How many bronzers or lip glosses does a woman need? As is patently obvious, the whole multi-billion-dollar beauty industry has nothing to do with need and everything to do with desire—the desire to be prettier or younger-looking, with more angled cheekbones or fuller lips or smokier eyes.
I ask this question not as a bluestocking who has read Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse four times (though I have), or who pulls a comb through her hair in the morning and calls it a day (which I don’t). I ask it as a committed beauty junkie who teaches English literature at Barnard College and writes reviews of dense biographies you have never heard of—someone who has all the same spent hundreds of dollars on the promise of a moisturizer that will infuse her skin with all sorts of esoteric ingredients and who stalks the aisles of the more elite department stores to suss out the latest brow pencil or lash-extending mascara.
