Instagram filters, Sephora sales, a little blush here, a little gloss there, and before you know it you don’t even look like yourself anymore.
Women, in general, are using too much makeup. When women “put on their face,” so to speak, they are doing so to try to conceal or accentuate certain features. Some women do so because of some unwritten and unproven idea of what they think will garner them the most attention from men. However, they’re wrong.
According to a study conducted by researchers Alex Jones and Robin Kramer, men actually prefer women whose visages are not slathered in makeup; specifically, they like women best, aesthetically speaking, when they are wearing 60 percent of the makeup they typically put on. Women were also tested in this study, and they, too, preferred images with this amount of makeup applied.
“…These results suggest that women are likely wearing cosmetics to appeal to the mistaken preferences of others,” Kramer and Jones said in the study. “These mistaken preferences seem more tied to the perceived expectations of men, and, to a lesser degree, women.”
Via: trove.com
The study showed that it’s not that people prefer no makeup, they just prefer less of it. Makeup shouldn’t be used to make a new face — it should just be used to accentuate the current one. After all, it is your face, so own it.
It would be easy to blame our society’s perception of perfection, Hollywood or advertisers for this thought process, and that is indeed part of it. However, we can’t just assign blame to those parties and label ourselves innocent victims. We buy into it. We are as guilty as they are. Each day, we are presented with thousands of images that denote what the beauty standard is, but instead of looking at airbrushed images and seeing them for what they are, we strive to recreate that unrealistic appearance for ourselves. We should know that this idea of beauty is not only impossible to attain, but computer-generated, too. It’s simply not human.
There was recently a campaign in the UK called the #NoMakeupSelfie campaign, which called upon women to take pictures of themselves unadorned by makeup as a means of raising money for cancer research. It was a great idea in theory. The campaign showed people who looked great without makeup. It should have been a step in the right direction, but wasn’t.
Via: babalingblog.com
If you Google the campaign, you will find many beauty sites directing women on how to take a seamless no-makeup selfie using different filters, lighting techniques, and angles. Doing this is counterintuitive: You’re still striving for perfection that is unnatural.
Even though wearing makeup can quickly become about contributing to a false idea of what beauty actually is, it doesn’t mean that doing so is inherently a bad practice. Wearing makeup is perfectly okay, as long as you do so because you want to and not because you think it’ll get others to find you more attractive.
Take back your face and rethink why you cover it.
Featured photo courtesy of: Co.DESIGN
