Questions about their thyroid health from strangers
Olga Khazan in The Atlantic on how much money women have to squander on having a socially acceptable face. (Talk about cisnormative…)
The cosmetics industry makes $60 billion each year. The personal-finance site Mint claims the average woman will spend $15,000 on the stuff in her lifetime. It also costs time. My weekday morning makeup routine takes 10 minutes. That’s roughly an hour per week, or two full days per year. Last year, the Today show pegged this number even higher, at two weeks per year per woman.
Lucky me! That’s ten extra minutes I have each day to spend on saying random things on Facebook.
That’s just me though.
It’s true that some women never wear makeup for various reasons. Some look better without it than others do. Some object on principle, or prefer to maintain a vaguely earthy-crunchy vibe. Others simply don’t have the time, can’t afford it, or have jobs that don’t involve interacting with others.
Well all of that treats wearing makeup as the default, and not wearing it as something that requires an explanation – a reason, a causality. That’s silly. The default should be not wearing it, because it’s a very odd thing to do, when you think about it. I have thought about it, and I find it very odd. Put bits of wax and blobs of goo on your face? No thanks – that would be uncomfortable, and I don’t want to do it. Of course I did want to do it as a child, when I was too young to do it for real so it had the allure of being a Grownup thing. But once I was old enough to do it for real I lost all taste for it, permanently.
The part about having a job that doesn’t involve interacting with others is relevant though. My laptop doesn’t give a shit what’s on my face.
Makeup, in short, is a norm, and nothing ruins a first impression like a norm violation. Some women contend they only wear makeup to “boost their confidence,” but the reason they feel less confident when they don’t wear it is that there’s an expectation they will.
Exactly. It’s the same reason we would all feel less confident if we went out without any pants on – there’s an expectation that we will wear pants, even if only the minimal shorts necessary to cover our bums and genitals. The makeup expectation is probably a little bit more expendable.
So, what can be done about it? Workplace policies that allow employees to work from home, where their facial-contrast levels are judged only by their cats, could be an immediate help. So could including more bare-faced women in TV shows and magazine spreads.
For more enduring change, women could just stop wearing makeup. But unless we all did it in unison, it’s likely that the holdouts would continue to reap benefits while the au naturel protesters would continue to field questions about their thyroid health from strangers.
It’s the tragedy of the commons, innit. Always a bear to deal with.
When I was a university student, I experimented with make-up a few times, then completely gave it up. I’ve gone to job interviews (in financial organizations, have to wear ‘business’ attire) without any make-up on and got the job! I do hope more and more women are able to see that they don’t HAVE to follow silly norms like wearing make-up.
My cats are so vain that they barely look at my face. They look at the part of me that they most covet, my opposable thumb. Contrasts on my face? Eye shadow? They would resent my purchasing anything that was not for them to eat.
I tried make up when I was in jr. high. But it just made me feel even worse about my jr. high self. It always just felt like a big mess on my face. And it made me feel hot and sweaty.
I don’t like the feel of anything on my face but I put sun screen on it b/c I prefer to limit my exposure to death rays from the sun that would make me have to get my face excised.
There are also plenty of people who cannot wear makeup due to an allergy, skin condition, or just skin sensitivity.
Somewhere someone is saying that you are engaging in makeup-shaming of people who feel they have no choice but to wear makeup because of discrimination. (I’ve seen that in other conversations.) The discrimination is hard to solve, but making you the bad guy is easy, even fun for some.
I experimented with makeup very briefly as a young teen, but I was never really able to get into it (I hated dressing up anyway). I’ve used makeup as an adult maybe half a dozen times, and only for costume parties.
The quoted article seems to be very fatalistic about the idea that women have no choice but to wear makeup, and it will never change unless every woman agrees to stop at once (which makes me wonder how the practice of men wearing powdered periwigs ever came to an end). On the other hand, a while ago I ran across the website http://30daysnomakeup.com/ which describes itself as follows:
And then poses the question:
“What if we care more about what we think of ourselves?”
Which I think makes the actual point very well: If a woman (or man for that matter) would like to wear makeup, that should be entirely up to them. But I find it sad and tiresome when women who have internalized the wearing of makeup as a requirement in modern society make derogatory statements about other women who “don’t keep themselves up”. (And I’m utterly mystified about the “thyroid health” comment, since the main symptom of hypothyroid is weight gain, which doesn’t really lend it self to covering up with makeup).
Jennifer @ 4 – You think you’re joking (perhaps) but Stephanie Zvan did say almost exactly that in her long, clotted, badly written indictment of me a couple of days ago. (She has precognition!)
I am “them” (but she names me at the end, so one wonders what the point of “them” was throughout the already confusing and clumsy post).
What is a blogger to do when she sees me “repeatedly deride feminine-identified clothing, grooming, and verbal expressions”?
Uh…nothing? Mind her own business? That sounds about right to me.
I personally dislike most feminine-identified clothing/grooming (for myself). I deride the idea that there is something wrong with me for doing so. Nonetheless, I strongly support the right of anyone who wants to wear or use such things, and I think (wildly idealistically perhaps) that every person should be able to freely choose their clothing and grooming according to their own preference, and that this choice of should be independent of their gender identification.
Also: I will unapologetically (though not out loud or directly) deride the idea of little girls wearing frilly pretty skirts/dresses at playgrounds and for other outdoor activities. How are they supposed to run, jump, climb trees, roll around on the grass, crawl in the dirt, jump in mud puddles, hang upside down on the monkey bars or any number of other things that *kids* are supposed to do when they go outside? (Yes, I know that not all kids of whatever gender will want to do that, but let’s make sure they are making that choice freely and not out of concern for getting in trouble for ruining their nice clothes.)
Makeup is a form of sexual display/signaling.
Women wear makeup to attract men.
Women wear makeup to signal that they are actively seeking a mate.
If those are the signals that you want to send, makeup is one way to send them.
That’s one reason women wear makeup, but it’s certainly not the only one. Try reading the article for other reasons.
Of course it’s the only reason! Everything women do is about men! Science tells us so.
Are there numbers as to how many women feel such workplace pressure?
I live in a big East Coast city, and I have never observed that women without makeup were “socially unacceptable.” I am a programmer, a profession notorious for unkempt people, so I personally have never felt any professional expectation to wear makeup. But I have plenty of non-makeup wearing friends in other professions as well (lawyers, a pediatrician, a biologist, a civil engineer). I can see that a woman who is on tv or a hostess at a restaurant or a politician will face different expectations, and there may well be regional variations as well. So I would like to see some numbers.
I do wear makeup, because I think I look better in makeup. I remember my high school physics teacher saying that I should not wear makeup or jewellery to interviews because I will be taken less seriously, so there is that as well.
So I read the article, and it all seems very much of a piece to me. Makeup is sexual display, and the question then is why women wear makeup when they are not actively seeking mates. A few possibilities:
1. Some women have been raised/taught/socialized/whatever to believe that they have to wear makeup. Always playing a role like this is exhausting and corrosive. I’m flashing on a PostSecret that read, “I look like a Playboy bunny, but I feel like the Easter kind: hollow inside.”
2. The flip side of this is workplaces where the men (in charge) will hire/promote/accept only women who wear makeup. This probably meets the definition of sexual harassment, but unless the men are specially clumsy about it, it would be difficult to challenge in court.
3. In an ideal world, people would be hired/promoted/compensated based solely on their job performance. But we don’t live in an ideal world, and it turns out that appearance matters, too. The sociologists have done the studies, and have the data. Tall men do better, pretty women do better, overweight people do worse. A woman can make herself more attractive by wearing makeup, if only in the raw functional sense that makeup attracts men. So some women wear makeup to gain a competitive edge in the workplace. And if some women do this, then others will too, just to keep up. The blog posting refers to this as the “tragedy of the commons”, but it is more like an arms race. The Atlantic article is mostly about this.
4. Women might wear makeup for the same reason that men wear ties: as a status marker to show that they don’t do physical labor. This is a use of makeup that is not tied to its function as a sexual signal.
N.B. All the same arguments apply to high-heels. And remember, makeup washes off at the end of the day, but heels can do lasting damage.
I was going to follow up with more analysis of women wearing makeup, but the top of the blog today is ISIS fighters raping 12-year old girls, and my heart’s not in it anymore. Sigh…
Further to your musings Steven @ #13, as to why, why? a woman might wear makeup, Maria Catt writes about why she feels she doesn’t really have any choice:
“Someday I will move around the world with my real face. Someday I will have the money in my account, and the land in my name, and I will not have to look like someone else to make the world be kind to me. I’ll live without mirrors and paint, I’ll live without constructing a face to live behind. It probably won’t be a young woman’s face anymore by the time I get that. I wonder how strange I will look to myself.”
http://mariacatt.com/2015/08/14/made-up/