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At the Makers Conference, This Year’s Takeaway: Beauty Shouldn’t be a Competitive Sport

Last week international beauty brand SK-II* invited me to attend the 2020 Makers Conference in California as a guest at their expense. I was delighted to accept—not just because I was excited to hear from the incredible women (and men) that Makers, a yearly event highlighting female change makers, had lined up as speakers, but because I was also intrigued by a new campaign that SK-II had just launched called #NoCompetition. Looking ahead to the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, SK-II has enlisted up-and-coming athletes and sports legends (including 2016 Glamour Woman of the Year Simone Biles) to celebrate competition on the field, the floor, in the pool, and more—but take competition out of the equation when it comes to how we look, act, and feel.

In SK-II’s estimation, beauty shouldn’t be a competitive sport. That makes perfect sense when we’re thinking about who has the longest eyelashes, the clearest complexion, or the shiniest hair; that kind of competition is toxic and dated. But I hadn’t thought about how beauty competition affects athletes—yet it does. There’s the way the press embraces certain athletes but ignores others. Or when female athletes vie for endorsement deals and might be chosen based on their physical appearance rather than their performance.

Today SK-II has enlisted Biles, swimmer Liu Xiang, surfer Mahina Maeda, and others to continue the fight. As YoeGin Chang, the brand leader of SK-II Japan, explained in her talk at Makers: “Our mission is to help women change destiny by standing up against pressures and expectations that are pushed on us every day. We are saying no to competition in beauty, because it will be all the more beautiful when beauty is no competition.”

Me, getting ready to be inspired.

In addition to hanging with Chang and the SK-II crew, I spent a lot of time at Makers enthralled with speakers who spoke to this year’s conference theme: Not Done. The fight for true equality isn’t over, is it? The journalist in me was enraptured by Meredith Levien, COO of the New York Times. She led the insurgency in the Times newsroom and is looking closely at the way we get news in today’s culture. Megan Smith, the former chief technology officer of the U.S. and current CEO of Shift7, gave a call to action about using the power of community to lift up innovators. One of those innovators is Bernice Dapaah, founder and CEO of the Ghana Bamboo Bikes Initiative, which uses local, sustainable bamboo to build bikes. Dapaah was one of many speakers who focused on sustainability and environmental issues. All of the environmental activists on stage encouraged every generation to be part of the fight against climate change and to take action in innovative ways.

I’m kind of addicted to forceful female business leaders, and I found one in the CEO of the Dallas Mavericks, Cynt Marshall. What an amazing speaker! As a woman who faced no shortage of misogyny in the corporate world, Marshall spoke about owning her authentic self and the ways all of us can help transform corporate cultures. Her focus at Makers was on her first 100 days with the Mavs, which included physically walking her team out of the building and back into a new values-based culture that prioritized diversity and inclusion.

Another speaker focused on change in the corporate workplace was Erica Chidi Cohen, CEO and cofounder of the well-being brand Loom. She’s an expert on body literacy, which is basically understanding our own sexual and reproductive health, and emphasizes that we need to integrate it into our workplaces and our schedules: She encourages women to make room to talk about periods, fertility challenges, and menopause at work—and to schedule big events, like board meetings and presentations, when they’re at the most energized point in their menstrual cycle. She made it clear that we need to bring men as allies into the conversation, and that we have to drop any shame we feel about our physiology and emotional state when it connects to functioning well as working women.

It wasn’t just the action on stage that inspired me—it was the connectivity I felt with the attendees seated around me. In this safe space, we were able to take a couple of days to envision what we wanted to do and how we were going to do it, examine the places where our work was not yet done and where we have the opportunity to make the greatest impact. SK-II got me started by talking about eradicating competition in the beauty space, but I realized that there should also be #NoCompetition when it comes to the opportunity to excel. We’ve moved away from thinking that there’s only room for one woman to run a company, launch a brand, or win a medal. By the time I walked out of Makers, I really did believe that when we’re playing the game together, we all win.

*SK-II is a Glamour and Condé Nast advertiser. The company underwrote this trip, but the story is my own.

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Mom’s Night Out Shouldn’t Exist

Part of the reason we even have a perceived need for “mom’s night out” is that parenting has undergone a fundamental shift. In his New York Times review of journalist Jennifer Senior’s book All Joy and No Fun, Andrew Solomon writes that “parenthood as we know it—predicated on the unconditional exaltation of our children—is no more than 70 years old, and it has gone through radical readjustments over the past two generations.”

Expectations around parenting are so great now that of course parents (read: moms) need a break from making sure that little Joe is getting an A in social studies; that Emma has a dozen or so friends to invite to her sleepover; that Benjamin is seeing the best possible sleep specialist. For parents in the 1800s, children were born and reared to help alleviate the workload on the farm, with ideas about success tied more to harvesting food and caring for animals than to a letter of admission to an Ivy League school. But now that parents are dealing with raising exceptional children with exceptional grades and exceptional futures, the pressure needs an outlet. The pressure falls on the shoulders of moms—and the outlet? We’ve decided it’s a night or two out at a small-plates restaurant.

In A Perfect Madness—her 2005 examination of modern (middle- and upper-class) motherhood—Judith Warner writes that “the women around me, for the most part…had comfortable homes, two or three children, smiling, productive husbands, and a society around them saying they’d made the best possible choices for their lives, yet many of them seemed just miserable.” Over a decade later, the unease persists, but now with social media. Instagram beams out “perfect mothers,” who never seem to need an hour to themselves just to scream into the void and still find time to make homemade party favors for their children’s birthdays. These moms’ “nights out” end at 8 p.m. to be home in time to tuck their kids into bed. (When a dad shows up on the ‘gram, he’s lavished with praise for being so “hands-on.”)

So what do we want? The occasional mom’s night out isn’t a bad idea—moms, like all overworked people, need social structures of support (and sometimes lemon-drop martinis). But the implication that whenever a woman leaves her children after dark she’s having a “mom’s night out”—as in the Hathaway case that Curtis Sittenfeld tweeted about—reinforces the notion that moms are their children’s caregivers and that dads are, at best, backup babysitters. (Never mind that the event Hathaway attended, the Critics’ Choice Awards, was a work-related event, not a round of drinks out with a group of girlfriends.)

As with most things, there is a compromise to be had here: It isn’t enough to suggest that moms be allowed to find a greater sense of identity outside the home and apart from their children; dads also need to find their sense of identity within it. Studies show that couples who share household chores are happier than those in which the woman does the bulk of the domestic work; it also stands to reason that children benefit from the sustained presence of both of their parents.

And then there’s the question of who gets to have a “mom’s night out.” Sure, Anne Hathaway with her coiffed hair and sequin dress can go to a red carpet gala. My friends and I can plan a night out at the latest restaurant—we have time, some disposable income, and supportive spouses. But no one guarantees a mother time to herself—not in the immediate aftermath of work with a federal paid leave program and not as children grow up. Meanwhile, the moms who most need a break from the relentless work of childcare are the ones who are least likely to be able to get or afford it.

If mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. But it’s going to take a lot more than a few cocktails a month to make mama happy. It is going to take the equal partnership of papas. It is going to take structural change that means that both parents get time off of work when a child is born. It is going to take, in other words, a lot more than a mom’s night out. So put on that lipstick. Zip up your sequin dress. Mama’s going out—she’s gonna get herself a revolution.

Laura Turner is a writer living in San Francisco. She is currently at work on a book project about the cultural history of anxiety. Follow her on Twitter @Lkoturner.

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