Wearing Make-Up: An Ongoing Battle With Society
I don’t wear make-up. It’s not a personal rule, it’s just uncomfortable.
My days are more carefree when I’m not wearing make-up. No checking shiny surfaces to see if my mascara has run in the rain. Or swearing loudly when you wipe your mouth on a napkin after lunch and find half your lipstick smudged on the tissue. I worry too much to worry about make-up, too.
I was a teenager in the 00s and back then, make-up was a matter of good and evil. If you wore it, those who didn’t were plain and prudish. If you didn’t wear it, those who did were flamboyant and attention seeking. It was a toxic dynamic that led to petty arguments and division.
The moment I turned 13, I was deemed “old enough” for make-up. Cue the distant family members we only saw once a year making remarks such as: “You should try some make-up. It’ll make you look more…polished.”
Wave after wave of adults who barely knew me insisting that I put more effort into my imminent womanhood.
Birthdays and Christmas presents were suddenly packs of eye-shadow and lipsticks I would never use. How-to guides for make-up application and how to get boys to notice you, were dropped into my stockings at Christmas. My die-hard hobbies of reading fantasy novels and writing were ignored in favour of what was apparently more important: How I looked and who would choose me.
I resisted, turning to my books and terribly written stories for comfort, struggling with the questions:
Why wasn’t I enough as I was? Why did I have to conform to the beauty standards of people who didn’t know me?
As a result, I began to buy into the theory that women were divided by a rift that couldn’t be bridged. Women who wore make-up were just too different from the rest of us and there was nothing to be done about it but make snide comments at each other from afar.
During my teen years, I saw girls and women who wore make-up and thought them shallow and dim. They told me that I was jealous and that I’d never get a boyfriend looking the way I did. I believed them. I don’t know if they believed me, but years after the fact, I sincerely hope they didn’t.
It wasn’t until I walked into the girl’s bathroom at my first nightclub that I had a real epiphany. The only young woman not wearing make-up in an 100 yard radius, I did what an anxiety-plagued young thing tended to. I kept my head down and tried to make my way to the toilet without making eye contact with any of the young ladies touching up their lipstick in the mirror.
Only I didn’t make it. A girl who had just finished drying her hands grabbed my arm and said “oh my goodness, you’re so beautiful, are you even wearing make-up?”
What followed was a drunken exchange of compliments that I don’t remember the specifics of. All I remember was feeling validated to the point of tears that a perfect stranger had gone out of their way to tell me that I was pretty even without make-up.
While all I had wanted was for my family to love me for the person I was on the inside, this young lady had helped me believe that I was, and could be appreciated for how I looked on the outside, too.
From that point onwards, my view on make-up changed entirely. I didn’t start wearing it but I began looking harder at the people who did. I stopped judging by appearances and looked for common ground.
As social media began to develop, it became clear that there was a lot more to make-up than I had ever imagined. For some, it was a mask to hide insecurities that I used to believe make-up users never experienced. For others, it was a form of self-expression.
Sometimes, it was just art; something beautiful to share with the world.
Society puts a great deal of pressure on women to look beautiful by its ever-evolving standards. But women are creating their own definition of beauty and it includes everyone, not just women with flat tummies and a very specific skin colour. For all of its flaws, social media has been instrumental in healing a rift that should never have existed.
Now, we are able to know each other better at first glance, we can know that beauty is not just one thing — Not just a face with or without make-up, or a lifetime of kindness and generosity, but everything in us that stirs wonder in others.
