21 Pieces of Beyoncé Gossip You Can Only Learn Backstage

1. Bey's eight female and two male back up dancers all do their own hair and makeup — next to Blue Ivy. They're allowed to experiment with their looks and don't have to get them approved. "Although, Beyoncé will tell us if she liked our hair better in one show, so we'll do it that way the next time," one told me. They also revealed that Blue Ivy does makeup with them. "She'll come into our dressing room and do makeup with us," the dancer said. To keep their makeup from running while they dance and sweat, the dancers use setting sprays from companies like Mac and NYX Cosmetics, "That way we don't have to touch up too much during the show."

2. Speaking of dancing, Blue Ivy can already dance. "She is really advanced for not even being 2," her dancer said. "She even knows how to twerk!" 

3. Beyoncé "watches the show on film every night." One dancer explained, "There was this one night in South America — it was an open stage and it was raining and a few of us slipped. She watched in on repeat, laughing hysterically. She didn't yell at us or anything though — the whole stage was a puddle."

4. Beyoncé has two stylists that assit her with costume changes her throughout her performances. The dancers have to share an additional two dressers. 

5. Beyoncé's tailors alter outfits after they receive them from the designers. One tailor told me, "They come in as couture and we have to make them into more of a costume, since hidden zippers and buttons don't really fly when it comes to quick changes." She wears Dsquared2 as her opening outfit, Givenchy, David Komo, and a bunch of other designers during her show. 

6. To keep the crazy costumes from moving around on both Beyoncé and the dancers, the tailors — who previously worked on Madonna's tour — use TopStick tape (a toupee tape) to keep the outfits in place and prevent nip (or worse) slips. Her back-up dancers have seven outfit changes and Beyoncé herself has seven or eight depending on the set that night.

7. The dancers have like 1000 choreographers. OK not that many, but one dancer said the "Run The World" routine had 20 choreographers.

8. Dance routines can change hours before a show. Dancers said they rehearse "until it's perfect," but, "Beyoncé always is wanting to be better and more innovative" so routines constantly change, sometimes just hours before a show. Some things like stage size — which affects how many dancers can do each routine — have to be sorted out last-minute.

 

 9. Beyoncé sometimes adds impromptu moves to the choreography — and her back up dancers just have to go with it. "We just have to stay on our toes," one told me. "We just make sure we're always watching her and each other."

10. When it comes to hair removal, "We have to deal with the local spas wherever we are," one dancer said. (Their leotards aren't exactly conservative.)

11. Each shoe is repainted after every performance to make sure it looks new for each concert. B and her dancers wear Stuart Weitzman lace-up booties during the show — among other designer shoes, like Christian Louboutin, that Beyoncé breaks it down in.

12. The dancers — who all have flawless figures — don't work out. "We get a lot of our activity onstage, so we're already pretty active."

13. The dancers had no idea Beyoncé was about to drop her latest the album. One said, "We were filming music videos with her and we knew she had new songs in the works, but we didn't know it was going to be dropped like that — we learned about everything on Instagram just like everyone else did!"

14. Dancers have to audition many times before landing a spot. The audition process was different for every dancer, but one girl told me she had three auditions, then tried out in person in New York, and then she was hired for the Superbowl, and has been dancing with her ever since.

15. The dancers felt intimidated by Beyoncé when they first met. "It's Beyoncé," one said. "She is someone we look up to and want to model our lives after."

The dancers wrapping presents backstage for kids at the Bronx Neighborhood Shelter.

16. Beyoncé's three backup singers, who Bey calls "the Mamas," have been singing with her for ten, eight, and seven years respectively. They say "she keeps going, and going, and going," and (like all of us) wonder if Beyoncé runs on batteries.

17. The Mamas spend an hour and a half getting ready for each show and do their own makeup and hair. "People assume that there is a makeup artist or hairstylist for every show, but we do all of our makeup and hair ourselves," one said. "We had a pro come in and give us tutorials on how to do both."

18. A member of Beyoncé's all-female band won her spot after a BATTLE in the Sony studio. Beyoncé's private American Idol.

19. Her dancers spray new fragrance Beyoncé Rise (coming out in February 2014) — a blend of orchid, freesia blossom, jasmine, musk — in their dressing room every time they enter it.

20. The dancers relieve stress by "drinking a lot of wine." 

21. The entire team loves their fabulous Beyoncé-filled lives. When asked what it's like to live life behind Queen B, the dancers said, "Amazing! No complaints." They added, "The real Beyoncé is really humble and down to earth — a real country girl. She's sweet"

There, now you're beyond educated on all things Beyoncé.

Photo Credit: Getty Images

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Gossip: The Good, The Bad, and Why You Should Consider Giving It Up

Women like to talk.

We like to talk about shows, shoes, and celebrities. With our mothers, significant others and to one another. And, if we're being honest, about each other.

I read a statistic from a couple of years ago that the normal woman spends five hours a day gossiping. Five hours. That's 300 minutes, or approximately one-third of the average woman's time that she's awake during the day. And that's about 76 days a year.

For the past three and a half years, I spent, on average, about ten hours a day gossiping. But not about my peers' boyfriends, clothes, or Facebook profiles. I was a professional gossip columnist. A paid keeper of secrets who revealed them by a daily deadline.

Because of this, in my free time, I wanted little to do with actual gossip. I didn't care about who Sally So-and-So from high school was now shacking up with, even if it was her boss, because I had just spent all day trying to track down whether Celebrity A was dating Celebrity B (also something, honestly, I didn't care that much about. I fell into gossip reporting because, while at 15 I may have wanted to be Martha Gellhorn, at 24 I just wanted a byline. And a paycheck.)

I also didn't want to spend my two free hours of the week over dinner hearing about what my friends' thoughts were on our pals Jack and Jill's dysfunctional relationship, and how stupid Jill was, because I had to write enough about messed-up celebrity romances on a daily basis. Let them all call Dr. Drew if they needed some analysis. I just wanted another martini.

What I took from this, though, wasn't that I sat on a horse higher than all my peers because I didn't want to join in a good old fashioned gossip fest. I am far from a saint (just ask the bevy of Hollywood A-listers who probably have taken a hit out on me for airing their dirty laundry to the nation).

Gossip can be good, when innocent. It can be bonding and create a connection between two people that may not have existed otherwise. I have seen friendships formed based on little more than women discovering they both hated the same outfit on someone, detest their own thighs, or that story that starts out: "...this is so embarrassing, but..."

Women revel in putting trust in their girlfriends, or even their girlfriends' girlfriends, and if they can't bitch to their pals about their boyfriend/boss/mother-in-law, who else are they going to turn to? Women gossip because they're bored. They gossip because they are honestly curious and are looking for further information. But it isn't always so innocent.

Gossip can also be malicious. It can be the destroyer of careers, the deceitful assassin of reputations. It has a snowball effect where even the person who created it often is unable to rein it back in. Do I need to remind anyone of how Lindsay Lohan, as Cady Heron, almost got Tina-Fey-as-Ms.Norbury fired in Mean Girls? The words drug pusher will never be the same. Samantha Jones had to make her own sex video in SATC to counter-act salon gossip that her boyfriend was gay.

One water cooler rumor gone wrong, and years of hard work can go down a rabbit hole never to return, with little explanation why. And that's the sad part. Since women are more prone to gossip than men, we're often the ones doing it to each other.

Women often gossip out of envy, hurt, confusion, and feelings they believe to be hatred. They gossip to block each other's shine.

"Did you hear about the girl who is now dating your ex-boyfriend?" a friend of mine asked me recently, excited for the conversation that would ensue, looking to latch on to my self-proclaimed viscous streak.

"No, and I don't want to," I lied, trying to convince her and myself that I had no interest in gossiping about the unfamiliar woman.

Try it next time. And, hopefully, pretty soon it will be the truth.

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Why Some Gossip Isn’t A Bad Thing

If you’re like us, you’re practically the first to know when a celeb gets divorced, knocked up or is caught stepping out on his or her longtime boo. And you know what? According to a new study, it may be okay, because gossip makes us better people—seriously.  

A team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley found that socially discussing the “bad” things other people do actually makes us less likely to do questionable things ourselves.  

The researchers conducted a series of experiments to test the effects of “social gossip” on various participants. During one experiment, participants played in an economic raffle, and a select few were allowed to share “gossip notes” about those who weren’t being generous with their fake cash. Researchers found that the threat of earning that negative rep amongst other participants kept most players from being stingy.  

In another experiment, when participants witnessed another person cheating during a game, most jumped at the chance to share a similar gossip note to warn other players. And after passing that, uh, info along, those participants actually experienced calmer heart rates—as if they felt a sense of relief in sharing what they knew.  

So basically, that can mean two things: One, the threat of people talking badly about us may keep us from doing crappy things, at least for the most part. Secondly, we may actually feel better after gossiping about someone else’s sketchy behavior—maybe because passing off a warning to others gives us a sense that we saved them from harm.  

What do you think about this study? Does gossip make you feel better about yourself?

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