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The fieldnotes I have chosen to reflect on come from fieldwork I carried out in Lisbon, Portugal between 2020-2022. The purpose of this fieldwork was to investigate “beauty work” and anti-aging practices during the COVID-19 pandemic among white middle-class women from 40 to 70 years old. The global sanitary emergency confronts us with what Ulrich Beck has called “metamorphosis of the world” (2017, 5): a radical life change that forces us to completely reconfigure our everyday routines at every level, including our beauty habits and even our modes of bodily self-perception. The transformation of everyday activities brought about by COVID-19 has altered experiences, perceptions, and understandings of the gendered body. The pandemic curtailed the possibility of going freely to the spa or to the hairdresser, to the gym, or to the beauty parlor . Many of the locations, which represent and shape the “beauty work” of the gendered body (Biggeri 2020; Manley 2020; Nussbaum 2011) were temporarily closed, while other self-care practices have become more central. My fieldwork was supported by the project EXCEL (The Pursuit of Excellence: Biotechnologies, Enhancement and Body Capital in Portugal),1 which focuses on the relationship between the 2008 financial crisis in Portugal and the increasing investment in aesthetic practices during and after the years of the recession |
