Walmart’s geoGirl: Doesn’t Every 8-Year-Old Need to Exfoliate?

While women debate if 50 really is the new 30, with Walmart’s help 8 may be the new 18. On February 21, Walmart launches geoGirl, a line of cosmetic and beauty products specifically formulated for 8- to 12-year-olds. The line, which boasts a total of 69 (let’s hope that’s coincidental) products, contains everything from eyeshadow, [...]

Why Aren’t We Protesting Miss America?

“When I was growing up, Miss America was the symbol of what every young girl wanted to be,” author Alix Kates Shulman, one of the organizers of the first Miss America protest in 1968, said in an interview with NPR in 2008. “That was the kind of attainment that everybody yearned for, to be considered [...]

Today’s the Day to Love Your Body

There are things we say to ourselves that we would never say to the people we love. Can you imagine telling your best friend her butt is too big or her breasts are too small? Or telling your daughter she’d have more friends if she just lost a few pounds? How about letting grandmother in on how much more beautiful [...]

Yoga’s Feminist Awakening

The online yoga community is still feeling the aftershocks of a recent debate about the use of women’s bodies in asana-related advertising, and the conversation is far from finished. It all started when the grand dame of U.S. yoga and Yoga Journal co-founder Judith Hanson Lasater wrote a letter expressing her unhappiness with the increasing [...]

Blog Roundup: Editor’s Picks, July 12-16

This week, Ms. learned from the blogosphere that gay parenting is better parenting; MAC is marketing maquiladora makeup; Vaseline launched a Facebook skin-whitening app; abortion hit primetime; and more. Gloria Feldt, The Real L Word, Bristol Palin and Angelina Jolie are all part of the best discussions of identity, politics, and identity politics on the [...]

Bad Shoes and the Author Who Takes Them On

It happened in Milan at a 2008 Prada fashion show.  “I was having a panic attack, my hands were shaking,” a runway model recalls.  “Some of the girls were crying backstage, they were so scared.”  Why the dramatics—An Act of terrorism?  An explosion? Had the prime minister been assassinated? No. These women were fearful of [...]

What Can We Do About Colorism?

As a woman of color who is deeply concerned and invested in interrogating the ways in which women continue to be marginalized, I’ve often wondered why more work hasn’t been done on the issue of colorism, both domestically and globally. Not only has it played a tremendous role in the beauty myths that imperil women [...]

Thumbs Down on Jessica Simpson’s “Beauty”

By now, many have heard of (or seen) Jessica Simpson’s new Vh1 reality series The Price of Beauty.  The premise of the show: Simpson and her best friends Ken and CaCee visit various countries to discover what each considers beautiful, finding out in the process the extreme lengths that women, in particular, will go to [...]