The Feminine Ideal

In October, I wrote an article for STITCH’s online blog about Glossier and the advent of “natural” makeup, or in other words, minimal and effortless looking makeup that enhances natural beauty. In the article, I praised Glossier for exactly this and wrote that it was especially important for people who were just getting started with makeup. Now, months later, I realize that Glossier’s “effortless” makeup isn’t really so effortless after all. While it may be less overtly branded, it’s still makeup, still something you have to spend time putting on, still something you have to buy and still something that makes you feel a little more “beautiful” than your natural self.

More importantly, it’s a part of the structures of makeup culture, or the ways in which societal pressures and standards of beauty compel women to wear makeup. These structures have been exacerbated in recent years with the rise of Instagram makeup artists flooding the explore page, beauty bloggers on Snapchat Discover and YouTube and the proliferation of makeup advertisements on primetime television. On one hand, makeup culture is empowering because it can make women feel more confident, but, on the other hand, makeup culture is heavily skewed by internalized patriarchal structures that enforce standards of femininity and beauty.

Makeup has a direct correlation to women’s confidence and self image, which is positive in that it allows women to feel beautiful. Yet, applying makeup comes at the expense of women’s emotional labor, time and money. A study conducted by The Renfrew Center shows that 44 percent of women feel less attractive without makeup. Furthermore, an article by Allure cites a 2017 study from SkinStore which finds that the average woman spends $300,000 on makeup in her lifetime, meaning she carries around $8 on her face a day. So while makeup can make women feel more confident and attractive, it also requires a lot of effort.

With brands like Glossier that attempt to sell “effortless” makeup products, it’s clear they are trying to rebrand and subvert traditional, overdone makeup looks. Nonetheless, they still contribute to the distortion of women’s self-image. If a natural makeup look isn’t even actually natural, what does that say about people who don’t wear makeup at all? It still takes a lot of effort to look effortless, and this idea is even more harmful because it essentially means that a natural makeup look is heavily constructed, making it seem like women who don’t wear makeup are even below the bar of “natural.”

This also goes hand in hand with companies capitalizing off women’s insecurities and insidiously marketing makeup products as feminist products that liberate female self-expression and beauty. Makeup culture is especially toxic and harmful in that it is branded as a feminist product since it’s supposed to make women feel more confident and serve as an artistic outlet. Yet, that idea is distorted since companies are just using feminist rhetoric to sell their products and attempting to align feminism with consumerist makeup culture. Companies are specifically targeting women’s insecurities to make a profit while branding makeup as something the modern and socially-aware woman should want and need.

Joshua Kissel, a philosophy graduate student at Northwestern University specializing in feminist philosophy, says that this idea isn’t even necessarily enforced by men, but rather, it has been internalized by women themselves. “(Makeup companies) might not even be male- dominated companies, but independent female- run makeup companies,” he says. “It’s better for the patriarchy and men if they didn’t have to enforce
it and if women enforced it themselves by self- policing.”

This isn’t to say that all women-owned makeup companies are internalizing their oppression and imparting it onto other women, but rather that they are complicit in a system that continues to disempower women and tell them that their natural face is not enough.

This relates to the idea of women’s self-surveillance and internalization of patriarchal standards of beauty and femininity. In her 1997 essay, “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” feminist philosopher Sandra Lee Bartky writes, “The woman who checks her makeup half a dozen times a day to see if her foundation has caked or her mascara has run, who worries that the wind or the rain may spoil her hairdo...or who, feeling fat, monitors everything she eats, has become...a self-policing subject, a self committed to a relentless self-surveillance. This self surveillance is a form of obedience to patriarchy.” Society and the patriarchy have continually presented unattainable standards of beauty and femininity for women and have proffered makeup as the vehicle for beauty in an insidious and harmful way.

All of this is wrapped up in the idea of compulsory femininity, where girls are supposed to conform to a certain societal expectation of “womanhood” in order to feel like they are worthy or beautiful, alienating people who don’t conform and discounting the emotional labor of the body maintenance necessary to look a certain way. Compulsory femininity isn’t just a personal problem; it’s not just about shaving your legs before putting on a sundress or crossing your legs when you sit down. It’s the way you and your friends joke about having “terrible” eyebrows, the way you laugh about not being able to go out without your “face” on or the way you may judge others when they don’t have a full blown skincare routine. Compulsory femininity is all of these things: it’s about how you impart those ideas onto other women, creating a sense of toxic femininity that forces the women around you to be “feminine.” It’s reinforced and exacerbated among female circles, knowingly or not.

However, there is a distinction between uplifting each other and methods of toxic femininity. Positivity, complimenting and uplifting each other are all part of female solidarity, but female solidarity also means accepting and supporting women, not their perceived femininity. It’s supporting women as women and not reimposing standards of femininity.

With all this in mind, how can we reconcile wearing makeup with the oppressive structures of makeup culture that work in tandem with compulsory femininity? Kissel maintains that we “can’t rule out anybody’s perspective on wearing makeup,” meaning that it’s still important to consider people’s actual experiences rather than take the big-picture, top-down structure at face value. In an article on Man Repeller, Haley Nahman writes about how foregoing makeup helped her accept herself and her flaws. Interestingly, she also cites Bartky’s literature as a catalyst in finally influencing her to go makeup free. “After reading that book (Bartky’s Femininity and Domination), I could no longer put on makeup without feeling that I was in some way reinforcing a system I didn’t agree to,” she says. With this, I don’t necessarily think everyone has to give up makeup, but I do think it’s important to recognize makeup culture’s impact on reinforcing these structures of femininity and patriarchy. More importantly, you can still put on a full face of makeup every day, but when you see someone who hasn’t, respect their decision not to and accept them for who they are because that’s what constitutes real female solidarity.