Before & After: Why makeovers were always kind of a bummer
The most important movie at my adolescent sleepovers was The Princess Diaries. Anne Hathaway plays a nerdy San Francisco teen who finds out she’s a princess and has to navigate learning how to be one, on top of every lovely indignity that comes with being fifteen. The most important scene in that movie is the makeover scene. If you haven’t seen it, you’ve either seen the TikTok recreations or you are the parent of children who staged their own version over and over and over again.
While The Princess Diaries makeover scene is one of the most memorable makeover stories, it is absolutely not the only one. There’s Laney Boggs in She’s All That. There’s Tai in Clueless. There’s every person in “Queer Eye,” every suburban house in Extreme Makeover and Trading Spaces. Before all that, it was Cinderella, and before that, the statue, Galatea. In all of these, the same blueprint keeps showing up, so I narrowed it down to four components. This is not a science, but pattern recognition and decades of Girlhood™.
The Crafter: The one who facilitates the transformation, usually positioned as benevolent or generous. The Crafter always has a vision of who the subject could be which is 99% of the time based on the crafter’s own standards. It’s a very subjective and non-neutral role. Crafters look like: the Fairy godmother in Cinderella, Cher in Clueless, Stacy and Clinton in “What Not to Wear”, the Queer Eye guys, Tyra
The Subject: The one being transformed. They’re almost always framed as lacking something before the makeover begins. Their consent is present…but complicated. The Subject agrees, but to what exactly? Only the Crafter knows!!! Subjects look like: Eliza Doolittle, Mia Thermopolis, Laney Boggs, the ANTM contestants
The Audience: The makeover only means something if someone witnesses it. A transformation can’t happen if there is no audience to confirm it!! In the teen movies it’s the school, more often than not, everyone who attends prom. In reality TV, I guess it’s us!
The Fable: The person or outcome that reveals the makeover’s facade. The Fable is basically like, a receipt of failure. The ANTM contestant cries through her photoshoot and gets sent home anyway. The Extreme Makeover house falls apart at the seams six months later
As a very, very, very mature adult, I look back at these makeovers and want to projectile because they are so vapid and terrible. The goal is, almost always, to make someone who is previously invisible become ⭐ visible ⭐.
Visible almost always means, now recognizable by some hot guy. And then that almost always means there’s a nasty scene where the girl is humiliated, and we realize the guy is just a snake in a letterman jacket.
I’m embarrassed that I watched versions of this so many times without noticing that we turned something as innocuous as contact lenses and straightened hair into a whole puppet show.
I suppose it was always sinister. If we look at the Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, Pygmalion is a sculptor who becomes so disgusted with real women that he carves an ivory statue of his ideal woman and falls in love with it. He names her Galatea, dresses her, brings her gifts, sleeps next to her, then prays to Aphrodite to bring her to life. And of course, she does. The story kind of ends there. I mean, there is no real ending for Galatea other than she was created out of spite, and then she just proceeds to exist.
This whole post makes me want to redefine makeover. The most straightforward definition is “a complete transformation or remodeling of something, especially a person’s hairstyle, makeup, or clothes.” We, as a culture, took that and ran with it, making it darker, heavier, focused on artificial fixes and no user input.
May it please the court, my proposed definition is:
makeover (n.): a transformation performed on a subject, by a crafter, for an audience — in which the subject’s own vision is the last thing consulted.