• By
  • Elva Ramirez

“Where humanity exists, beauty exists,” writes Sir Lindsay Owen-Jones, Chairman of  L’Oreal in the opening essay to a five-volume work published by the L’Oreal Foundation.

Courtesy L’Oreal
PAKAL, A MAYA KING The Maya shaped the human head to emulate the form of the maize cob. Palenque, Chiapas, Third Period.

The phrase pithily sums up the thesis of “100,000 Years of Beauty,” a four-year academic project to dismantle the cultural constructs of beauty. The project tapped 300 authors of 35 different nationalities and across 20 different disciplines to decipher and explain how aesthetic exercises occurred not just in contemporary society but throughout time. The first book begins with a look at  pre-historical efforts at jewelry, embellishment and colored powders.

The works, while accessible to a mass audience, are rooted in academic research, which might seem surprising when linked to a cosmetics giant. That a cosmetics company shouldn’t be behind an anthropological work is one of the assumptions that  “100,000 Years” challenges. “We think there are dangers connected with this idea of making [beauty] sound superficial and not like an industry that’s worthwhile,” L’Oreal executive vice president Beatrice Dautresme said, adding that the beauty industry is often ghettoized as a feminine endeavor, and therefore frivolous and futile.

One of the difficulties in condensing a multi-disciplinary work on beauty was the elusive definition of “beauty” itself. Philosophers had a different take on it than anthropologists or sociologists, for example. In the end,  beauty is “the need for human beings to transform themselves, to never be content with the body that nature gave them,” editor Elisabeth Azoulay said. “All humanity can speak but each one speaks a different language. Beauty is the same.”

In an age where tabloid weeklies trumpet how reality TV stars are “addicted” to plastic surgery, the pursuit of beauty through technology can take on a darker edge. In some ways, the Heidi Montags of the world are expressing an anxiety that bubbled up in the last century, when aesthetic norms were transferred from the group to the individual. Prior the 20th century, beauty was defined by rituals and  the group. But the rise of the individual undermined those foundations. “It means that the individual has to know who he is and how to be happy. So the exercise of beauty has changed because it became an individual decision,” Azoulay said. “Even if there some influence by another, it is not the same.”

“In the 20th century, individuals have to make choices and the addition of all these choices on important matters will be important for the future of all the species,” she added.

Envisioned as an antidote to dippy women’s magazines, L’Oreal hopes that the books will spark discussion among young women. At least some fashionable types will be soon reading it: New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology has incorporated the books into its graduate program curriculum.

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