“A name, like a face, is something you have when you’re not alone.”
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
When people talk about their makeup and skincare routines, I often hear them say “I do it for myself.” In video tutorials, when discussing alternate ways to spend time, when trying to validate labor that is both required and required to be downplayed. “I don’t wear makeup to reproduce strict aesthetic requirements or to guarantee better treatment or higher pay, I do it because I like to spend time this way! What can I say, I’m a lil’ bit selfish!” *nose scrunch* *giggle*
But your eyes are inside your face. Makeup can’t be smelled or touched or tasted—it exists only to be looked at. Your eyes cannot see the thing that exists to be seen. How, then, is that for yourself?
We don’t do makeup for ourselves in a literal sense. We don’t put makeup on and look at the result in a mirror, staring to appreciate our artistry, having appointments with the mirror multiple times a day to smile at our own faces and the result of our labor. We put on makeup and then walk away from the mirror and go do that tasks that make up a life. We only find a mirror every now and then, to make sure our makeup isn’t messed up. Which we would know, if we could see it in the first place, which, again, we can’t.
This has always been weird to me. I’m an overly literal person. Even when I was in high school, I did not understand why I would do my makeup and hair if I couldn’t see them during the day.
I did know that I was supposed to feel insecure. I was supposed to see all the insufficiencies of my face existing in its natural state. I also knew it would be much faster to decide that I would not base my confidence on what I looked like. You are altogether beautiful my love, etc.1
We wear makeup for ourselves in a non-literal sense, sure—to avoid feeling insecure. We perform Makeup, and when we are in the world in makeup, we have painted ourselves to be that which deserves respect. In Thick, Tressie McMillan Cottom writes, “Beauty is not good capital. It compounds the oppression of gender. It constrains those who identify as women against their will. It costs money and demands money. It colonizes. It hurts. It is painful. It can never be fully satisfied. It is not useful for human flourishing. Beauty is, like all capital, merely valuable."
I am interested in a harsh criticism, one that goes, “How you feel as an individual person smearing individual concealer on your one, single face does not matter. What matters is that each individual decides to resist the collective oppression of makeup/skincare/hair/beauty culture. Makeup is art. It is fun. But, more importantly, it enforces a system of power that oppresses women and perpetuates inequality.”
Now, I wouldn’t make that declaration without adding more niceties. I’d also need to actually building scaffolding for that argument. I’m not, in this instance, trying to change your mind. Just describing what’s in mine.
Maybe another day! For now, you can go to The Unpublishable and get lost in a heaven of anti-beauty-industry writing. Defino’s writing there is the inspiration behind a lot of my thoughts here. I’ve cited her in some hyperlinks, but click here to get all the goods.
What does it mean that we let women who are mothers be alone only when they are making themselves presentable via blow dryers/eyeliner/lipstick? And, I hear moms saying, they often have to do makeup and hair while they watch their kids, which, true. I just wonder — We all know that in heterosexual marriages, more housework falls on women. Women will tell you they don’t get to prioritize hobbies and passions for years after having kids. But there’s time to do makeup? Over and over? Couldn’t we replace this with things individual women found life-giving, like painting or reading or anything except coercing their faces into a culturally accepted patina? And jumping further from there, can’t we make it acceptable for mothers to look exhausted because mothering is, in fact, exhausting?2
This is the other thing I’m going to write about today:
The only time we’re looking at or engaging with our face, we are actively fixing it.
This can’t be good.
Most people don’t look in mirrors for more than a few seconds here and there. We cook food and read and scroll on our phones; we don’t sit in front of mirrors as an activity. The only time we sit in front of mirrors as an activity is when we’re doing a skincare and makeup routine.
I’m not advocating that we create a habit of staring into mirrors.
But I am interested in what it does to our brain to spend fifteen minutes or an hour or however long each day in front of a mirror, going through a checklist of the issues with our body and fixing them one by one, and zero minutes in front of a mirror, looking at our face with passive acceptance. Not joy, or praise, just like—yup, that’s me. A face and body. There it is.
Especially when these “issues” on the checklist aren’t real problems. Baggy eyes and wrinkled lips and acne aren’t health problems. Invisible eyelashes and dull lips and light (or big) (or small) eyebrows aren’t health problems. They’re fake problems, created by the beauty industry so they can sell us solutions.3
These issues are fake. The fixes we implement aren’t great, either, no surprise. Makeup and skincare routines don’t actually fix anything. It’s not surprising that the solutions to fake problems are fake (or harmful!) themselves.
Over the past few years, but really the entirety of my life, I’ve been obsessed with figuring out how to be efficient. I couldn’t be bothered to wear mascara once I realized what a pain it was to wash off. Three minutes of blinking and splashing every night becomes 1100 hours by the time you die. In 2020, I stopped shaving my legs (More on this later, probably.). January of this year, I stopped cleansing and moisturizing my face. (My skin has not suffered. There is no difference.)4
I haven’t ever habitually worn makeup or spent time styling my hair. There’s privilege in this, absolutely, and that’s another thing I could write a whole separate piece on. But in a sentence, I think it’s important to leverage our privilege to live according to our values symbolically / resist oppression systemically. Not trying to be too grand. Pulling at the threads we can, as Jenny Odell says.
I don’t spend much time on my own beauty5. But I’ve watched dozens of the Vogue videos of celebrities walking us through all the steps of their routines, explaining all the problems with their faces and how they fix them.
I practice my version of that video, in my bathroom with the cracked walls and stained tub, and I realize it’s just descriptive, just facts:
Here is my face. I splash it with water. My eyebrows keep water out of my eyes. They grow straight across, but they know what they’re doing, so I let them. My forehead is between my eyebrows and my hair. I have eyes with eyelashes and underneath my eyes it’s purple. My cheeks are always pink, possibly from a thyroid disorder, and I have freckles on the pink and purple parts of my face. My nose is always pink, too, and it has small black dots on it. These have caused no problems I can discern, so I leave them alone. I have lips and a chin and a neck. I floss and the best way to floss is to use a really long piece so you can wrap it around three fingers and spread the constriction—it hurts less and gives more grip. I wear sunscreen. My face is expressive. Right now it looks bored, because it’s looking at itself. Faces externalize our emotions to help us communicate. I feel my emotions from the inside, so I don’t need to look at my own face for any information. It is just there. I am grateful.
This is from Song of Solomon. I knew the Bible was written as a letter from God to us, and I knew this verse, and I’ve always loved a good syllogism. I was altogether beautiful, there was no flaw. I skipped the usual chapter of crushing self-esteem and moved on with my life. I consider this remarkably lucky.
Please look past the 1,000 generalizations in this section. I just—I think about the moms a lot. Had to include this (inadequate) paragraph. As is the theme of this post—more on this later, maybe!
I absolutely agree that wearing makeup makes you prettier. I hate when people waffle between the two definitions of beauty without being clear about which definition they mean. There’s beauty as capital, as performance. The standards often change but they are clear: emphasize your eyes, make your skin smooth, spend time making your hair either voluminous or perfectly flat, and on and on and on. From Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Thick, “Beauty isn't actually what you look like; beauty is the preferences that reproduce the existing social order.” Yup! Yikes. Then there’s the second definition of beauty—the more weighty, eternal one. Beauty as a spiritual experience. Truth, goodness, beauty. That one.
In my mind when I was younger, I termed the first one being “pretty” and used the word “beauty” for the second. Having two different words for these two different meanings would be incredibly helpful for philosophical clarity. As the term “beauty culture” and “beauty routine” and etc. etc. make clear, the word “beauty” will be used to mean both things for the foreseeable future. The beauty industry makes so much money from conflating the two terms. Bummer.
Incidentally, after quitting my face routine, I started brushing and flossing my teeth more. Two non-beauty tasks that actually increase my health and save me money. Johnson & Johnson can’t make rivers of money selling floss, though. (“Thank goodness for exfoliating scrubs that dry out people’s faces so we can sell the hydration serum to fix the problem we created!”)
Beauty as capital. Beauty definition number one—see the third footnote.