PSA: You have more to offer than your beauty. Also, I guarantee you slay without makeup.
This article reflects on why I stopped wearing makeup. Please understand that every woman has a different reason to wear makeup. I write this introduction not to be PC, but because it infuriates me when people first demean women for wearing makeup and then wearing too little. Amy Schumer tells it better.
Don’t let this article be a way to demean women by thinking this is additional proof that women wear makeup because they are insecure. Rather use this to understand your motives or better yet how you treat someone based on their beauty.
“What a strange illusion to suppose that beauty means goodness.” — Leo Tolstoy
I think I began wearing makeup because it felt similar to a right of passage. Between older women I knew and celebrities I admired, I associated makeup with maturity, as I think much of society does. It was exciting to step into that world, and even today I swear I am most artistic with liquid liner in my hand. Yet, after the initial excitement of playing with makeup, my purpose in applying it changed.
Around this time, I was also becoming a woman, which sounds cheesy and likely will make half of my readers cringe, as it will remind them of when their mothers cooed that sentiment at them as well, but I was, by all definitions, finally a woman. I suddenly had curves, and boys who wanted to date me, and I found very quickly that beauty is power.
I think I confounded this with confidence. I would dress up, take an hour to do my hair and makeup, and upon entering my school found that things just sort of went right for me. People complimented me, or stared, or sometimes, at least I imagined, went out of their way to be nice to me, like allowing me to cut them waiting in line. This was not confidence, because it depended largely on how others perceived how I looked, and if I were to be treated as less than a princess my self-worth would have crumbled.
There is a difference between having people look at you and look up to you, and in wearing makeup, in trying so very hard to look fabulous, I only received the former. This ostensible power of beauty was not satisfying, sustainable, or in anyway what a sixteen/seventeen year old should strive to attain. I began to place too much importance in how I looked, ignoring all the other wonderful qualities I possessed.
Upon entering college, I tried to continue seeking power through my looks. But on a college campus where literally no one knows you, whether you curled your hair or left it up matters to absolutely no one. I found that my real strength, my real power, was my intelligence.
I began attending class without makeup. It seemed odd that to believe that in order to match everyone in the class I needed to spend three hours on the reading and then make myself more presentable. I realized it was bullshit. I found myself walking into a classroom and thinking “I’ve had three hours of sleep, and I don’t have any makeup on, which is irrelevant because either way I am going to drop some knowledge in this discussion and be treated like an equal and I don’t want even the pretense that my ability to kill the game comes from my looks. It’s all in the brain, baby.”
This was so liberating. I did not need anyone to let me cut them in line or offer me free things to harness confidence. I started to draw that from late-night study sessions or encouraging remarks from professors. My blood, sweat, and tears to succeed at the school became far more impressive to me than my ability to contour my face.
I still wear makeup, once and awhile. But I consider my motives far before I apply the first drop. In high school, I did not wear makeup if I knew I was going to be surrounded by people who would love me anyways. Here, I want people to accept me and respect who I am, regardless of what my face and hair look like. Learning that I had so much more to offer than my looks makes me consider, even at 9:00 AM in the morning, what I wear and how I present myself.
I want how I look to say “this is just the beginning of who I am,” and for me that meant dropping the makeup. Perhaps I will get to a place where I can truly say I wear makeup for me, but until then we are never ever getting back together. Like ever.
Image credits: Rebecca Pachl, giphy.com