The Empowering Benefits of Beautification

Source: Pexels / Retha Ferguson

In today's world, more is expected of women than ever before. Women must be nurturing yet independent. They must be homemakers and breadwinners. They must be warm yet purposeful. They must be scientists, artists, teachers, and CEOs.

Where does beautification fit into these competing demands? New research published in the journal PLoS ONE found that appearance adjustments — in the form of wearing desired clothing, makeup, and accessories — helped women approach the world with an increased sense of strength, vim, and assertiveness.

"Some women report that beautification is an agentic and assertive act, whereas others find beautification to be oppressive and disempowering," state the researchers, led by Khandis Blake of the University of New South Wales in Australia. "We found that women demonstrated higher psychological assertiveness after beautifying their appearance."

To arrive at this conclusion, the researchers recruited 158 adult women to participate in a short in-person experiment. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two experimental groups. The first group was asked to bring a full change of "attractive" clothing to the experiment, including shoes, jewelry, make-up, and accessories. The second group was also instructed to bring a change of clothes, but of a different kind. This group was informed to pack clothes that they might wear for a relaxing day with friends.

After each group had changed into their outfits (either attractive or casual), the researchers asked participants to complete a series of personality scales that measured traits such as assertiveness, sexual motivation, and happiness. Interestingly, they found that women who beautified themselves viewed themselves more favorably across a number of desirable personality dimensions. The researchers write, "Compared to women in the control condition, women in the beautification condition [...] associated themselves more strongly with assertiveness. Participants in the beautification condition also reported more sexual motivation and positive affect than women in the control group."

The researchers designed a follow-up study to test whether the effects of beautification might extend to behavioral intentions. They asked participants to indicate the likelihood that they would respond assertively to the following three hypothetical cases:

1. Participants' willingness to revisit a shoe store to return a faulty pair of shoes.
2. Participants' willingness to call a hair salon to ask for clarification over a bill.
3. Participants' willingness to contest a bill from a mechanic who completed work on their car without informing them

Again, the researchers found that women were more likely to indicate they would act assertively in these situations when they had beautified their appearance.

The authors conclude, "Research derived from objectification theory has emphasized the negative consequences of beautification and related practices, highlighting that they harm women and are derived from a cultural context that disempowers them. [...] Our results suggest that beautification can increase assertiveness in women, but that the effect may be domain-specific. These findings shed light on a key tension in female psychology by challenging the notion that beautification and related appearance-enhancing phenomena are necessarily disempowering."