On Makeover Culture, Status Degradation Ceremonies, and Challenging the Beauty Industries

We live in a “makeover culture.” We are called upon to constantly improve, with countless books, magazines, and television shows offering instruction on how to remake every aspect of our bodies, our relationships, our lives. The neoliberal imperative is clear: we must recognize our deficiencies, seek expert advice, and engage in both the hard work and the correct consumption practices that will optimize our beauty, affluence, and happiness. A wealth of scholarship has examined self-transformation practices such as fitness regimens, cosmetic surgery, and television makeover shows as forms of domination grounded in hierarchies of gender, race, and class. This paper considers whether one specific makeover practice, the cosmetic counter makeover, transforms not only the appearance of the recipient but also their subjectivity. The author employs an autoethnographic approach, drawing on qualitative data from a year-long personal experiment in which she abstained from all goods and services proffered by the beauty industries, with one exception, cosmetic counter makeovers. This approach is designed to connect theoretical and analytical understandings of bodily capital and disciplinary power with embodied experiences of makeover culture.