I have in my bathroom dozens of beauty products.  Cleansers, moisturizers, hair styling agents, anti-aging skin-care gels and creams, cuticle oil, soothing eye balm.  I have eight different kinds of lotion.  And let’s not even get into makeup and perfume, or the tools to apply them.

Obviously, the reason I own hundreds (thousands?) of dollars’ worth in beauty products is that I want to approximate the mainstream physical ideal, or some beauty ideal.  But there is another, hidden allure to beauty products. That allure lies in the heady world of woman to woman bonding, a social phenomenon that often takes place in the context of beauty.

When we are little girls, we see our mothers taking part in beauty rituals.  Many women my age and older find the scent of cold cream soothing and nostalgic- our mothers used it to remove their makeup after a long day, or after a big event.  For me, the daughter of a woman who only wore makeup once a year, to my father’s company ball, makeup is a quasi-mystical substance.  An everyday housewife can be transformed into a glamourous femme fatale with a swipe of lipstick.

Eventually our mothers teach us to use makeup, cold cream, a razor- leading us into the secretive world of femininity that seems to bond all adult women.  Mothers, older sisters, fun aunts, grandmas, show us which products work and which don’t, how to use the best ones, how to save money while still looking like a fashion plate or a pin-up.

And thus begins the experience many, probably most, women normalize throughout our lives: bonding by talking about beauty products.

“Girl talk” is often product talk.  Two women go to the bathroom together.  While the first is in the stall, she asks the other what kinds of tampons work better than the brand she’s using.  While one is putting on lipstick, she complains about her brand and asks for recommendations.

Complaining and asking for advice are a trope of social interaction for women.  Complaining about one’s looks is a primary method of both conceding dominance and gaining sympathy.  To ask for advice places the advisor in a position to be dominant, and allows her to expound about a topic on which she’s been cast as an expert.  This concession can smooth over potentially awkward interactions- meeting your boyfriend’s ex for the first time?  Tell her you love her hair and ask where she gets it cut.

The treacherous and often subtextual social complexities women face are myriad, and often involve competition or perceived competition over men’s affection.  If a woman tells another woman she does not consider herself beautiful, it can be a way of proving she is not competing.  "Of course he is only interested in you–I’m no rival, as you can see," the subtext goes.  "Please, won’t you tell me how I can be beautiful like you so one day I can get a man interested in me?"

Advertising is pervasive.  It covers almost every surface one encounters, especially in urban spaces.  It also fills our minds, changing the way we think and feel about ourselves and the world around us.  Advertising does target both men and women, feeding on our insecurity and fear of rejection to reinforce gender roles by insisting that products can make us normal, healthy, clean, perfect.  When our very relationships with other human beings are filtered, augmented, colored by our knowledge of the products that define what it is to be beautiful, we become the best tools of the advertisers as well as their target.

That all sounds so negative, and yet I have at times felt closest to my female friends when we were bitching about bad mascara.  While I wish that we, as women, had some other near-universal experience to bond over rather than making ourselves feel pretty, it does make me happy whenever women set aside their differences and bond.