According to the concept of choice feminism, “any choice a woman makes is inherently feminist and … women’s individual freedom to choose represents women’s liberation.” This is the belief behind the mainstream justification for the wearing of makeup by women and girls: these women and girls are actively choosing to engage in this self-styling, thus their behaviour is construed as a feminist act. However, choices are not made in a vacuum. The act of wearing makeup, for example, is predicated on the societal expectation for women to be beautiful. Making one’s self up as a woman, then, is not a free choice, because being beautiful is an obligation. Makeup thus reinforces the idea that women must be beautiful, and also further advances the idea that their beauty must be a beauty of perfection.
In the United States, 38 per cent of women report wearing makeup at least a few times a week, if not daily. These women cite boosting confidence, special occasions, enhancing certain features, covering blemishes, and self-expression as their primary reasons for doing so.
The most devious of these justifications is that of self- expression. As feminist American Philosopher Sandra Lee Bartky asserts in her book Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression, makeup, portrayed as a tool for expressing individuality, leaves little room for it. As no two beings are the same, self-expression naturally implies a variety. And yet, made-up faces on the streets, following popular trends or routines like “clean girl,” “doe-eye,” or “no makeup- makeup” looks, become identical. As Bartky says, “[p]ainting the face is not like painting a picture; at best, it might be described as painting the same picture over and over again with minor variations.” Maybe, if a classmate showed up to lecture with flamboyant blue eyelids, I could be convinced of the self-expression argument. Instead, the mainly- conformist stylings of our student body confirm to me Bartky’s point.
Considering that most women don’t often step out of the appropriate makeup routine, the 26 per cent who claim to wear it for self- expression are deceiving themselves. And then there is the issue of the other rationales. Boosting confidence, special occasions, covering blemishes, enhancing features — these are all euphemisms for the desire to be more beautiful.
The question, then, is whether there is anything wrong with wanting to be beautiful, and whether women are even allowed not to strive for this. Society expects women to be beautiful and desirable. Pursuing physical perfection is thus not a choice at all but a required path. When women do choose to opt out of makeup, they face immediate social and professional frictions: they are told that they look “tired,” “unprofessional,” or “unwell.” Beauty is an obligation precisely because the default state of a bare or natural face is treated as a failure of presentation.
What is strikingly interesting, is that it’s a field reserved for women only. As Naomi Wolf stated in The Beauty Myth, “this embodiment is an imperative for women and not for men, which situation is necessary and natural because it is biological, sexual, and evolutionary…None of this is true.” For this reason, women account for nearly 90 per cent of all cosmetic purchases. Because women are assumed to be more beautiful than men, it becomes that they must be more beautiful.
If makeup really is a choice, what explains the queasy feeling of shame whenever they aren’t made-up? I can’t count how many times I have heard a woman apologise for the way she looks. Makeup is not only a symbol of women’s obligation, but it further pushes the boundary of beauty into perfection. As stated by Bartky, the depth of shame of being considered ugly is a “measure of the extent to which all women have internalized patriarchal standards of bodily acceptability.”
Makeup, along with all beauty rituals, are therefore examples of the policing of women’s minds. And so the minds of women are like Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon. His prison model presents a circular structure of individual cells with a tower at the center, the tower seeing everything within these cells. The cells are the minds of women and the tower is the internal voice — coming from society, patriarchy, etc. — which polices them. As said by Bartky, it is a state of conscious and permanent visibility. A state of self- surveillance: checking whether the mascara is running, whether one has gained a pound, whether one’s pores are too big, whether one smells good. A woman is perpetually under someone else’s gaze, even in her own mind. As John Berger in Ways of Seeing famously said: “[M]en act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”
In the mind of a woman, there is a he who requires the performance of perfected beauty. And this he is everywhere. It is in the camera of her iPhone, in the mirror, in the “get ready with me” videos, and in the 2 hours that girls spend getting ready before a night out. It has so usurped their minds, to the extent that, women often claim that beautification is “fun.”
Ironically, women are simultaneously ridiculed for their interest in these apparently-trivial things such as fashion or makeup. Whether or not they participate in the pursuit of beauty, then, they are ridiculed. What must they do, then?
As one of my dearest friends recently put it, we must do what we can to get by. This is the idea explored by Kathy Davis in Remaking the She-Devil: A Critical Look at Feminist Approaches to Beauty, who argues that “cosmetic surgery might be a way for some women within the limitations of their present situation to end their suffering.” Makeup may also be a means of ending the suffering from the apparent curse of being ugly. Although a collective agreement among women that they need not be beautiful would perhaps end this plague, there may be reluctance to join this movement, as some will refuse to part with the very real rewards that accompany adherence to beauty standards. As Mary Wollstonecraft in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman wrote: “The conduct and manners of women, in fact, evidently prove that their minds are not in a healthy state; for, like the flowers which are planted in too rich a soil, strength and usefulness are sacrificed to beauty; and the flaunting leaves, after having pleased a fastidious eye, fade, disregarded on the stalk, long before the season when they ought to have arrived at maturity.”
Until all women agree, few women are incentivized to quit the system.
This article seeks to awaken the consciousness of those who view the wearing of makeup as an innocent choice. I do not wish to over- admonish my fellow women, however. Self-awareness is not freedom: a bird which knows her cage is no more free than the one who doesn’t.
