Pamela Anderson needed to explain and she did. There are many articles discussing her choice to appear without makeup and hair products this year.
On one hand, it could be a promotion for her new book, Love, Pamela (2023). On the other, it could be a daring emergence from decades of pressure, labor, and performance, an assertion of ownership over her body, which is first and foremost, her life. And whatever it is, it’s none of my business.
This isn’t news, not really, but the way the media sunk their teeth into it is. Her choice was devoured more than the results, what she looks like, how happy, confident.
There are consequences for dissenting from aesthetic labor. But there are also benefits.



Anderson says it’s, “freeing, and fun, and a little rebellious, too.” She doesn’t want to “play the game.” The shift happened shortly after the passing of her career-long makeup artist in 2019. Anderson said, “Since then, I just felt, without Alexis, it’s just better for me not to wear makeup.” This was a personal and tragic event and, again, none of my business, except to draw a parallel between the death of the past and the birth of brazen freedom.
Not wearing makeup is a death of performance, preoccupations, self-image, self-worth, and desirability. Let’s all stand vigil and watch who cries; this is a public event.
Even though appearing makeup-free is seen as a statement—I’m sick, I’m tired, I’m not taking this seriously—it’s more of a conversation. It anticipates a possible response, desired or not. Existing in the world as this default question mark is a deeply gendered experience, and makeup, which has a varied and genderless backgound,1 has come to symbolize that mark.
A makeup-free face communicates the health of the body, letting the skin show with acne, sun damage, and rashes, all the physicality we’re ashamed of. I have a pimple on my forehead right now that says, “This person is lactose intolerant.” Ironically, the facial products we use to convince people of our health with rosy cheeks, bright eyes, and shimmering complexions, deliver endocrine disruptors and carcinogens straight onto our delicate eyelids and wet lips.
Katy Kelleher discusses the “makeup for makeup,” modern reincarnations of the toxic beauty regiments we believe to be archaic. Not belladonna or white lead ceruse, but PFAS that cause cancer, infertility, thyroid disease, liver damage, high cholesterol, and autoimmune disease. Kelleher, in The Ugly History of Beauty Things, goes on to say:
When a woman injures herself in attempts to fit cultural beauty standards, many people respond not with concern or compassion but with mockery.
I used to consider lead makeup a historical oddity, akin to the mouse-hair eyebrow wigs… but now I think [it’s] more important than that. Look closely at Venetian ceruse and you’ll see something far uglier than damaged skin.
And what else does the unadorned face say? Who knows. It’s muted and contorted to the viewer. I think makeup-free people attract attention because they’re mirrors, confronting others with the reflection of their insecurity, misogyny, and competitiveness that nests dormant, disturbingly eager to surface. Unhidden, the face speaks in lines and softness, non-ironic, non-performative, non-nihilistic feeling. A communication that anticipates openly, “I’m listening.” A squeamish thought in a post-modern world and an added response to the question. Who am I? Who are you?
In the open, we can’t deny we’re moving. Our looks are changing and morphing—we’re not cartoon characters.
Anderson prefers the term “life-ing” to aging. Every minute we’re metabolizing and metamorphosing and every minute we’re striving to powder over it and serialize ourselves. Jessica Defino quotes a commercial for the Botox-alternative in The Unpublishable:
“Who wants to wake up looking like someone else? Not me,” [Joe] Jonas says in the opening lines of his Xeomin commercial. Later he reiterates, “I want something that keeps me, well, looking like me.”
An unchanging mind is a possible side effect of our static bodies that we don’t think about. We could be stunting the natural unfolding of our minds, something gracious and wonderful that will wait patiently and continue to knock, because our faces demonstrate the occupation we have with remaining in the past.
Defino later cites and discusses Clare Chambers, philosopher and professor, in her book Intact: A Defense of the Unmodified Body:
The anti-aging sector often uses the language of “feeling like yourself again” as a sales tactic. It perpetuates the idea that you, as you are now, are not the real you. It capitalizes on the innately human quest for identity and convinces you that you will not be real until you are beautiful (with beauty, in part, being defined as youth). It conditions you to prioritize the imagined self — a self that not only doesn’t exist, but will never exist — over your present self. It encourages you to pursue living in the past (“I want to feel like myself again”) or the future (“I’ll go to the beach when I finally lose weight”) in lieu of living in the now. It keeps you from being in the present moment (which, to my limited knowledge, is kind of the entire point of life).
We’re changing. And we mask and stunt this change, surgical and otherwise, to fit in, succeed, and feel valued. But if we only feel like ourselves with our masks on, or in a specific decade, then we can’t move through the world as who we are right now.
What if I only feel like myself with my makeup?
This article isn’t about personality, gender, or culture-affirming makeup. The goths can goth. This is for the people who catch themselves post-shower and think ‘wow, that’s me, hi, but I’m raw right now.’ I can’t go out, I can’t be seen by my friends, my partner. I don’t feel on top of it, I want to feel my best. This is for people who’ve tallied the cost of their products and time, afraid that the life built around them is reliant on those metrics.
It is a personal choice to appear in the world however you choose, but Tressie McMillan Cottom in THICK: And Other Essays points out:
‘I like what I like’ is always a capitalist lie. If beauty matters at all to how people perceive you, how institutions treat you, which rules are applied to you, and what choices you can make, then beauty must also be a structure of patterns, institutions, and exchanges that eats your preferences for lunch.
The pressure. The unspoken rules.
There are so many anxious Reddit threads asking if it’s okay not to wear makeup to work. Our presentation shouldn’t count as evidence of our competence or intelligence, but it does. We’re so entrenched with the prosperity gospel, a belief that moral purity and goodness change your life, including your physical form, and it’s in bed with bootstrap capitalism, fueling pretty privilege.
Kate Bower writes for Vox,
The prosperity gospel looks at the world as it is and promises a solution. It guarantees that faith will always make a way. If you believe, and you leap, you will land on your feet. If you believe, you will be healed.
We’re raised on ugly Disney villains as children, but there’s no escape in the 401k. Messaging for the prosperity gospel, pretty privilege, and pro-aesthetic labor is subliminal in adult media from news to novels. I’d argue it’s not even a genre or trope, it’s omnipresent.

These themes are how we explain-away systemic injustice and assuage our guilt. If ugly people aren’t putting in the labor, aesthetic or otherwise, they don’t deserve to be successful. What a shallow well to draw from. Laborers will always grow tired. Without aesthetic labor, we blink away the bright light and adjust to the room. Real people. Frizzy people. Sensitive people.
We prop up pretty privilege so we too can have it someday, the someday that has us believe that we’re not real until we’re beautiful.
In a 2015 academic study titled Pretty Probationers, OSU students studied physical attraction bias as it relates to criminal justice. They found a correlation between attractiveness and sentence, with more attractive offenders less likely to be imprisoned. Remember Jeremy Meeks, the hot felon from California? His GoFundMe page was astronomically successful and he served 13 of his 27-month sentence for firearm possession and grand theft before being recruited as a fashion model and TV actor. He now has an autobiography called Model Citizen.


Kelsey P. Yonce writes in Attractiveness privldge: the unearned advantages of physical attractiveness,
Langlois et al., 2000 found that attractive adults are judged to be more competent in the workplace, have better social skills, and be better adjusted than their less attractive peers.
We don’t need research papers to tell us this. It’s almost a guarantee that if we haven’t personally experienced the plenties or pitfalls of pretty privilege, we’ve internalized the messaging and mashed it up with self-worth. Personally, I feel better in social situations with makeup on. Even though I know I can be kind and smart and engaging without it, I perform better when I don’t have to prove it.
Yonce writes, “Attractiveness privilege should be included in any discussion of privileged statuses, along with the more commonly recognized types of privileges.” The evidence is too clear to be left out of social work and therapy practices, school policies, the criminal justice system, and the workplace.
Pretty privilege is especially insidious because beauty standards have morphed over time to mirror the ruling class and we’re ruled by billionaires who’ve transcended humanity into the other, the effortless object who escapes entropy and pink cheeks because they can splash cash around.2
The ugly reality of our glorious beauty is stifled and modified by makeup but also lasers, facial yoga, lymph massaging, facials, rollers, botox, everything. Ditch makeup and go for permanent mods. It’s easier and cheaper in the long run. You can finally roll out of bed.
Idolizing billionaire celebrity alien objects is harmful because the less we humanize ourselves, the less we humanize others.
Mikala Jamison writes in her article “The era of beauty standard brain rot,” that to fit the model of contemporary beauty, we need to look “alien-like… unusually, otherworldly, almost scarily beautiful.”
She argues that our obsession with quiet luxury will reapply itself to quiet beauty and a new plainess aesthetic could emerge.
I often watch movies and shows from the 90s and early 2000s and think, “Jesus, people looked … normal.” They weren’t all angles and sucked cheeks and hard edges. I don’t know how else to describe it, they looked realer. Like you could reach out and touch them and feel the warmth of a messy little human instead of the cold contours of a person-like bust in a museum. The former is more beautiful to me at this point in my life, perhaps because I worry it’ll disappear.
The crusade to eradicate outward ugliness is shrouded in fear that we won’t be accepted, fear the authentic will disappear, and fear we’ll never embody beauty in the past or present we strive for but never live in.
But the embodiment of beauty has gone further than outward appearance. If money can buy 10 years back on the face (there’s an actual fractional laser called Take10), it can also buy expensive lawyers to coach and coax statements and appearances. This could be a whole other topic, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that our goalposts are moving towards total annihilation of the mind and the middle.
The mind and the middle are uncertain places.
I wrote a short piece about a year ago about embodying beauty. It’s choppy and underdeveloped, but I still resonate with the elation and finality of feeling ugly. It was such a welcome successor to years of striving and laboring for attractiveness.
When I cut my hair, it brought out the soft edges of my chin and the roundness of my cheeks. I leaned into a boyish lifestyle and stopped my full-face routine, relieved to finally wake up, shower, and wear face masks as easy tasks.
I hadn’t realized how fragile makeup had made me feel. To be perfectly in place, not smudged or faded, is so much restriction and self-regulation. And it starts freakishly early in life. I was afraid of running mascara when I was a tween so I didn’t swim. Now, we have Sephora-tweens, maxed out on scientific jargon and specialty products, barely high school age.
I’m neither for nor against makeup. It’s a personal decision, as is anything that relates to the body. But the labor, time, financial, and mental commitment of remaining attractive has a deeply corrosive effect.
We are so much more than how we look—healthy or not, beautiful or not, it doesn’t matter. What matters is what’s present now and what’s real, because what’s real is beautiful.
The only source for who we are comes from our words and actions. Certainties. Those are evidence for self-worth where beauty is not.
I want to end with a line from Matrix by Lauren Groff, a book about plain, sapphic medieval nuns.
When it comes to strength and goodness and brilliance and gentleness and grandeur of spirit so vast that it takes one’s breath away, beauty is nothing, beauty is a mote to a mountain, beauty is a mere straw alight beside a barn on fire. (p. 241)
I’m not sick, I’m not unprofessional, and I’m not irresponsible. This is just my face.
[Fin]
For your consideration:
Lisa Eldridge in Face Paint: The Story of Makeup, “Anthropologists believe that the first instances of face and body painting would have been a form of protection from the elements or used as camouflage or part of a ritual.” Eldridge goes on to provide many instances of both men and women using makeup throughout history, such as manicure sets made of henna found in royal tombs, Egyptian eyeliner, facial powder used in English and French courts, and, recently, men’s glam rock makeup in the music industry.
Very importantly, I have also splashed cash around in the pursuit of eliminating goops and serums. Not only that, but I have a connection to extremely discounted procedures. This is not a judgment of cosmetic procedures in any way. The call is coming from inside the house.