Britain's Prince William and his wife Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge. appear with their baby son outside the Lindo Wing of St Mary's Hospital, in central London July 23, 2013.ANDREW WINNING/Reuters
In a delivery room, next to the clamps and forceps, sat the tools of another trade: blush brushes, an eyeshadow palette, lipstick, concealer and mascara.
The image appeared this week in a risible New York Times trend piece that highlighted the lengths some mothers will go for pristine-looking baby announcement photos – the ones families slap up on Facebook and Instagram after a birth.
"A growing number of women ... are booking hairstylists and makeup artists to come to their hospital room for postpartum grooming, typically with the first photographs of mother and child in mind," the Times' Rachel Felder observed. The article profiled stylists who sit outside delivery rooms during labour and hop in, boar bristle hairbrushes in tow, after the baby arrives. One hospital staffer quoted even kept a list of nearby salons for her patients.
This is all "good for the psyche," one salon founder explained. The piece named Kate Middleton as partial inspiration for the trend after the Duchess of Cambridge sailed out of hospital following the birth of little George, wearing high wedges, her hair styled and the trademark eyeliner re-applied.
Post-birth glamour shots are ludicrous, clearly, but they're also disheartening for the sheer narcissism involved. Worse is that post-labour glamazon shots are almost certain to make other moms feel bad about themselves, this despite the ridiculous vanity of booking a blowout and makeover in a hospital room. It's all tacitly competitive, with women putting yet more unnecessary pressure on each other in the beauty game.
There's also something unseemly about turning your baby's birth into a photo shoot and yet another social media milestone.
"There's too much of a fixation on documenting everything – as if it didn't happen if you didn't Instagram it and have it validated by likes," said a 34-year-old friend of mine who gave birth to a son in May after 30 gruelling hours in labour. After that ordeal, she was mostly concerned about her baby being okay, not strategizing "how I could get my mug on Facebook."
She said something important would have been lost had a makeup artist been hovering around, concealer in hand: "The only people I wanted to see after were my husband and baby, not the staff of Aveda. It would have detracted from the intimacy and specialness of the time."
Over at Vocativ, Tracy Clark-Flory and Annemarie Dooling were so put off by the trend they asked women for their own photos post-labour, au naturel. They argued that the glamour shot goes against instinct, "literally [concealing] the raw beauty of giving birth."
Whether you look like a zombie or a Kardashian, at the end of the day people want to see your new scrunched up baby – not you.