Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: The new face of power politics
Gorgeous young politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posts a beauty tutorial online. Mere frivolity? No, a lesson in empowerment.
So, how long would you usually spend doing your makeup?” I’m in the first minute of a 90-minute makeup lesson, sitting in front of a mirror in the flagship outlet of one of the many grand beauty emporiums that have sprung up across our cities and suburbs in recent years. I don’t yet know how good my consultant Amber’s own application skills are because she is wearing a mask, but there is no denying that her gold eyeshadow pops in a lovely way. Her customer service technique is warm too. She quickly presents me with a few options: “Five minutes? Ten minutes? Half an hour?”
Honesty being the best policy, I tell her that on average it would be five minutes, including my daily application of sunscreen. But I don’t want her to think that I’ve given up on my appearance, far from it, so feel compelled to reassure her that of course I spend more time making up my face if I’m going out somewhere special. I’m determined to stick to the two-word plan I formulated as I crossed the threshold into this makeup and skincare HQ: Don’t apologise.
I will not apologise for my sun-damaged, 55-year-old skin. Nor for my frown lines, crow’s feet, creases, uneven tone, scars and broken capillaries. There are, no doubt, other infelicities I don’t even know I have. I’ve earned this skin, for better or worse. I don’t yearn for stasis in other aspects of my life. To achieve it on my face would take more time and money – and assaults on my sense of self – than I’m willing to pay. But when Amber and I begin to focus on my fully exposed face, my resolution falters. “I look a bit washed out, don’t I?” I say. Evidently as skilled with managing a customer’s insecurities as she is with achieving a perfectly defined brow, she says: “Don’t worry, we can fix that.”
Her words capture the paradox of me being here: on the one hand, while I acknowledge that I’m far from perfect, I want to proclaim that I don’t need fixing. On the other hand, adjectives that might be grouped under the general category of “flawed” start to muster at the front of my mind: puffy, blotchy, red, dull, saggy. I’m here because I want to arm myself with products and techniques so I can fight back with other words: smooth, glowing, even, contoured, lifted. I, too, need to put my best foot forward in our hyper-visual world, one where beauty content – and a very particular kind of face whose patron saint is Kim Kardashian – dominates much of the internet.
Courtesy of my daughter back when she was a teenager, I knew that makeup tutorials were a thing. But as eager as I usually am to tune into the zeitgeist, I had never watched one – until, recently, I saw one delivered by a woman who also happens to be one of the best political communicators on the planet. I was watching the weaponisation of beauty in action.
US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2020 makeup tutorial for Vogue attracted millions of viewers, which is not so unusual in the world of beauty vloggers, but rarer for a politician. Over the course of the video, which is easy to find on YouTube, AOC walks viewers through her skincare and red lip routine. This is not another example of a politician trying hard to ingratiate herself with younger voters, because at 32 she is a member of Generation Z herself. This is her world and she’s owning it. In makeup tutorials, the watcher is the mirror. We gaze back unseen, but the instructor knows we’re there, or soon will be. Ocasio-Cortez’s self-possession, her performative genius, and her armoury of products absorbed me completely. Her political brilliance shone through every time she reached for her concealer or contour stick.
This idealistic young Latin American woman, cum laude university graduate and former bartender overturns our assumptions of what power might look like. The already gorgeous revolutionary-celebrity-politician has makeup skills that intensify her aura. For her, sharing them is normal as it is for so many of her peers. It’s just that few other elected representatives have a platform that blends their role as authentic social media influencers with genuine political commitment and its associated policy discussions. It’s a gift, one that is turning out to be transformative. AOC negotiates the surfaces of beauty and politics, sharing their gloss and toil with her millions of followers. Combining pragmatism and panache, she uses her skin to build social capital and leverage it into political capital. Skin is not just skin: it’s content, it’s an idea, it’s a force.
The video lasts 18 minutes and has the same number of makeup steps. With each new one she holds a product up to the camera before applying it. She knows her viewers want to know exactly what she uses: brand name, formulation, shade. Many will no doubt turn to their own mirror and replicate her look exactly. But the video’s focus isn’t entirely on bronzer, highlighter and lipstick; viewers hear about patriarchy, inequality, self-care, healthcare packages being debated in Congress and feminism. She encourages us to have fun and be creative with makeup, whoever we are, but only if “it gives you life”. After all, as she reminds us with that old chestnut, beauty comes from within.
But under the all-seeing surveillance of the public eye, that platitude is redundant. Especially for women. AOC makes quite the understatement when she says, “Just being a woman is quite politicised in Washington.” She thinks it’s important for her as a much-scrutinised politician and a woman of colour to be open about how she comes to present the way she does. To be electable, women need to be qualified, relatable and appealing, not always in that order. If her signature red lipstick gives her confidence, a kind of war paint for going into political battle, who would begrudge her?
Her opponents do, of course, and are vocal about it, rabidly so. But I found it difficult to imagine Australian politicians of any gender or ideology schooling potential voters in makeup application techniques and policy analysis and succeeding in winning anyone over. They would be ridiculed. But perhaps it’s a generational thing, because I can imagine Grace Tame and Brittany Higgins doing a makeup tutorial while talking about the need to reform laws relating to sexual assault and child abuse. I suspect the contradictions of applying makeup while talking about misogyny and power would be as apparent to them as they are to me, but they could pull it off without losing legitimacy with their peers. Many senior men in politics perhaps don’t see them as having legitimacy anyway, but it is unlikely that these men are watching makeup tutorials.
Some TikTok makeup tutorials have become a platform for political activists who jump on beauty content and turn it into something else. Viewers are lured in with the promise of a beauty hack guaranteed to change their lives. Once their attention is grabbed, they might hear about, say, the plight of the Uyghurs in China, or challenges to the Voting Rights Act or discover some other protest video hidden inside a makeup tutorial. TikTokers have used snippets of AOC’s speech in Congress about the abuse she received from Republican Ted Yoho in their own makeup tutorials. If I looked harder, I’d no doubt find one that employs Julia Gillard’s famous misogyny speech, with which AOC’s powerful speech was compared.
It’s clever subversion, beauty content meets political discourse, killing two birds with one artful stone in our time-poor world. Viewers have devoted a few minutes to learning something about a cause while wondering whether that shade of purple might suit their own complexion. But if social justice concerns linger, they might go on to share the video and it’s on its way to going viral.
Was I thinking about all this as I sat in front of a mirror surrounded by shelves packed with beauty products we don’t even know we need? I was not. I had a sense of being on show as patrons of all ages and backgrounds walked past and observed Amber’s efforts. I am a willing participant in this dance between the function of beauty and its form. I’ve been inculcated in it for my whole life. The appealing designs of the tubes, compacts, jars and tiny pots, not to mention the formulations they contain, are weighted down by forces of commerce, sexuality, desire, art and power. How can one glamorous gold tube of lipstick carry so much meaning? And do I want to buy it?
I do. My lesson in which colour worked best for me and how best to apply it was continuing. It had an explicit pedagogy, one that was very much hands-on. Because faces are symmetrical, Amber would do one eye, or one cheekbone, explaining with great precision what she was doing as she worked. Then I would do the other as she instructed, encouraged and occasionally corrected me. If I had to summarise what I learnt about applying creams, shadows and lotions to my face, it would be to not smear or rub but to gently pat. And apparently where and how you hold a brush, and what kind of brush it is, makes a difference. Amber asked me which mascara I used at home. I felt chuffed when I named the not-so-well-known brand and got her nod of approval. Her professional opinion was that it was indeed fabulous. She watched me apply lipstick and told me my technique was good. It should be; I later worked out that I’ve put on lipstick at least 10,000 times.
Here’s the thing about my makeup lesson though: I enjoyed myself. I heard myself asking a little playfully, “So what does this eye cream do, Amber?” She told me and I didn’t believe her, but its ceramic applicator felt nice and cool as I put it on, so I bought it. It was Japanese. The blurb on the box it came in earnestly mentions a quest for a 200-year-old-text written in Japan’s Edo period and promises that enduring beauty is a culmination of the wisdom of centuries. This purple plastic tube has journeyed to me, apparently, across generations. I chortled at the ridiculousness of it all. I know I’m being conned, but I’m still putting that cream under my eyes every day, hoping against hope. I confessed to Amber that I had no faith in my ability to do a tight eyeliner (under the eyelashes) balancing a mirror on my lap and she said don’t worry, just put on more mascara. And boy, did we laugh.
I was there to learn, but also to buy. I had paid a $150 deposit, redeemable in products, but we all knew I was a willing participant in a mission to get me to hand over as much money as possible. I went in with open eyes and they remained open when I left, albeit with better contours and definition. Had I been so inclined, I could have made my own contribution to the internet’s seemingly endless beauty content with a product haul video of my own. I bought around $800 worth of stuff. My list of products isn’t as long as AOC’s but it’s a good effort: eye cream, primer, foundation, powder, contour stick, highlighter, eyebrow fibre gel, two small pots of eyeshadow, lipstick. It all came with more packaging than I can bear to think about. These products also cost more than most women in Australia earn in an average week. They will last me a long time, but beauty as self-empowerment takes on a different hue when you think about it through this economic lens, one that not everyone can afford. There is also the time that all this aspiration eats up; instead of perfecting my eyeshadow technique or getting the perfect shot to post on social media, I could be fighting for something more meaningful. Or doing anything that might remove me from a spiral of self-obsession.
Humans have evolved to be highly visual creatures. We like checking each other out. But the way in which personal or celebrity aesthetics saturate every aspect of our lives can be exhausting. Yet again, I found myself feeling grateful that I grew up without Instagram, and the constant comparisons prompted by the visual, a kind of oppressive hell for so many people, young and not so young.
Carrying my big bag of products I walked back to work, feeling a little self-conscious. A male colleague looked at me and I could tell he was trying to work out what was different. A female colleague said, “Wow, that lipstick looks great on you.” Did I deploy my new skills and apply all these powders, paints and potions the next day? I did not. AOC says that beauty should be about the person who is applying it. I’ll take her words to heart and not overdo it, by my measure at least, on the daily. But next time I’m going somewhere special, look out.
Phillipa McGuinness’s Skin Deep: The Inside Story of Our Outer Selves (Vintage, $34.99) is out this week