Estee Lauder, Meghan McCain And Why Image Is Everything

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Starting Oct 16, Estee Lauder will be running a promotion offering women free social media makeovers at its cosmetics counters in Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s and Saks. Yes, complimentary make-up and photo sessions (complete with “minor retouching”) to ensure that one’s social networking  profile image is  picture perfect. Really? Seriously? F’reals? Has it come to this? Please do not make me long for the only recently bygone days of media consternation over high schoolers sexting risque snapshots and Captain Obvious career expert articles about the fact that a pictorial Facebook chronicle of your spring break escapades might come back to haunt you on a future job search.

I can understand the need for the self-employed (of both sexes) to shell out for professional headshots for their websites if that’s how they’re connecting with clients, but no businessperson worth her salt is going to opt for a make-up counter pic with the Estee Lauder watermark splashed across the background as her official image. No, this promotion seems aimed squarely at the youth demographic (which a “mature” brand such as Estee Lauder would love to tap into) and it does so by both clamoring aboard the social media bandwagon and capitalizing on the idea that it’s imperative that we now look our “best” at all times and across all media platforms. Two birds with one stone and all that jazz. In the era of “personal branding,”  you are never not being watched, evaluated and pigeonholed, even in a Facebook thumbnail. Might as well make sure our pores are digitally downsized and the whiteness of our smiles optimally enhanced while it happens, eh?

It’s a lesson that Meghan McCain learned the hard way this week. She posted a candid self-portrait (she referred to it as “spontaneous”) on Twitpic, over 100 000 people gawked at it and more than a few of those took the time to chastise her for… her attire? Her body? Her crappy choice in reading material? It sparked enough negative feedback that Ms. McCain threatened to quit Twitter forever (oh Miley Cyrus, see what you’ve wrought?). Politics aside, there’s something damn disheartening (and ridiculously frustrating) about the fact that a young woman (politicized public figure or not) can’t choose to post a casual,  non-airbrushed photo of herself in which she’s fully clothed and not partaking in any illegal substances and/or graphic sex acts without inviting  unsolicited vitriolic comments from the peanut gallery.

I suppose I shouldn’t be so quick to judge; perhaps Estee Lauder’s  makeover magnanimity is simply meant to save the rest of us from a similar fate.