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Cover image via @witneycarson.
The following was written by Alice Gregory for Allure Magazine. It is an excerpt of an article called, “Why So Many of Your Favorite Beauty Personalities are Mormon“. While we don’t necessarily agree with all of her conclusions about what church culture implies about our doctrine, it is still interesting to read an outside perspective and see the ways members of the church are recognized and perceived by those not of our faith.
Any insomniac who has tried to convince herself that “just a few minutes” on Instagram will beckon back sleep has landed, circa 3 a.m., on the feed of a Mormon lifestyle blogger. Although she probably has no idea that’s where she is. The blogger’s faith is never foregrounded. It’s obvious, though — once you know what to look for. She’s white and under 30 and married. Fit and given to flattering dresses that hit the knee and cover the shoulder, she has multiple children and Lady Godiva hair. She knows her way around a braid. She is wholesome but not dowdy; her posts are relentlessly positive but never pious. Until you Google her name and see that she was married at the Salt Lake Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), you might not know that she routinely asks herself, while shopping or applying eye shadow, Would I feel comfortable with my appearance if I were in the Lord’s presence?
Amber Fillerup Clark, aka the Barefoot Blonde, is 27 years old and lives in Arizona with her husband, their two young children, and a golden retriever. They all appear on her blog, alongside pictures of Fillerup Clark herself, who is breathtakingly pretty. She offers up beauty and fitness tips and bubbly accounts of her balmy days, as well as a line of clip-in hair extensions, which are for sale on her site for roughly $200 and given names that sound like nail polish shades (“Melt My Heart,” “Platinum Status”).
Like most Mormon girls, Fillerup Clark was encouraged to keep journals and scrapbooks growing up, and she thinks this early education in archiving one’s own life is what leads so many Mormon women to take up lifestyle blogging.
To read the full article in Allure, click here.
Jenny VisentinJuly 1, 2019
https://missionary.lds.org/clothing/sister/grooming/demo/skin?lang=eng This is where is talks about concealer.
Michelle BentleyOctober 18, 2017
This article was inaccurate on many levels. It was also a mockery of the church as a whole. It was about pride, looks, wealth, materialism, vanity and other things we see in the Great and Spacious Building. Oh yeah - can you please tell me where I can find - on the church website - how to apply my concealer? I can't seem to locate it anywhere.