How Radiant, Glow-y Skin Became Everyone's Obsession
By Deanna Pai. Photos: Getty Images.
For centuries, from Cleopatra, to Audrey Hepburn, to Elizabeth Taylor, the quest for radiant skin has been so unflinching, it's hardly a trend. But you don't have to live in Calabasas or be on a first name basis with Claudia Soare to know it's now enjoying a second wave (tsunami?) of popularity. Last holiday season alone, the consumer consulting firm The NPD Group saw a 33 percent year-over-year increase for the purchase of "other face products" alone — which included contouring, highlighting, and sculpting kits. And that's just in the makeup category. The skin sector is in on the action, too. There's Kiehl's Pure Vitality Skin Renewing Cream (which "visibly renews skin for smoother texture and healthy radiance") and the newly expanded Aveeno Positively Radiant line. In between the two are products like Milk Makeup Face Gloss, which comes in one shade and one shade only: Radiant Finish. The concept of "radiance" in the beauty world has the sort of staying power and ubiquity that rivals, well, Styrofoam.
Radiance isn't exactly an enigma. According to Merriam Webster, it's the ability to reflect beams of light. How this translates to beauty: "To me, radiant skin is clear and even in tone," says makeup artist Sir John, who counts Beyoncé and Olivia Culpo among his clients. It's also a signifier of youth. "The first sign of aging is a loss of radiance," explains New York City dermatologist Dendy Engelman. When your skin is firm and tight, its smooth surface allows light to readily reflect. Lines, laxity, and uneven texture reduce its reflective power — making your skin look less radiant.
Radiance gives away more than your age, too. It's an external sign of good health. "We tend to equate radiant skin — that is, clear skin — with health, cleanliness, and good hygiene," explains Stephanie Medley-Rath, a sociology professor at Lake Land College in Mattoon, Illinois. Meanwhile, dull skin or even a breakout implies, at least subconsciously, that you've made some not-so-healthy choice, like opting for a third glass of Sancerre or passing out before washing your face. (Of course, as anyone that suffers from acne, eczema, rosacea knows all too well, oftentimes even the best skin behavior can lead to the worst skin results.) Still, though, have you ever looked at the state of your skin when you're hungover? It’s a lot of things, but radiant is not one of them. On the other hand, smooth, glowing skin makes people think you just woke up from eight hours of sleep and accented it with your daily açaí bowl, naturally.
But radiance goes beyond sheer aesthetics. Let's take it way back — and we mean way, way back to the glory days of Stratford-Upon-Avon. Even Shakespeare was obsessed with radiant skin. In Shakespeare's Freedom, author and Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt writes: "Shakespeare often conveys the sense of beauty’s radiance with the word 'fair'…Fair can denote lovely clear, fine, or clean, but it also has the distinct sense of shining lightness." The advantage of this "shining lightness," this ethereal glow, according to Greenblatt, is that it creates contrast to emphasize the color of, say, your rosy lips or your deep brown eyes. Gleaming skin makes it all the better to see you with, my dear. (Or so the Bard thought.)
In this light (pun so intended) our current obsession with getting radiant skin doesn't seem like an outlier. In fact, it’s the natural evolution of a desire that's always been there — and only just magnified by social media. "You see all of these makeup looks on Instagram and, more often than not, the skin is always radiant," says Sir John. "Radiant skin is very visually intoxicating." It's not a big surprise that NIOD's Photography Fluid contains multiple light-refracting ingredients: Good photos and good lighting go hand-in-hand. That's why radiance-enhancing products aren't interchangeable with bronzers and the like: When it comes to luminosity, particles, particularly those that reflect light, are way more important than pigments. So Tom Ford’s recent Illuminating Primer, Guerlain L’Or Radiance Concentrate, and Nars Radiance Primer SPF 35 are all colorless. They rely on their pearlescent and reflective particles to mimic natural radiance.
Oh, and there's also what we'll lovingly coin here as the Instagram Effect. Don’t we all want to look like the FaceTuned version of ourselves? Photoshop, Instagram, and Snapchat have made it all the easier for us to see ourselves and those around us with the least pixelated, most luminous skin imaginable. It's unnatural, it's artificial — but it looks damn good. And until someone actually invents filters that work IRL — Google X, you on that? — most of us will do as our ancestors did before us, and stay on the endless quest for radiance.
This story originally appeared on Allure.
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