Calling It Out | Makeup Shaming
Over the past two years, I’ve immersed myself into the world of makeup. It began with a quick trip to the MAC store at Union Station that ended with me purchasing $100 worth of products and leads up to my current state of watching YouTube videos and liking Instagram posts in search of new looks to try. All throughout this journey I’ve been met with a number of reactions from friends, family, and colleagues. I’m grateful for those who have encouraged my exploration of makeup as a means of expressing my femininity. However, I’m always bothered by the negative reactions as they seem to be grounded in shaming — verbal and nonverbal expressions of disapproval with the intent of attaching negative emotions and meanings to a behavior.
Makeup shaming is a fascinating beast, especially when we factor in race and ethnicity. I’ve found that many people will say “oh, you don’t need to wear makeup. You just need to focus on loving yourself.” Often times, cis-hetero men will state their preferences for a woman that doesn’t wear makeup as she is, by their standards, more “genuine”, “authentic”, and “natural” than women who wear makeup. There are also critiques that wearing makeup, as a women of color, is an act of internalized oppression, a manifestation of colonial mentalities that have engraved Eurocentric beauty standards and white femininity as ideal.
At one point in my life, I too shamed women that wore makeup. I believed that wearing makeup meant a woman didn’t love herself, that she wasn’t comfortable in her natural beauty, and that she was unable to free herself of internalized oppression and Eurocentric beauty standards. But as I got older and immersed myself into the writings of Black woman from the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean and as I talked to more Black women about their beauty regimes, practices, and philosophies, I had to start asking myself questions and interrogate my own socializations around expressions of femininity.
What does it mean to be a “genuine” or “authentic” woman (focusing in specifically on physical expressions of femininity)? Haven’t Black women always found ways to accentuate femininity? Haven’t Black women always had beauty customs and practices? Why are Black women so heavily critiqued (within and outside of our community) for the choices we make with regard to clothing, make-up, hair, etc.?
I also had to engage the complexity of my own understandings of my womanhood and femininity. My journey has been complex with just as many points of doubt as there have been points of self-reflection and healing. While much of it has been grounded in my desire to express my femininity without bounds or restrictions, I also have to navigate in a society that is often cold and cruel towards women that are the bottom of beauty hierarchies largely informed by white supremacy and all that it begets (colorism, racism, sizeism, etc.).
During the beginning stages of learning how to properly apply cosmetics, I wanted to learn how to use makeup to clearly showcase my femininity as a means to avoid harassment and unwanted questioning of my gender identity that had become so commonplace as I navigated the Washington D.C. metropolitan area as a six foot tall, plus sized, dark skinned Black woman of West African descent with an androgynous face. However, the more I was in front of mirrors, the more I learned about foundations and concealers and eyeshadows and lipsticks, the more I interacted with women to learn more about the products they used and the beauty bloggers they followed…the more I had to ask myself questions. Was I concealing “flaws” or was I accentuating the beauty that was already present? Was my beat a mask, an exploration of my feminine face, a reclamation of my own “terms and conditions of womanhood,” femininity, and beauty?
I’ve come to understand that all of these things can be true simultaneously, at varying levels. My choice to wear makeup now is less about avoiding questions around my gender identity and more about expressing my femininity as boldly and as proudly as possible.
I’ve always struggled with my self-esteem and have learned that self-love is an everyday practice, a never ending journey that has its ups and downs. I wear makeup when I’m feeling my best, my worst, and in-between. I wear makeup to compliment my outfits and I wear makeup to assist in navigating the world with as much ease as possible because misogynoir is real and I don’t know a single Black woman (especially Black women that look like me) that doesn’t have some sort of strategy to make life a bit easier. I also go about bare faced and shut shit down! Makeup for me, and I imagine for other Black women, is centered on accentuating and flaunting my facial features. It has always been centered on my wants and my needs. It has been centered on affirming myself and my femininity as a West African woman living in a Western nation that has little to no love for Black aesthetics — with exceptions being made for certain Black bodies or non-Black bodies appropriating Black aesthetic practices.
Bare faced or with a full face, I am constantly engaging in the practice of self-love and will no longer continue to allow makeup shaming to weigh me down.
In a world that places significance and value on the physical appearance of women, Black women in particular, are faced with so much — fetishization, hypersexualization, being stripped of our sexuality, colorism, sizeism, etc. There are literally no aesthetic choices that we can make that won’t be criticized. We are criticized for choosing to wear make-up and criticized for our bare faced beauty. We are criticized for our natural hair and for our weaves. We are criticized for the clothes we wear, the way we dance, the way we speak…but I am asking that we begin to disrupt this. I ask that we call out shaming in any form it presents itself and deeply interrogate why we feel the need to directly or indirectly criticize the aesthetic choices that Black women make.
We’ve known and cherished our beauty (internal and external) for centuries and with time, our perceptions and practices have evolved.
Black women should feel free to wear makeup and whatever else we choose without being questioned, criticized, and chastised. While it is important to engage in conversation around colonialism and the ways in which internalized oppression continues to impact the ways in which we define beauty, we also have to recognize the agency of Black women in finding ways to construct, embrace, and love our femininity in its various forms.
