What came first: The Real Housewives or our ever-growing obsession with perfection? Did the smoky eyes and bandage dresses on Bravo's juggernaut Housewives franchise influence the beauty choices of millions of women or have my fellow Housewives simply conformed to society's ever-changing beauty standards?
To answer that, we need to travel back to 2006. Facebook was in its infancy, Jack Dorsey gave birth to Twitter, and Bravo announced a new show: The Real Housewives of Orange County. The franchise grew up alongside these newfangled social apps, and so did the Housewives themselves. We are pop culture, and we are informed by pop culture. We have incredible reach, but we too are merely followers on the yellow brick road that led to the rise of social media, beauty bloggers, and the filtered culture we have all grown accustomed to.
When I joined the franchise in 2011, The Real Housewives of New York City had been on the air for four seasons. Facebook and Twitter were no longer novelties; they had helped to popularize the shows — and to normalize oversharing. But it was the birth of Instagram (in late 2010) and Snapchat (in 2011) — and with them, the filter — that revolutionized, seemingly overnight, the way we present ourselves to the world.
Until then my experience with glam could have been summed up in two words: "What's glam?" In fact, in 2006, I had a job as a columnist for Glamour. Each month I took a celebrity — Alec Baldwin, Julianne Moore, Jon Bon Jovi — to lunch and interviewed them. That conversation, along with photos of the two of us at lunch, then appeared on the glossy pages of the magazine. Every month, for two years, I brushed my own hair and did my own makeup before sitting down for a nationally published photo shoot with A-list stars. It never occurred to me, or my editor, to have my makeup professionally done. That was for movie stars, models, and the occasional brides. Not writers, working girls, or your average housewife.
In my first season of RHONY, I, along with most of the season five cast, did not get my makeup done professionally for each scene I filmed. When I started RHONY, I did not have the phone number for a single makeup artist (I now have eight, on two coasts). We had glam teams, courtesy of Bravo, only for our "confessionals" and a few of the "all-cast" events. It wasn't until midway through season six — incidentally, also the year we all joined Instagram — that I recall glam becoming the rule and not the exception. It all started with a ruined blow-dry in the Berkshires: When Kristen splashed water on Ramona’s fresh blowout, and Ramona went, well, berserk, we knew that a new standard of glam had arrived. I suppose, after all those years, it was difficult to watch yourself on a high-definition TV screen and not want to make improvements.
By the time I left, after season 10, glam teams were part of our everyday life on camera, with producers offering to pay for glam if they could film it as part of the story. We were shown getting Botox injections to smooth our foreheads, chemical peels to tighten our skin, lasers to reduce ass fat. I was once filmed getting a Brazilian bikini wax — legs up! It seemed nothing was off-limits. When new castmate Tinsley flew her glam team with her for a group trip to Cartagena in 2018, all hell broke loose after it became clear that they were there for Tinsley only. Glam-gate provided lots of drama, though none of it ever aired. Apparently, getting your makeup done for a dinner in New York was fine, but flying your glam team on location to film a TV show was too over the top, even for Bravo. It is reality, after all.
Today, if you strip away the fights, the drinking, the petty disagreements, and the occasional road trips, what you have left are outfits and glam. When I cut my hair short in my last season, Bethenny seized on it to say how my values had suddenly changed and all I cared about was glam and dresses. Fourteen years into the Housewives phenomenon, we've seen haircuts get weaponized and fake lashes get normalized. And, trust me, nothing irritates another Housewife more than their frenemy showing up in a better outfit. Let's face it, the culture of glam isn't always so pretty.
This story originally appeared in the December 2020/January 2021 issue of Allure. Learn how to subscribe here.
More reality journalism:
-
Why the Hell Don't the Love Island Contestants Ever Wear Sunscreen?
-
Lisa Vanderpump on Housewife Drama and Giggy's Wardrobe
-
What Reality-TV Stars Look Like When the Cameras Are Off
Next, step inside Jenna Lyons's beauty space: