In my lifetime I would hear my brother and my male friends making jokes when they would start dating; they ranged from fart jokes to sexist jokes. One of the more prominent ones I would hear is the “take her swimming on the first date.” It wasn’t until I started wearing makeup that I knew that it was a guy’s way of revealing what a woman looks like without makeup–because a woman just naturally wakes up with contoured cheekbones and smokey eyes.
Then a little while ago I heard about this new app called MakeApp. This app allows the user to input a picture and put filters on it. The one that caught my attention would be the one that actually removes the makeup from a woman’s face.
Out of curiosity, I decided to give the app a try:
It seems like the app didn’t really like my glasses all that much. The next image is one I took on a lazy day where I am not wearing any makeup whatsoever (please excuse my mediocre selfie skills).
The app clearly isn’t that effective. From what I can tell, it lightens up a person’s skin and adds blotches to their face while making them look a bit blurry. A quick google search will show that the same look is applied to any image you input.
Slate, an online publication that follows pop culture and politics, did an article on the app. They took the app’s creator Ashot Gabrelyanov (because of course, it was a white cis male that comes up with it) and ran him through the app multiple times. In the end, he looked like a corpse from Criminal Minds or Law & Order.
Gabrelyanov’s reason for creating the app was that it was all for entertainment. That would be fine if that were true. What I see happening is some guy is talking to a girl on Tinder and he takes her picture and runs it through the app. That’s what Gabrelyanov’s intention truly was.
The app only has two filters, add make-up and remove makeup. Both are demeaning, to be able to add makeup to someone is basically saying, “Well, if you wore makeup this is what you could look like.” The other part is how people say that makeup is someone’s way of lying about what they look like. *insert dramatic eye roll here*
“I feel like guys just think girls are lizard people who wear makeup to disguise themselves,” Emily Crane said when I told her about the app.
Here’s the thing about makeup, it’s become a major part of our society and is marketed to woman with slogans that say “here’s a problem with your face, we can fix it for you!” Society likes to do that, make women think that there’s something wrong with them and that they need to be fixed. Now that doesn’t mean I hate makeup, in fact, I generally like wearing it, but being told that something is wrong with you is where I have the problem.
I wear makeup to give myself confidence, it makes me feel better about myself when I’m having a crazy day. It’s even treated like a form of art by many people. Wearing it is not a deception, no human being is born looking perfect, no matter what the media says.