Clockwise from top left: Goldie Hawn’s “trout pout” in The First Wives Club, 1996; Farrah Fawcett’s 1976 poster; Shalamar’s Jody Watley on Soul Train, 1971.
Just beneath the surface, something else was happening. There stood the white-lab-coated attendants of Clinique, ready to instruct you in a three-step skincare routine, with “toner” and other products you hadn’t known you needed. But now you did. There was a sort of analog machine you used to figure out what type of skin you had. Large pores? Oily? Visible lines? Dry and flaky? Helpful mirrors stood on the counter, so you could get a close-up look—My God, yes, now that you mention it…—while you answered the questions. The process, the packaging, and the name itself signaled a new direction toward the scientific.
With the arrival of the nineties came the waif look, embodied by Kate Moss, as a counterpoint to the Guess ad glamazons of the eighties. First it was time to get all that hair under control. You needed a hair dryer, a flat iron, and the new anti-frizz products containing silicone, or else a salon blowout a few times a week. Foil highlights were supposed to make you look as though you’d spent the summer basking on the beach, not bent over the bathroom sink. Black women got weaves, and some went blonde too—like Mary J. Blige and, later on, Beyoncé. Eyebrows were shaped, penciled, and lightened. Vats of wax were heated to tame even more hair. The euphemistic bikini wax became de rigueur. One had to clip, trim, and prune the topiary that was left behind. And then word began to spread of a new, much more denuded depilation called the Playboy wax. It was quickly rebranded the Brazilian.
As hair was plucked, everything else was pumped up. Pamela Anderson’s Baywatch physique, life-raft buoyant and golden-hued, became the pop-culture paragon. The 1996 movie The First Wives Club built in a visual joke about Goldie Hawn’s character having “trout pout” lips from an overenthusiastic collagen injection. But that didn’t stop the swelling, as women lined up to have their faces, necks, eyes, and breasts “done.” Fat was vacuumed away with liposuction. Faces were sandblasted with dermabrasion or chemically peeled. A cult arose around the prohibitively expensive Crème de la Mer face cream, originally developed for burn patients—which many customers now were, in a sense.
Along with cosmetic surgery and “procedures” came cosmetic dentistry. Teeth were bleached white and then whiter still, or a set of veneers was glued atop the originals like a white picket fence. (Perfect teeth had become the new American Dream.) Makeup was formulated to give the illusion of wearing no makeup, with ingredients like “light-reflecting particles” that promised to “mattify” and otherwise remedy the complexion. As for the rest of the body, with self-tanning cream you could be tan everywhere, all the time. Women went bare-legged and wore sandals in winter. It became unthinkable to go without a pedicure. Nails were shortened, squared off, and coated in dark Chanel Vamp. Everyone went to the gym; everyone began to do yoga and Pilates. A high colonic was said to do wonders for your skin. Everyone wanted to “detox.” Pop stars once made pilgrimages to the Maharishi; now it was to plastic surgeons, dermatologists, and wax estheticians, who enjoyed guru status.
