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Lebanese presenter and entrepreneur Joelle Mardinian on why our relationship with beauty needs to evolve

Joelle, who has openly spoken of normalising getting cosmetic procedures, talks about the line between empowerment and blindly following trends

Joelle Mardinian has had enough — of political correctness, the TikTok trends on beauty and everything that requires a public figure to wear a mask when they speak to the world outside. That Joelle, the well-known presenter who fronted The Joelle Show for 14 years on MBC while establishing herself as a leading beauty entrepreneur in the region, isn’t wearing one is evident as we sit down for a chat with her on a particularly busy and buzzy day last week at Beautyworld. “Imagine a woman, very captivating and alluring, entering this room and telling her assistant to get her things while being very rude to them. Will you find any beauty in such a person?”

It’s a question that begs some deliberation. Because in the digital era, our ideas of beauty and perfection are rooted in what we see on social media. So ingrained is our idea of flawlessness that we don’t ask ourselves deeper questions about what makes a person truly beautiful. But Joelle is different. As someone who has been giving makeovers to other women, she understands why the need to feel beautiful can simply not be tied down to vanity. “What I really was doing was transforming women to empower them. It was not as though I was putting makeup on a model to make her look beautiful for a photo. I was working with real women, women who were broken,” says Joelle who did makeovers for over 400 contestants.

“All of them had different issues. Some would come up to me and say, ‘Joelle, if you do not work on my looks, my husband will marry someone else,” “If you do not alter my appearance, I will not be able to drop my children to the school gates.”

And then there was that time when a group of girls from a football team brought their football coach for an audition for Joelle’s show. “I think I worked on building people’s self-esteem. I don’t think people ever looked at me and thought, ‘Oh, she is beautiful but should just shut up’. But yes, I remember there being a presenter who once remarked, ‘Her show is all about vanity’ because she never wore makeup.”

WHY BEAUTY BRINGS JOY

Joelle’s encounters with hundreds of contestants meant not just understanding the skin or personality type, but empathising with a woman’s fears — of looking good enough to remain attractive for her husband, for her children. Even as we age and the fine lines and wrinkles speak of the journey we have had through life, ageing becomes difficult for women not just biologically, but also socially. And it is to the credit of women like Joelle who have fearlessly spoken their mind about cosmetic corrections and our collective attitudes towards beauty that we now have healthy debates around how we can look our best at every age and stage of life. But her own journey did not quite start off on this note.

Growing up in London, Joelle, who hails from Lebanon had studied hospitality following in the footsteps of an uncle she greatly admired who helmed some notable properties. But when her grandmother passed away, it hit her that life was too short to not follow one’s heart. It helped that her mother was a makeup artist and Joelle went on to study makeup to be able to have a full-time career “enjoying every minute, every hour”.

“I realised it as I progressed in my career that when you truly love what you do, you don’t mind working longer hours, you don’t mind missing holidays with your family. I sometimes worked 19 hours a day, but boy was I happy!” says Joelle, adding that when she started working for a local channel here she had to negotiate hard to receive what was paid to her back in the UK. “I took neither my success nor money for granted. I focused on earning money first and rewarding myself later. In fact, I bought my first designer bag from Chanel after I had started my business. I bought one for myself and one for my mother. I have always believed that we don’t need to show a life that doesn’t really belong to us. We cannot pretend to live inside a private jet when we don’t.”

NO JUDGEMENTS, PLEASE

Joelle has also been strongly advocating how our attitudes need to be more liberal towards the choices people make. “If you have a pretty face and good hair, don’t assume others will have it too. We don’t know what happened in their childhood. What if they were picked on because of their hair, acne scars or dark circles? Don’t tell me if someone is not happy with their weight, they are going to walk around feeling confident. My job has largely been to fix people from the outside so they can feel happy inside,” says Joelle. But it is when external fixing goes a little over the top that even Joelle, who has openly spoken of normalising getting cosmetic procedures, draws a line. “I am not about the trends. For example, I don’t see the point of the cat eye trend which lifts your eyebrow. It makes you look like characters from Star Trek. Also, why would anyone want butterfly lips?” she asks. “My businesses are based on the simple principle of making someone look as good as they can. If someone is not bothered by the dark circles they have, I am not going to push them to correct it. Why add one more thing for a person to worry about?”

While that may be a well-thought-out strategy, there continues to be a strange silence on the part of a number of celebrities who continue to be discreet about cosmetic corrections. To each his own, one may argue, but the problem is when a celebrity posts a flawless picture of themselves without telling the younger (and hence more vulnerable) audience that there has been an intervention, they unconsciously end up creating a beauty standard to live up to. “They feel if they reveal they have got a procedure done people will consider them less beautiful. There has always been pressure on women to look a certain way. But when I was younger, I’d say, that pressure was greater because we didn’t have access to Photoshop. Every single cover was heavily edited and supermodels seemed to be women who came from other planets,” she laughs. “Today, it is a fair world because the procedure that the celebrities are undergoing are also accessible to you. Today, who doesn’t have ring lights at home? Who doesn’t have a phone that has a great camera?”

THE BUSINESS OF ‘INFLUENCING’

One look at the world of influencers and you get Joelle’s point. But then when it comes to the business of ‘influencing’, she has a hard stand. “In the beginning, I was against influencer culture and brands connecting with them. I worked in television for the longest time and have a sense of what brands I can or cannot collaborate with. For example, once a soap brand came to me and asked me if I could lather myself in front of a camera. I was like, ‘you are ridiculous’. Now that’s a sort of discretion an influencer may or may not practice. They tend to say yes to most things. A reason why when the brand representatives come to us to endorse something, they don’t understand how differently people like us work. If you ask me to promote a brand of coffee, I will say it is delicious. But if you want me to say this coffee is full of vitamins, that’s where I will draw my lines. I have to consider what is good for my fans,” says Joelle.

While that may be the case, she is aware of the power of the tool that is social media. “It has helped my business grow,” says Joelle who has 21.8 million followers on Instagram alone. “I am forever thinking about what to create next. My husband often says, enough of the phone. I tell him, ‘One day, this is going to pay our bills.’ It’s so true. Today, I am using my platform to advertise all my work.”

Understanding the power of her voice on social media has been just as important. A trenchant critic of the ongoing war in Gaza, Joelle has been posting about the human rights crisis. “But ever since I started doing so, my following has begun to increase at a much slower pace. I get it. But I am headstrong. There are children dying in Gaza. Those could be mine.”

It is this ability to fearlessly speak her mind that makes Joelle Mardinian an important voice of our time — on social media as well as off it.

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