Aesthetic Color Blindness in the Beauty Industry

• In Event: Idealized Bodies

Abstract

In his influential book Racism Without Racists, Bonilla-Silva (2006) demonstrates the ways in which racial inequality is justified and reproduced through race neutral language. Most whites claim that race is no longer relevant, or that they don’t see race. This kind of “color blindness” perpetuates white privilege without naming it and disregards the systemic and institutionalized nature of racism. Color blindness relies on seemingly neutral explanations that obscure structural inequality. Building on Bonilla-Silva’s work, I suggest that “aesthetic color blindness” in the beauty industry maintains racial hierarchies in similarly covert ways. To gain insider access to the processes through which beauty norms are taught and enacted, I enrolled in a professional makeup school and completed a certification program in makeup artistry. Following graduation, I continued working as a makeup artist, extending my field site to industry settings including fashion shows, photo shoots, workshops, and related industry events. This focused ethnographic approach uniquely positioned me as both a student learning the norms of the beauty industry and later as a working artist negotiating those norms. I found that in beauty spaces, whiteness functions as an unmarked aesthetic baseline. Racial inequality is not articulated through explicit exclusion in the beauty industry, but through seemingly neutral education, discourse, and practices. Racial hierarchy is reproduced in this industry without overtly acknowledging race at all. Contemporary beauty standards operate in color blind ways that mask racial hierarchy as aesthetic neutrality. This paper moves the analysis of color blindness into the domain of aesthetic practice and demonstrates that beauty standards are mechanisms of racial stratification embedded in the everyday labor of cultural production.

Author

• Rebekah Burroway, Stony Brook University