Dabbing Glossier’s Haloscope highlighter on her cheeks, 31-year-old congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rightfully proclaimed “Beauty is political!” in a now-viral beauty tutorial for US Vogue, adding “there’s this really false idea that if you care about make-up or if your interests are in beauty and fashion, that that’s somehow frivolous”. While talking viewers through her 12-product beauty routine, Cortez took down the patriarchy, touched on gender equality and denounced the pink tax – a swift and assertive nod to the fact that in 2020, beauty and politics are not mutually exclusive.
Whether it’s 18-year-old American activist Feroza Aziz using a TikTok makeup tutorial to highlight the mistreatment of Uighur Muslims in China, or Hong Kong-born news journalist Cherie Chan demonstrating a hair braid that can be flipped over to conceal the face as a DIY balaclava during protests: beauty has never been more interwoven with civil and social justice causes.
With facial recognition cameras now commonplace across the United States and Europe, a number of artists, activists and makeup artists have joined forces to create what is now known as CV Dazzle (Computer Vision Dazzle), which lends its name from ‘Dazzle camouflage’ (a painterly geometric technique that was used during both World Wars to conceal war ships). CV Dazzle involves using make-up to obscure the five points that facial recognition algorithms tend to pick up: forehead, nose, each cheek and chin.
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