The Cult of Beauty review – delusional, divine, deadly…

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From wife-grinding windmills to pure gold serums, this riveting show traces humanity’s obsession with beauty through time and cultures with a keen sense of the ludicrous and the shocking

ant to look your best? A beauty box, new on the market, offers instant improvements: brow shaper, eyeliner, cheek enhancer, a pair of padded falsies in frothy white lace, plus the full range of available beauty spots.

Indeed, the show hurtles fast through western notions of beauty, from a statue of Venus to sultry Hollywood starlets andcover girls. This is partly, and importantly, to speak to different races and ideals. A neoclassical statue of a hermaphrodite is deliberately opposed to the depilated Venus. There is a superb gallery of androgynous beauty in life and art. JD ’Okhai Ojeikere’sBut it is also because the curators have a keen sense of the ludicrous.

The extremes of the industry itself are, of course, yet more enthralling. A photograph of Helena Rubinstein, surrounded by white coats in her beauty “laboratory”, might have looked advanced in 1950s America. But snake-oil salesmen have always tried to come over as doctors. What startles is just how many aesthetic procedures have their origins in actual medicine.

The belief that light skin is more beautiful than dark goes entirely with colonisation; or so it may seem. The writer and broadcaster, one of several historians selecting special objects for this show, points out that this theory is not so simple. She includes a beautiful illustrated recipe for Chinese pearl powder lightener made in 1591, predating western notions of superiority.

Source: Entertainment Trends (entertainmenttrends.net)

 

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