SELF
You Couldn’t Make it Up
My conflicted relationship with my barenaked face
This insightful post got me thinking about my feelings about my face. As a kid I never thought about it, as a teen I hated it, as an adult I accept it. Kinda. One thing I haven’t really done (yet), though, is attempt to change it.
In 2016, my favourite aunt called me from her deathbed to tell me to buy some mascara. “It doesn’t all have to be so serious,” she said, before hanging up. I never got the chance to speak to her again.
As a self-declared 'unfeminine' woman herself, always more comfortable in hiking boots and waterproofs than high heels and fancy clothes, this struck me as odd. I think what she was trying to tell me though was to enjoy the frivolous things in life — not something I have always been very good at.
My mum, however, was big on frivolity, especially make-up. I remember sitting on her bed, watching her get ready for a night out, her ‘vanity case’ — a bag the size of a small suitcase — spewing various creams and powders onto the duvet. She would spend at least two hours getting ready to leave. The result? Beautiful, of course. But I thought she was beautiful anyway — the make-up just made her look different, not better or worse.
She thought otherwise though. And she assumed I would feel the same when I hit puberty and got the odd pimple here and there, which she urged me to cover up with concealer. Whether she thought it would make me feel better about myself, as her make-up made her feel better about herself, or whether she just didn’t like looking at my pimply teenage face, I have no idea.
All I do know is that it made me feel like my face was suddenly unacceptable as it was.
I wasn’t alone. A close friend of mine lamented the shape of her nose and finally had plastic surgery to alter it when we were eighteen; another was so ashamed of her acne that she plastered foundation all over her face day in, day out through seven years of secondary school. Between them, they must have spent thousands of pounds and countless hours feeling bad about their faces. As for me, I just hid behind my hair and hoped no one was looking at me.
I did experiment a bit, spent a couple of years wearing too much eyeliner and dark lipstick to go with the air of tortured angst I was cultivating, but it didn’t last long. I put more effort into scorning my mum for the time and money she spent on beauty products even when she didn’t even go out much anymore and confronting her with my newly discovered feminism courtesy of Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth.
Once I left home for university, there didn’t seem much point spending valuable time on my face when I could be sleeping, studying or lounging in the TV room watching Smallville, and my fellow students all knew what I looked like hungover anyway. I read more feminist theory and came to the conclusion that make-up was decidedly unfeminist, and I wanted nothing to do with it.
Since then, I haven’t really bothered much with my face. But I have changed my perception of the feminist implications of a made-up one. The tribe sharing their #nomakeup selfies are usually cis, white, thin, young, and without disabilities: their barenaked faces are a humble brag.
I too recognise that I was guilty of taking pride in the fact that my smooth-complexioned, high-cheekboned, heavy-lidded visage had the look other women use make-up to achieve. I got used to hearing “But you don’t need make-up”, and it made me feel good. I mistook my privilege for moral and intellectual (not to mention aesthetic) superiority.
Truth is though, no one needs it. Lots of people of all genders enjoy it. And lots more people feel better with it, for a variety of reasons. And all of that is fine.
I’m now almost 36 and the signs of age are starting to creep in — dark circles, some fine lines, a bit of postpartum discolouration — and I can kind of see where my mother was coming from. I also get why she, as a middle-aged woman with a disability that kept her more or less housebound, wanted to feel good about herself in one way that was easily accessible to her, when not many others were.
One day soon, I expect I will become one of those people who feel better with a bit of make-up to hide the effects of another night of broken sleep. Only now, the trouble is, in believing I was flying the feminist flag, I never learnt how to do make-up properly. I have no idea where to start.
For now, I can procrastinate and just accept my slightly wrinkly, tired-looking face and avoid looking in the mirror. It’s not as if I’m a model, relying on my looks for money. In fact, at the moment I’m not even working. My only job is keeping a baby alive, and he doesn’t care how old or tired I look as long as I feed him and keep him clean.
Still, I am afraid that one day, when he’s grown up and doing his own thing and barely remembers what I look like, and I have to face the world again, the world might not like my face. Or worse, I might not like my face enough to take my place in it confidently.
Because if you’re not lucky enough to have the privilege of looking right by other people’s standards without make-up, you’re up against a whole beauty industry’s worth of patriarchy, to say nothing of the centuries of history and culture telling women our worth is in our appearance and youth.
What I really hope is that, before then, I will stop caring. Because I’m the last person who thinks middle-aged women should become invisible if they don’t make an effort to look younger. Some of my most fulfilling friendships have been with older women, and I don’t like them for their looks. I believe my partner will love me no matter how I look, and so will any of my friends who are worth their salt.
Employers though might be another story. It’s no secret that older women are victimized in the workforce. And what about doctors, dentists, bureaucrats, police— anyone else we encounter who holds some power over us? I don’t need to go into the myriad ways in which not looking ‘right’ can leave us open to discrimination. It’s a fine line to tread though. Too much make-up and no one takes us seriously. We literally cannot win.
So who knows, maybe my mum was right to coat her face in expensive creams every day. Perhaps I should follow her example and my aunt’s advice, invest in some mascara and check out some YouTube tutorials. Or maybe I should reread The Beauty Myth and embrace my middle age barenaked, come what may.
