Is A ‘Boss Move’ Just Anything Now?
I don't know what female liberation looks like, but I don't think it's this.
Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty spruik at the Super Bowl is being praised as boss behaviour, but writer Reena Gupta has other thoughts.
I can’t stop thinking about it. The moment when one of the world’s biggest popstars, midway through her performance at the Super Bowl, whipped out a compact to touch up her makeup in a strategic hat-tip to Fenty Beauty.
According to Forbes, in the 12 hours following Rihanna’s performance, the six-second act generated US$88.3 million in media impact value, and Google searches for the Rihanna-owned beauty line went up 883 percent.
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Popstars, famously, love selling stuff. Even the likes of Kendrick Lamar performed at Louis Vuitton’s Paris fashion week showcase, and in 2021, Kanye West debuted his Yeezy x Gap label at the launch of his album, DONDA. But it’s the wave of uncritical praise heaped on the moment that’s left me feeling like I’m going insane. I don’t know why characterising a billionaire promoting makeup in the middle of a concert is now a “boss move”, but I fear we’re not in a good place.
One of the perks of being a woman with an internet connection is that it’s impossible to escape the genre of women putting stuff on their face. To be fair, social media doesn’t feel as makeup-heavy as it used to; lately we’ve seen a definite shift to “skincare” as we’re positively bludgeoned with footage of women slapping on serums, LED light masks, and acids. So many acids.
Fenty predictably adjusted to the shift: a new unisex skincare line was unveiled in 2020; promising to help fade dark spots, tighten pores, and plump up skin. It’s all bullshit, of course. Skincare and makeup are two sides of the same coin, which is a predominant emphasis on your face as a signifier of value – and skincare doesn’t actually have anything to do with skin health.
When Fenty launched in 2017, there was a frisson of excitement for its attention to non-white skin tones. And don’t get me wrong, as a person with brown skin, there was a moment of release in seeing someone as big as Rihanna giving our varied and complex tones some attention.
But let’s be honest. The beauty industry, regardless of how “inclusive” it is, exists to extract wealth from women by selling them an ideal that can never be achieved. Talking to NPR, Jessica DeFino explains that the meaning of “good skin” changes over time. At the moment, she says, “the ideal of good skin is smooth, extremely shiny and wet looking.”
“There is no allowance for changes in tone or texture,” she adds. “It’s very flat and glass-like. It reflects the state of our largely virtual digital lives. We’re expecting our faces to look like a screen… we are trying to adapt our real life human faces to a virtual, hyperreal standard of beauty.”
The product that Rihanna spruiked during her performance, which is adorned on Fenty’s official website with a note that it is “half-time approved”, is described as a finishing powder that “blurs, controls shine, extends makeup wear”.
“Comfortable for all skin types,” boasts Fenty’s official website in line with its original ethos of diversity, we’re again reminded that the product “instantly blurs the look of pores”.
Rihanna is a great business woman. But it’s a bummer to live in a world where the blurring and disappearing of our bodily flesh is somehow deemed aspirational.
In 2021, Rihanna memorably became a self-made billionaire, thanks mostly to her beauty line being a huge success.
But let’s be honest about where that that wealth came from: the bank accounts of women who are drowning in messaging that they must do their best to make their skin not look like skin; lest the world sees that women are actual humans and not just ethereal puffs of air.
This is an opinion piece written by Junkee’s Deputy Editor, Reena Gupta. You can follow her on Twitter at @purpletank.