My introduction to sociology piece on makeup

Why do people wear makeup to achieve self-actualisation?

Makeup promotes positive self-image by bringing the ‘interior self to the exterior, producing an integrated and authentic self’ (McCabe, Malefyt & Fabri 2017, p. 7). Though people wear makeup for many reasons, this piece aims to discuss how people can wear makeup when it ‘acts to both judge and liberate them’ (McCabe, Malefyt & Fabri 2017, p. 2). Beauty rituals are a conscientious addition to cultural aesthetics, but also an attempt to generate societal value where previously denied. Evidence would suggest that the main reasons people wear makeup are societal pressures and self-validation due to manipulative dominance by the media and peer groups and repetitive devaluation.

‘For years, society has been telling our girls to be pretty and women to be beautiful, as if that’s the most important thing they can be’ (Embrace 2016). If attraction constitutes the whole importance of the being, drilled in from childhood through to adulthood, then being considered ‘unattractive’ can equate to ‘useless’ or ‘worthless’. The constant positive reinforcement of beautification by the media, ‘well-meaning parents’ and the regulatory gaze of social groups, further inflates the importance of objective beauty – ‘fitting into’ the golden ratio or being vigilant with appearance-enhancing routines (Embrace 2016; Elias & Gill, 2018, p. 71). ‘On the occasions when women do not use makeup, they feel uncomfortable, self-conscious, and embarrassed about physical appearance’, creating gender dissonance (McCabe, Malefyt & Fabri 20187, p. 6). Manipulation of this kind can be so powerful, the importance of such a value can be assigned a higher priority than other important values i.e. equality (Van Dijk 2006, p. 372). Rituals of emphasis and de-emphasis can be used to ‘produce and legitimise hierarchies of power in society’ (Bell 2009, cited by McCabe, Malefyt & Fabri 2017, p. 1). Albeit this concept is not inherently wrong, if ‘elites’; those organising television, radio, news and online media, were to favour one ideal over another (e.g. right over left-wing politics), we may get biased exposure and consequently have our opinions compromised (Van Dijk 1993, cited by Van Dijk 2006, p. 372). With prolonged validation through appearance, dictated by the media and peers, the cognitive process of ‘exposing’ the natural body confidently is not only rejected but entirely by-passed.  

‘Cultural meaning is produced and consumed’ through cosmetic advertising, and ‘becomes part of women’s subjectivity [surfacing] in the behaviour and emotional state of women when not wearing makeup’ (McCabe, Malefyt & Fabri 2017, p. 17). The ‘makeover paradigm’ has been integrated into the beauty industry to not just makeover people’s perceptions of themselves – ‘not only demanding work on, careful styling of and reinvention of the body’ – but ‘subjectivity itself’ (Elias & Gill 2018, p. 64). When we don’t own our own subjectivity, we don’t know ‘what (or whose) interests are served by the rhetoric of beauty’ (Jones 2002, p. 222, cited by Wolff 2006, p. 144). This indefinite entity assumes the ‘voice’ of a friend to their audiences, to create intimate credibility – ‘Do you ever wonder if you’re ugly and your friends just don’t tell you?’ (Elias & Gill 2018, p. 71-72). Defined as the ‘girlfriend gaze’/‘surveillant sisterhood’ by Winch (2013) and Elias & Gill (2018), people, intentionally or not, regulate each other’s appearances (p. 67). Through this, we experience ‘relentless beauty surveillance’ and ‘intense metricized self-scrutiny’ to be driven towards ‘optimal transformation through consumption’ (Elias & Gill 2018, pp. 60-63). This ‘fashion-beauty complex’ creates a ‘subject who is perpetually dissatisfied and unhappy with [their] body and appearance and thus compelled to embark on new regimes of “self-perfectibility”’ (McRobbie 2009, pp. 62-63, cited by Elias & Gill 2018, p. 64). ‘Unprecedented degrees of scrutiny’ employ such self-tracking and regulation, due to the ‘intensification (ever finer, more detailed and more forensic), extensification (spreading out, more diffuse and leaving no areas unsurveilled) and psychologization (focus not simply on techniques but on making over subjectivity) of surveillance’ (Elias & Gill 2018, pp. 73-74). This ‘achievement’ of combination is intended to ‘create a new sense of self-confidence’ (Sharpe 1989, p. 8), adding to the sense of ever-consuming to create the perfect self – which is not ‘you’. To alter the body the way media dictates ‘naturalizes the feminine body’ (McCabe, Malefyt & Fabri 2017, p. 15), implying that the media’s model is standard rather than the unaltered body.

Through excessive exposure to the beauty industry through commercials, targeted advertising, billboards, posters, entertainment integration, phone applications, and more, it is hard to separate what is subjectively beautiful over the association of current cultural ideals. If at first glance you see a person does not conform to ‘a socially defined category of what is considered beautiful’ (McCabe, Malefyt & Fabri 2017, p. 4), you could consider that person unattractive by quantifiable means. Through the hyper-essentialised wholesale fragmentation of the body, people have been able to create a ‘quantified self’, to measure waist-to-hip ratios and facial symmetry (Rocha 2013, cited by Mccabe, Malefyt & Fabri 2017, p. 4; Elias & Gill 2018, p. 67). For a human who naturally fits the ‘golden ratio’ developed from evolutionary psychology (Elias & Gill, 2018, p. 71), they may find themselves with excessive attention. Those witnessing this attention elsewhere, ‘consciously and subconsciously compare themselves’ (Embrace 2016). On the other hand, ‘it seems probable … that a physically attractive woman, because she may receive more than her share of attention from others, may become publicly self-conscious’ (Miller & Cox 1982, p. 751).

Naturally, people give more attention to something they deem beautiful than if they do not. Beauty is attractive; it gives us feelings of catharsis, consolation and arguably a sedative effect (Wolff 2006, p. 146; Elias & Gill 2018, p. 68). People may feel they are treated better when they are wearing makeup – ‘and were more apt to believe that makeup enhances their social interactions’ (Miller & Cox 1982, p. 748). This benefit of makeup use is called ‘impression management’ where ‘social interaction is a matter of rational calculation’ and ‘[people] add makeup during the day as they anticipate and adapt to the ongoing fluidity of social situations’ (Goffman 1959, 1967, cited by McCabe, Malefyt & Fabri 2017, p. 3; McCabe, Malefyt & Fabri 2017, p. 5). If the ‘self-actualized person’ displays characteristics of confidence – ‘feelings of sureness and the absence of shyness, timidity, self-consciousness, and embarrassment’ (Ryckaman et al. 1985, cited by Sumerlin et al. 1994, p. 1329), then a person wearing makeup ‘becomes’ the self-actualised human. Although ‘makeup may indicate a [person]’s values, sexual desires, availability, or social and professional status’ (Miller & Cox 1982, p. 750), simplistic first impression judgments ‘dropped’ into these categories contribute to further denigration of makeup users. When testing perceptions of women wearing makeup, the results were positive for dominance when it came to mating competition but not when it came to leadership (James, Jenkins & Watkins 2018, p. 540). If three-dimensional characteristics can be discerned by two-dimensional images, uninformed judgments perpetuated by the media are being actualised and consequent actions based on these assumptions fall ‘short of an ideal decision-making process’ (Wilkinson 2013, p. 350).

Not all people like to wear makeup, and it is their agency to not do so; ‘at the same time, women’s reluctance to appear in public without wearing makeup indicates that women may not only contest standards of beauty that wearing makeup implies but also adopt advertising discourse on the importance of enhancing physical appearance with makeup’ (McCabe, Malefyt & Fabri 2017, p. 2). Beauty is a core ideology and the idea of unlearning this exists in the form of anti-aesthetic art like Dadaism which works as a ‘resistance to the consolations of beauty and aesthetic pleasure’ (Wolff 2006, p. 147). Feminism has a distrust of beauty because dominant hierarchies have created the dialogue for women to constantly critique themselves and others to gain ‘approval among women’ (Wolff 2006, p. 145; McCabe, Malefyt & Fabri 2017, p. 1; Sharpe 1989, p. 8). Makeup works in a way to keep people down because of beliefs that those who engage with it are either using it as ‘“camouflage” for [people] who are more anxious, defensive, and unstable or as “seduction” for [those] who are more sociable, assertive, and extroverted’, both alluding to dishonesty and manipulation of the wearer (Van Dijk 2006, p. 368; McCabe, Malefyt & Fabri 2017, p. 3). The fact that it is mostly women who are experiencing devaluation of this kind, perpetuated by both sexes climbing different dominance hierarchies, is oppression. Whilst individual de-validation continues to occur because society assumes patronising characteristics of humans that devote part of their day to personal beauty regimes, people will remain unable to liberate themselves.

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