From lipstick to eyelashes, make up has really changed the way people look and choose to express themselves. As a boy, I really don’t know a lot about makeup, how it’s applied or how to make sure your eyeliner wing stays the same on each side, but what I do know is many people rely on makeup to express the way they look and feel. Makeup has truly changed the world.
A recent trend that has took the world by storm is the ‘#makeupselfie’, the origins of which are a little hazy, but it seemed to have started with the novelist Laura Lippman, who posted the selfie following an incident when a model was criticised for her looks. This caused a lot of publicity, and in the following days, thousands of women had posted selfies of them without any makeup. This was then adopted by the Cancer Research team, which had later led to a staggering amount of £2 million raised (well done ladies). This also led to a counter hashtag, called #nomakeupselfie, which is still currently on the rise, encouraging men to put on makeup, which therefore increases their understanding of it.
However, the world of women’s makeup is a sort of foreign ground for most men, a mysterious landscape of brushes, powders, and colours. To most men, a makeup table is a curious object which they have often forbidden themselves from exploring, this shows again how men are unfamiliar with the makeup world and to some extent show no interest in learning about it.
Most men think that make up hides the way people actually look. For example, the famous beauty blogger, Em Ford, made a video called ‘You Look Disgusting’ her purpose of this video was to challenge society’s concept of beauty. Em is famous for having flawless skin on YouTube. The video has been viewed more than 20,084,970 times. However, she suffers from really bad adult acne, this as you can imagine, sparked a lot of attention on social media, with comments ranging from ‘you look disgusting’ to ‘she’s beautiful’, males went on to say things like ‘trust no f*cking b*tch with makeup’, which again, to me, highlights society’s double standards on makeup because social norm permits a woman is beautiful due to the way she looks ‘naturally’, however, what I think males don’t see, is that makeup started out as an art-form, for women to feel empowered within themselves, this is something which I think should be made clear to men around the world.
In my opinion, women should be allowed to do what they want, the suffragettes did fight for the rights of women, so why are they still being challenged today? If a woman is willing to wake up an extra half an hour or fifteen minutes to apply her make up then so be it, even if a woman does not wear make up at all it is HER choice, she should be allowed to express herself in anyway she pleases, and no one should ever be allowed to take that right away from her.
