What Does Makeup Allow Us To Do

F rom the soot-rimmed eyes of the aboriginal Egyptians to the lead paint worn by the Elizabethans, women and girls accept experimented with cosmetics throughout history. Indeed, according to the Roman playwright Plautus, "a woman without paint is similar food without salt". Shakespeare's Hamlet was less cracking only just as rude, telling Ophelia: "I've heard all nearly you lot women and your cosmetics besides. God gives you one face, but you paint some other on top of it. You trip the light fantastic and prance and lisp; you call God's creations past pet names, and yous excuse your sexpot ploys past pleading ignorance."

So is makeup necessary seasoning, a conniving ploy by manipulative sexpots, or neither? Enquire a group of women why they vesture makeup and you'll receive myriad responses. Some volition say information technology makes them feel more confident, that they don't feel completely "done" without it; others will say they love experimenting with looks and colours as a style of expressing themselves, that there'south a fun, theatrical element to face pigment that allows them to channel different personalities and aesthetics.

"Later on twenty years working as a makeup creative person I can say quite confidently that women clothing makeup for themselves," Lisa Eldridge, the author of Face Paint: The Story of Makeup, tells me. "At that place are many unlike roles makeup can play in a woman's life. In that location's the playful and creative attribute – who doesn't enjoy swirling a brush in a palette of color? Then there's the conviction-edifice aspect – why not cover a huge carmine blemish on your nose, if you lot tin? Finally, there is an element of war paint and tribalism. Makeup tin can make y'all feel more powerful and ready to confront any situation."

But just as there are women and girls who wearable makeup completely for themselves, there are those who wear makeup for the perceived benefit of others, or who feel as though they are unacceptable without it. Makeup can be a mask you hide backside that gets you set up to face the world, or something you deploy as a weapon – to attract a partner, to intimidate, shock and amaze. Information technology is used as role of religious or cultural rituals, or to align yourself with a subculture. It can mask your insecurities or be used to enhance the bits you love the most.

Makeup is then ubiquitous in our gild that for a adult female to get without information technology has get, in some cases, a argument – the "no makeup selfie" being a case in point. Female person celebrities feature on the Daily Postal service'due south sidebar of shame beneath headlines such as "Jennifer Lopez, 46, dares to bare her naked face up". Boybands, meanwhile, cynically tap into the feet young women feel by claiming that they love you lot only as you are, a trend expertly satirised in the Amy Schumer sketch "Girl y'all don't need makeup".

Indian students in Amritsar — 'Some volition say there's a fun, theatrical element to face paint that allows them to channel dissimilar personalities and aesthetics.' Indian students dressed equally Punjabi giddha dancers apply each other's makeup in Amritsar. Photograph: Narinder Nanu/AFP/Getty Images

Perchance, then, the more useful question to ask is not "Why do women wear makeup?" simply "Why do women wear makeup when nigh men don't?" (especially when David Bowie's career bears testimony to the fact that the sight of a human in makeup can practice powerful things to a woman's nether regions).

For some feminists, the question can exist answered by simply muttering "patriarchy" and dusting off their hands before heading to the bar. Certainly, women receive messages from an early age that encourage usa to believe that one of our primary functions is to be decorative and therefore appealing to men. Go into any newsagent and you'll see little girls' magazines that come with gratis gifts of lipgloss and nail varnish. Parents buy their daughters strange, disembodied dolls' heads to practise on. The Disney princesses so many little girls model themselves on habiliment eyeliner, mascara and eyeshadow, and have perfectly plucked eyebrows. Because the extent to which makeup is viewed equally a process of adornment used for attracting a mate, to foist it upon girls so young is arguably more than than a lilliputian creepy.

Evolutionary psychologists accept it that, as with and then many things, makeup comes down to sex. Women tend to have darker eyes and lips than men, and makeup enhances those sex differences. Furthermore, the desirable qualities a human looks for in a woman – largely related to reproductive fettle – are said to be amplified past makeup. Beauty ideals vary from culture to civilization, but there are some universal markers of attractiveness. Facial symmetry and an even skin tone imply good health, while youthfulness denotes fertility. Plump lips and flushed cheeks, meanwhile, are signs of sexual arousal, then your cerise lipstick and pink blusher might but be giving that random man in the bar the subconscious signal that you're ready for a night of passion.

David Bowie 1973 — 'David Bowie'south career bears testimony to the fact that the sight of a man in makeup can practice powerful things to a woman's under regions.' Photograph: Ilpo Musto / Rex Features

Readers of women's magazines will exist familiar with the utilise of evolutionary psychology to flog cosmetics. I'll never forget reading an commodity that suggested I wearable cherry lipstick so my lips could mimic blood-flushed labia. And, if a vagina mouth isn't your matter, then you lot could always make the skin on your face up resemble a baby's in order to concenter men, a proffer repeated with alarming frequency in the pages of the glossies and capitalised upon by makeup brand Maybelline'south Baby Skin range.

Cosmetics companies often rely on women'south insecurities – inculcated through years of exposure to images of physical perfection in mainstream media – in lodge to sell products, operating on the basis of "maybe she's built-in with it, merely probably non, and so buy this concealer". Its office as a ways for covering up unwanted flaws or "unsightly" blemishes is hammered into u.s.a. over again and again. Many women spend hundreds of pounds each year on cosmetics, and as many minutes worrying near the way we look. In The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf makes a persuasive case that the beauty manufacture exists to control a generation of women in the process of emancipation. Keep us broken-hearted, proceed the states hungry, keep the states ever vigilant in our quest for concrete perfection, the statement goes, and you keep us downwards.

As such, the message that your natural beauty is never plenty is socialised into usa very young. I first started to wear makeup equally a young teenager because I believed the freckles dusted beyond my cheeks were ugly. My female parent, a redhead who before leaving the house will say "Hold on, I only demand to put my eyelashes on", never encouraged me to wear makeup until – concerned about the fade-out cream I was using in an endeavour to bleach out my freckles – she thankfully steered me in the direction of foundation (and then spent the next x years pointing out the slightly orange tidemarks that would wash up around my mentum). At the time, roofing up my freckles made me feel improve about myself, more than attractive, more in keeping with the "blazon" of daughter I believed boys went for. It wasn't until I gained confidence, and started seeing more varied portrayals in the mainstream media, including girls with freckles, that I began to wonder if they were really and then hideous after all.

When the vision of beauty you are presented with is largely homogeneous, it's but natural that you might resort to makeup as an endeavor to "alloy in" or to "pass". But, as oft with trappings of femininity, you're stuck between a rock and a hard identify. Studies repeatedly tell u.s.a. that men are more attracted to women who wear makeup. We're encouraged to aspire to a kind of unnatural natural beauty, as captured by the immortal words of Calvin Klein, who said, helpfully: "The all-time thing is to await natural, simply information technology takes makeup to look natural." (Thanks, Calvin.)

Of course, as the aforementioned Plautus was no dubiety unaware, too much salt – a likely characteristic of life in aboriginal Rome due to the absence of refrigeration – can be a bad matter. A study concluding twelvemonth at Bangor and Aberdeen universities plant that both men and women thought women with some – but not besides much – makeup were most attractive. According to the study's abstract, "these findings suggest that bewitchery perceptions with cosmetics are a course of pluralistic ignorance, whereby women tailor their cosmetics preferences to an inaccurate perception of others' preferences." The Atlantic, which reported the findings, was quick to bespeak out that "the judging took place in Bangor, a tiny village in Wales, where beauty standards are probably different than they are in Beijing or Berlin or Billy Rouge". (If they were suggesting that those standards might be lower, well, those of us who have frequented the ladies' toilets of the Bangor Wetherspoon'southward and seen a makeup session in progress would humbly beg to differ).

Perhaps, and so, when it comes to makeup, nosotros are our own worst enemies, believing that the world wants to meet us in a certain way when in bodily fact nosotros're fine the fashion we are. Why practise women wear makeup? You could say it'south a pinch of patriarchy, a dusting of sex, a smattering of fun, and a whole, caked-on layer of misplaced insecurity.