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My first magazine gig was as an intern at Ms. magazine, but I took my first job as an editorial assistant at CosmoGirl. At the time this looked like an odd jump, but I knew from the hours I'd spent holed up with magazines that what those magazines said mattered to their readers, and I believed there was a way to make that responsibility mesh with the feminist beliefs I’d had since my mother took me on my first protest in 1980 (she dressed me as a suffragette to agitate for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment—which, to this day, has not passed). That’s where most of my writing takes its root, at the crossroads of the trappings of/joys of (take your pick) conventional femininity, and the belief that people of all sexes are equal.
When I first started writing about beauty, I was simply hoping to understand my own relationship to the way I looked, from the little things (why do we continue to value a tan when we all know how bad it is for us?) to the bigger questions (why do we still delineate "the smart girl" from "the pretty girl"?). But the more I talked with other women and men about appearance, I saw that there was a larger story there to be told about how beauty shapes us—one that went beyond the expected feminist criticism about how beauty standards make us feel bad about ourselves. "Face Value" is my attempt to tell part of that story.
You can find my essays in Marie Claire, Glamour, Salon, Jezebel, and The New Inquiry, and my work on the ways beauty shapes women’s lives has been covered by The New York Times and the Today show. I live in Astoria, New York, and I'll tell you my beauty secrets if you tell me yours.
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