Debate Cake - The Materiality of the Beauty Industry 

With Louise Rondel - Goldsmiths University
How does the beauty industry make you feel?
For a while I stopped wearing make-up and hid my heels. And I became a false version of myself. But then I woke up and I saw in full colour, in full confidence again.
​Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, author, 2016
... I'm sick of the masquerade. I'm sick of pretending eternal youth. I'm sick of belying my own intelligence, my own will, my own sex. I'm sick of peering at the world through false eyelashes, so everything I see is mixed with a shadow of bought hairs; I'm sick of weighting my head with a dead mane, unable to move my neck freely, terrified of rain, of wind, of dancing too vigorously in case I sweat into my lacquered curls. I'm sick of the powder room. Germaine Greer, academic, 1970
Louise Rondel is currently working towards her PhD at Goldsmiths University London, with a focus on women's relationship to the beauty industry, and how this entangles with the lived experience. This Debate Cake session explored ideas of 'how the beauty industry makes you feel'. ​