to quit dieting. Imagine all the brain space we’d have if we weren’t counting calories?

3. PROGRESS: You know what’s amazing? How drastically President Obama’s support of marriage equality has impacted views (and polling numbers) on the subject in the black community.

4. GENDER: It’s old internet news, but in case you missed it, I really enjoyed John Scalzi’s post “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is,” using video games as an analogy for gender and race and privilege. Also, his follow-up.

5. SPACES: Virtual tour of Chicago’s new start-up space, 1871, from Tech Cocktail. You ain’t got shit, Palo Alto.

6. FACEBOOK: LifeHacker explains all the rookie mistakes you make on Facebook, and how to fix them.

Related Post: Sunday 60 = Dita Von Teese, George R. R. Martin, Settlers of Catan

Related Post: Sunday 59 = psychopathic children? Michelle Obama and The Biggest Loser, Kickstarter successes?

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August 1, 2011 · 2:28 pm

Dreams DO Come True

*GMP article about age gaps, Ramen, and internet formulas is up, but I will tell you about it tomorrow.*

Boy, oh boy, today I am peeing-in-my-pants gleeful about this post. Do you remember Virginia who writes at Beauty Schooled and Never Say Diet? I wrote about her here, and here, and here. She covers beauty culture, body image, health news and all things fascinating with sharp wit and insightful commentary. I have a big, fat blogger crush on her.

Today, in things-I-have-been-wanting-to-say-forever, I’m guest blogging over at Beauty Schooled:

From my online profile

“I’m online dating (pause for commiserative laughter) and last week, I received a lovely note from a potential suitor. He addressed things we had in common, complimented various portions of my profile, and concluded with this: Anyways, you do not strike me as someone who is curvy…would be nice to chat soon. Wait…what? You were doing so well! Let me get this straight, based on a written profile, I do not “strike” this guy as “someone who is curvy.” Hmm… let’s investigate.”

Read the rest at Beauty Schooled!

Related Post: I wrote a body-positive guest post for Emilie’s blog I Came to Run.

Related Post: I totally agreed with Virginia on this No Skinnies Allowed yoga.

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May 19, 2011 · 3:37 pm

No Skinny Bitches Allowed

I love yoga.  Some other time, I will wax poetic about all the reasons I love yoga, but not today. Today is for talking about a very good point that Virginia at Beauty Schooled brought up yesterday in her iVillage column. She wrote about a yoga studio that only allows “larger bodied” yoga practitioners. Virginia quotes the founder as saying “”When I tell 120-pound people they can’t come, they get very offended, which I find fascinating.”

Walking into a yoga studio with a “No ________ Allowed” sign is fundamentally contrary to the spirit of the practice. Instead of speaking to body sensitivity, a policy like this demonstrates either a profound lack of imagination or extreme laziness on the part of the instructor.

Every week, in addition to my official “studio classes,” I take a class at work. We range from age 22 to 60-ish, estimated size 2 ballet bodies to estimated 24s, yoga newbies to Mr. Gumby’s. We have an awesome instructor who is able to teach a class that, per the feedback we’ve received, challenges everyone. She is constantly voicing modifications to make postures more accessible to those struggling, and adding extensions that are available to the more practiced crew.

I am a “larger bodied” yoga practitioner, and I am occasionally intimidated by the tiny flexible people in class. But this is not solved by telling the “skinny bitches’ to stay away. It’s ameliorated by focusing on advances in my practice, by recognizing the progress I am making, and by instructors designing complex classes that aren’t stratified by size.

I’m all in favor of extending the reach of yoga by creating atmospheres that encourage people of all shapes and sizes to participate. I’m just not okay with creating weight limits on either end or turning people away at the door. Yoga is about acceptance, body love, physical and emotional growth, and deriving energy from those around you. Size really has nothing to do with it.

Related Post: Tyra labels plus size women “fiercely real.” Does that mean that thin women are less real? Or less fierce?

Related Post: Words matter. “Curvy” vs. “full-figured” vs. “voluptuous” as relates to sex drive.

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April 14, 2011 · 6:21 pm

Shout Out to Never Say Diet

Beauty Schooled writer Virginia has been blogging at iVillage about fascinating things like the FDA’s potential calorie-counting measures and the taco-eating beauty queen.

Today, she’s collected stories about earliest “bad body” moments, when the good body/bad body was first called out. I participated with a story about a sales lady pointing out my “bubble butt” while shopping for a dress to wear to my friend’s Bat Mitzvah. I was 11, which I thought was quite young.  Reading some of the other stories, however, I now feel blessed to have made it that long before somebody told me there was something “wrong” with me (which there obviously isn’t).

Related Post: Embrace:Me entry featured on I Came to Run. Instead of butts, let’s talk about thighs.

Related Post: Rosie Says on Beauty Schooled‘s weekly feature, “Pretty Price Check”.

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March 19, 2011 · 2:31 pm

The Wheatgrass/Doughnut Paradox

Don’t you just love when two of your favorite things collide into a ball of accidental awesome? Like when you take a bite into a cookie you already think will be delicious to find a hidden peanut butter cup on the inside? Double win, right?

Wednesday had the blogger equivalent of the surprise cookie. Virginia of Beauty Schooled interviewed Kate of Eat the Damn Cake, and they talked about cake, beauty, body image and DIPEs. If those aren’t a few of my favorite things all wrapped up in a nice little mid-week package, I don’t know what is.

Got me thinking about Hollywood eating. I would have thought the relationship would look like this:

Except, as Kate and Virginia discuss, the actresses who go into great and graphic detail about their love for doughnuts/bagels/deepdish/mac ‘n cheese earn major street cred. At the same time, Gwyneth Paltrow gets roundly derided for her flax-seed/wheatgrass schilling GOOP. So maybe it actually looks like this:

All of that is, of course, contingent on the actresses in question being thin. Gabourey Sidibe does not earn points for eating potato chips. And maybe that’s why Gwyneth, about as svelte as they come, gets ragged for GOOPing up a storm about absurdly healthy foods. Although we are wise enough to know one doesn’t achieve that level of lean without some sacrifices, we want to believe it’s possible. For 99% of us, its not. Health food = smaller you, junk food = bigger you. The question is, how much cake are you willing to give up?

Note: Thought I made the charts, they are clearly in the vein of thisisindexed. Go check out Jessica’s much cleaner, much neater index card collection.

Related Post: More indexed-style graphs, this time on Hollywood career. How bad does a bad movie have to be to get good again?

Related Post: How to buy toys for girls. Follow the map, avoid lifelong scarring.

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March 11, 2011 · 4:31 pm

Beauty Schooling

(image: Life Magazine)

Beauty Schooled is a kick-ass blog by Virginia Sole-Smith all about the “the price we pay for pretty.” I found it a while ago when I got sucked into her addictive account of her 600-hour adventure in a literal beauty school.

Every Friday, Virginia posts a “Pretty Price Check” summarizing the week in numbers. This week, among facts like “69% of men trim their groins” and “$40,000 is what a fan paid for a lock of Justin Bieber’s hair,” is RosieSays!

Virginia is also currently blogging at iVillage in a column called Never Say Diet. Check her out, she’s taking over the world.

 

Related Post: Sociological images spreads the body love…. sort of… at least the white, smooth, hourglass-shaped body love.

Related Post: My mom has thoughts on the subject as well.

 

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February 19, 2011 · 10:01 pm

Ideals

Saw this posted on Beauty Schooled and Sociological Images today:

From UK magazine "Fabulous"

As both sites point out, the scientific methodology here is somewhere between quackery and bogus. There’s really nothing surprising about this. The Christina Hendricks outpouring of love has made it quite clear that not everyone goes for a size 2. Though honestly, this is a fact that we already knew, right? The range of human preference is vast and varied, even more vast and varied than this (all white) triptych would suggest. What’s new(ish) about this is the idea of publicly declaring one’s none-size 2 preference. Not that any man in this “study” did that. How many of them, I’m curious, date women of Anna’s size?

The image got me thinking about men. Since I don’t have any of the “data” that this Fabulous “study” had, this is pure speculation. It’s not quite comparable, but worth considering nonetheless:

Anonymous male model, Brad Pitt, Kevin James

I’m all in favor of a wider range of men on screen as well. After all, the incidence of male eating disorders is on the rise. And yet, the prevalence of less-than-svelte dudes on screen is already taken care of (Seth Rogan, Zach Galifianakis, Jonah Hill, etc). Where are my size-12 actresses? Average-sized actresses never play “average” characters, they are always the sidekick/comic relief/sassy best friend. There are a few examples on TV now in which average-sized women play just-another-girl, not “the fat one” (think Brooke Elliott on Drop Dead Diva, Sara Ramirez on Grey’s Anatomy), but it’s slow going.

Related Post: A wider range of women featured on The Good Men Project.

Related Post: My mom’s thoughts on a different sort of narrowmindedness

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