an epiphany about star trek hair and makeup

[cimorene]

TOS having Christine Chapel's hair be blue-tinted or silver-tinted white and Janice Rand's woven wig are both silly to modern eyes but potentially believable trends for future fashion. But more importantly, they tell us that Starfleet regulations don't disallow hair dye, even colors not found in nature, or elaborate hair styles (wigs?).

And in light of that, all the Star Treks since then have been falling down on the job.

Sure, the modern day military and the modern day business casual world in North America don't permit these things, which probably renders them shocking to the eye (and that was no doubt part of the intent with TOS). But norms for hair, dress, and makeup are still changing, and have certainly relaxed quite a bit in the past few centuries; and the hairstyles you see in comparable situations in other parts of the world are already much more diverse.

It's not possible that Chapel's hair color is natural, since we see her with a more traditional pale blonde as well. So it's canon that this is permitted in Starfleet. And I think it's a logical corollary that facial hair and long hair for men wouldn't be disallowed either; they're illogical and frankly bizarre prohibitions in the first place, that don't even prevail for the business world worldwide in the present day (and violate the requirements of some major religions as well).

Other corollary: makeup. Women in Star Trek are usually wearing makeup, and while we've mostly only seen work-appropriate looks that just so happened to have followed the fashions of the 1980s-2000s, they haven't all been minimal no-makeup-makeup looks. There were some pretty smoky eyes in TNG and DS9 and some beautiful eyeliner and colorful eyeshadow in TOS, not least on Spock.

We should, therefore, have been seeing a wider range of makeup since. Everyone isn't normcore. There's always that one person in every workplace who clings to the makeup styles and particularly the eyebrow fashions of a couple of decades before, and there's usually at least one person whose hobby is makeup and whom I end up in the habit of regularly complimenting on their eyemakeup. So we should see the occasional crewmember with weird makeup looks that are trendy in the future, like eyeliner in unaccustomed shapes.

And the likelihood is that the technology to color hair is going to improve and become cheaper by the 23rd century, esp. given the other tech they seem to have.

IN CONCLUSION: Star Treks have not featured, but should have been showing us, a wider range of hair and makeup styles including:

• beards and other facial hair


• longer hair on masculine-presenting individuals (human ones, not just Worf)


• dyed hair, including colors not found in nature - possibly only a subset of these to avoid being bright enough to clash with uniforms or something, though?


• more haircuts and styles along the lines of Janice Rand and Discovery's Joann Owosekun


• occasionally more edgy or weird makeup looks


• some hijabs

Comments

[naraht]

beards and other facial hair

Love the post but... later seasons Riker, surely? Not to mention Mirror Spock's goatee!

[cimorene]

Yeah, but the proportion of beards in Starfleet doesn't approach a realistic proportion IRL, IMO. Riker is pretty much the only regular castmember example.

[naraht]

Not currently - or by Victorian standards! But I do think beards are having a bit of a Moment now, so perhaps they're going through an out of fashion period in the Trek universe? I agree it would be nice to see more, though, just saying they're not entirely unrepresented.

[ironymaiden]

What about tattoos? I understand that there might be Reasons around restricting piercings and other body mod, but in my work world visible tattoos have become pretty common, yet we never see them, even on folks who don't work for the Federation.

[cimorene]

That's a good point!

Tattoos would be a matter of the makeup department most of the time, unless they just cast a tattooed actor.

[twistedchick]

Some of the hair color -- and skin color -- in TOS comes from the fact that Desilu Studios had no idea what they were doing half the time with the makeup -- because nobody had had this kind of television show before, They had to invent how much green tint to put on Spock's skin. They had to figure out how to do all of it. Those 'velour' uniforms? They're terrycloth towels, because toweling lasts well through washing after washing. Read up sometime on how the boots on the officers were lined with cardboard to hold them together.

[cimorene]

Sure, and all that is interesting and fun - but they don't affect the in-verse argument!

[twistedchick]

Yes, it does -- the makeup people were not talking to the lighting people or the ones developing the film -- because film was used here -- so the film people kept overcorrecting to get the colors back to something approaching 'normal. So, first season at least, most of the hair and skin colors could be considered accidental at best. They provide context to the comments concerning TOS.

[cimorene]

Oh, yeah, I get what you're saying, and I'm not surprised at all. But what I meant was, the intentionality and reasons - Doylist explanations, that is - for how a story came to be the way it is are interesting in their own right, but still ultimately separate from whatever is presented in the finished work. Death of the author and all that. Regardless of why a discrepancy or contradiction appears in canon, making fanfiction, or more of the canon such as sequels, is bound to explain it in verse: without breaking the fourth wall.

In fanfiction, that might be a spackle fic that introduces some complicated sequence of events; or it might claim that Watson's wife had multiple names in Sherlock Holmes because he lied carelessly in his memoirs, or that eps of TNG repeatedly state that nobody in the Federation has encountered a similar situation even though it's exactly like something that happened on TOS because Kirk's logs were heavily redacted for security reasons.

[stranger]

One jarring makeup moment happened in movie #3, where green-blooded T'Pau wore bright red lipstick. (I'll bet the other Vulcan women on screen did as well, but they didn't have closeups.) Wouldn't Vulcans accentuate with green or related colors? Weird, and I can't figure an in-'verse reason for it.

[cimorene]

Oh, I know right? Tragic but sadly typical for the level of attention to costume and makeup design on Trek!