The Causes and Consequences of Women’s Competitive Beautification

The Causes and Consequences of Women’s Competitive Beautification. Danielle J. DelPriore, Marjorie L. Prokosch, and Sarah E. Hill. The Oxford Handbook of Women and Competition, edited by Maryanne L. Fisher. http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199376377.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199376377-e-34

Abstract: Much empirical evidence suggests that “what is beautiful is good,” particularly for women. Whether in the courtroom or the classroom, attractive women enjoy a variety of benefits not available to their less attractive peers. It is therefore often in a woman’s best interest to engage in efforts to enhance her appearance. Women utilize a number of strategies to increase their physical attractiveness (e.g., wearing cosmetics, dieting), particularly when competing for romantic partners. Due to the competitive advantage it provides, however, a woman’s beauty can also evoke aversive psychological responses from same-sex competitors. These negative responses—such as decreased self-esteem and increased envy—can have costly consequences for the attractive women who elicit them. In this chapter, we review research and suggest that women strategically enhance their beauty in order to facilitate competitive success. We also address several important questions about the causes and consequences of women’s competitive beautification.

Keywords: physical attractiveness, intrasexual competition, human mating, envy, anti-attractiveness bias, appearance enhancement, beautification penalty

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Research also supports the idea that women who use artificial means to deceptively augment their attractiveness via the use of cosmetics are sometimes penalized in organizational settings [...]. Specifically, female undergraduates were presented with a series of same-sex targets (half wearing cosmetics and half not) and were asked to imagine they worked with these individuals. Results revealed that women evaluated female targets wearing cosmetics as more likely to use their looks to get ahead in the workplace and less likely to achieve success via hard work alone relative to female targets not wearing cosmetics. Although this beautification penalty was found across target attractiveness, the negative response was most pronounced for attractive female targets wearing cosmetics. These effects extended to affect individuals' desire to interact with the female targets wearing (vs. not wearing) cosmetics, women indicated a _decreased_ likelihood they would affiliate with these targets in the workplace (an effect that was mediated by decreased perceptions of the targets' trustworthiness in response to their appearance enhancement effort).