Something to Do With the Face

On beauty, performance, and the interior lives we protect

Some mornings, your face may feel like a borrowed object. Like it was handed down to you, a second hand archival piece with slightly frayed edges, handled too much, and not entirely yours. 

Some mornings, your face feels like an exam. 

Something you’ve been asked to explain. Or perfect.

You get up, assess the damage and begin your ritual. Not even always just to beautify, but to reclaim.

Not because you think beauty is truth. But, because in the right hands [in your hands] it becomes a weapon, or an offering to yourself. 

Toyin Ojih Odutola, Above all else make it look effortless, 2012. Pen ink, marker, and varnish on paper © the artist and courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Some mornings, visibility feels like violence.

I don’t necessarily mean this in a dramatic sense, but in a silent, more cumulative one.

You start to realise that to be seen is to be read. And to be read is to be reduced.

When you feel reduced, you strive to become more.

We see this in the particular kind of fluency shared among girls raised on YouTube tutorials; hallmarks of a generation trained in aesthetics, and in strategy.

It’s less flippant, and girly in the way that people typically dismiss, it’s more obsessive, studied, almost scholarly in nature.

Instagram: @maretamee

The technique becomes a code; a new grammar for the self. A visual education, conducted in GRWMs and product hauls, learned from bedroom ring lights and pixelated Jackie Aina videos.

The fruits of graduation from this class embed themselves into the fibres of your being, long after you move past it. 

Because before there was disillusion, there were undertones, and before learning the language for alienation, we learnt to blend.

The commitment to beauty was really research, a teenager’s minor architecture of survival and evolution. 

Framing beauty as vanity is to fundamentally misunderstand its stakes, especially when classed, gendered and racialised bodies are at the centre of the conversation.

It is not simply about appeal. It never has been. 

It is about access and respect. 

Maybe about safety, and certainly about control.

It is about how the world greets you, and how you choose to greet it back.

It teaches you how to deflect, to seduce, to shield.

And in many rooms, it becomes a basis for belonging.

“Self-Portrait” © Ming Smith, Courtesy of Jenkins Johnson Gallery

Scholar Tina Campt reminds us that images aren’t just seen; they’re felt.

In her work on black visual culture, she speaks of “listening to images”, of holding the tension between appearance and existence.

I think about that often.

The “UK Black Girl Aesthetic”, in particular, functions as a shared visual language. Not necessarily a monolith, contrary to popular belief, but certainly a common dialect. A way of saying “I’m here” in a world that often refuses to see you.

Beauty offers the illusion of control, it reads like a curated surface in place of messy realities*

And the most beautiful thing about illusion is that you don’t actually need to tell anyone how the trick works. 

Yet still, the girls are asked to explain. Asked to justify. They are asked to tone it down, to dress it up, to make it legible to a gaze that names them too much and not enough all at once.

It’s that tension between self-expression and self-surveillance.

Image © Nadine Ijewere

bell hooks wrote that “the body is a site of struggle.”

So we know beauty, then, is not neutral. It’s political performance.

We know this because we see it all around us. And still, the framing of that performance is often too binary. It’s liberation or oppression, real or fake, natural or artificial.

We seem unable [or unwilling] to make space for the idea that actually it exists between those poles; that it’s neither a mask or even a mirror, but a less interesting third thing: method…structure?

*A means of making oneself coherent in a world that refuses to make sense.

The assumption that beauty is purely superficial overlooks how deeply it’s woven into systems of power.

Image © Nadine Ijewere

In the workplace, a woman in a wig and acrylic nails is coded differently from one in a slicked back bun and a bare face [or at least the appearance of a bare face].

In the function, identical inputs will code for completely different outputs.

Neither is more authentic, but one is always more acceptable, depending on the audience.

There comes a day when you realise that respectability is rarely about merit. It is about appearance. The appearance of virtue, of competence, of superiority.

And appearance is always read through lenses of race, gender, class, and, ultimately, history.

So when someone says, this is what makes me feel like me, what they might mean is: this is the version of me that survives scrutiny.

Don’t get me wrong, aesthetic labour will always be labour, even when it’s pleasurable; even when it’s skilled, joyful, or feels freely chosen.

That choice is real and it’s definitely yours. But it’s certainly not always free.

It exists within a field of expectations, shaped by culture, capitalism, and muscle memory.

The demand to look effortless is itself effortful, and the performance of nonchalance takes rehearsal.

[you eventually realise you’re intensively rehearsing for an audience that does not clap.]

We tend to frame the female relationship with beauty with an urgent concern, like we are naive children drowning in a shallow pool. That’s not always untrue, but the real shallowness lies in our conversations about it. We reduce it to preference, shame, self-esteem.

It is often framed as a betrayal of seriousness, as if tending to the face disqualifies the mind.

tallawah | by nadine ijewere & jawara

History disagrees.

Women have always carved space for themselves through ritual. The adornment is not just about allure, it is assertion.

Rightfully so. Invisibility does not make you more authentic, and visibility does not make you a sellout.

Not all beauty is about the gaze.

Sometimes it’s about returning to yourself, or building a version of you that feels legible, even if only to you.

Image © Nadine Ijewere

The ritual can be inconsistent. Contradictory.

One day it’s armour. Another, intimacy.

Some days it’s resistance. A lot of days, it’s just fun.

The point is not to arrive at purity. The point is to observe what’s been asked of you, and choose, when you can.

That’s the crux of it all. The one thing women are rarely freely afforded - choice.

Let the girls experiment. Let them rest.

Let them love beauty without having to explain why.

Let them be unreadable, inconsistent, excessive, undone.

Because not everything is performance.

Sometimes it’s survival. Sometimes it’s art.

Sometimes it’s just something to do with the face.

And that, too, is enough.