I hardly ever wear makeup. I’ve never had a daily makeup routine, and until embarrassingly recently I didn’t even have a daily skincare routine. While my dry, sensitive, blemish-prone skin appreciates that I now take better care of it, my morning and evening cleansing, toning, treating, and moisturizing isn’t followed by foundation, contoure, blush, shadow, mascara, or lipstick. At most, I might apply a coincidentally tinted lip balm with sunscreen.
The fact that I have never been a regular consumer of makeup started with my adolescent self-identification as a tomboy. Tomboys don’t wear makeup. I didn’t like anything girly after about age ten. I eschewed flounced floral dresses in favor of t-shirts and cargo shorts. I think I did this mostly to separate my identity from that of my more delicate-looking sister, but I was also much more likely to be found playing football with the guys at recess than hopscotch or four-square with the girls. Being told “You’re such a tomboy” repeatedly reinforced the stereotype.
So while my girlhood friends were learning how to do their makeup in their pre-teens, it remained an irrelevant mystery to me. My mom did take me to the mall in my early teens to one of the many department store makeup counters, where a nice lady “did my face” and then sold us a bag of nearly two hundred dollars worth of product. I followed the routine the makeup counter lady taught me for a while, but not daily, and then eventually only for special occasions. I still have the small eyeshadow palette, nearly two decades later. It’s perhaps half-used.
By high school, my friends were all experts, it seemed, and had defined “their look.” Meanwhile, I struggled to put on eyeshadow and blush symmetrically and never looked like myself in the mirror after I did. People were surprised when my friends didn’t wear makeup. People were surprised when I did.
Putting on makeup felt more like playing dress up than like a normal part of my day. Even though I knew that my mom did this every morning and wouldn’t leave the house without lipstick, I never got to the point where it seemed like it was time for me to do the same. Wearing makeup every day was what adults did, I guessed, and I wasn’t an adult yet. I still got sweaty playing frisbee with my friends between classes. Who had time for running to the bathroom to power their nose? Why did it even matter?
I felt the same way throughout college. Nobody seemed to care that I didn’t wear makeup. I think nobody did. Yet the other young women in the seats around me had faces full of color, darkened eyebrows, overdrawn lips, and often false lashes. I never understood why. Nowadays, it makes sense to me that this is normal. Every day is a series of selfie opportunities, so people want to have their Instagrammable faces on, but when I went to college the world was barely on the cusp of influencer-driven social media. Instagram didn’t exist yet, so what were all these women spending all that time and money on makeup for? I didn’ t know, and I hardly thought about it.
I graduated college, got my first “real” job, went to grad school, floated around the gig economy for a while, and eventually started my career in the high tech industry. All the while, I showed up to class, to interviews, to work, with a bare face. With rare exceptions, I was the only woman in those settings who had nothing on her skin.
These days, I enjoy trying to make myself up for special occasions. Makeup can feel like part of a well-considered outfit, and that is something I do understand and value. But on ninety-nine days out of a hundred, my face is naked.
I find freedom in showing my true face to the world. I know that many women find freedom in the self-expression that makeup allows them. They can literally look like a different person, from a different era or a different culture. They can be unrecognizable, if they want. I understand why makeup is a tool in their toolbox. It enables self-transformation.
It’s not a kind of self-transformation I value, though. I want to be recognized for me. I have seen many examples of someone being unrecognizable without having their “face” on. People might say they look weird or even ugly. “Wow, that’s what she looks like without makeup? Gross!” go the comments.
I don’t want that. I want to be seen as me, always. I don’t want washing my face at night to be like taking a mask off. I don’t want to go through the world in disguise. I don’t want to spend time and money every day on the illusion of changing the shape of my nose or the set of my eyes.
Not wearing makeup frees me from the time that would otherwise be consumed by it. It frees me from the expense of having to buy the products. More important to me, however, is the freedom from the social pressure to have a face that is on-trend. My eyebrows are my own. They do whatever my genetics tells them to do (with a touch--I’ll admit--of unibrow maintenance now and then). I don’t change them to be thicker or thinner or darker or lighter depending on the cover of Vogue. I don’t change the shape of my mouth or my nose with contouring, and because I don’t do these things, I don’t worry about whether I look the way that influencers and movie stars do. I can’t look like they do because I don’t put on a face like they do.
I don’t judge people who wear makeup. That would be silly, rude, and, well, judgemental. Those are not things I want to be. I see other people’s makeup routines as normal. I also see my own lack of makeup as normal, just as it is normal for men to be bare-faced. Both choices are fine, depending on what you want.
I do feel, though, that the sense of requirement to wear makeup should be consciously revolted against by some women. Wearing makeup should be a choice. My mother is not free to leave the house without makeup because it makes her too uncomfortable. She feels naked without a fake hue to her lips. I don’t blame her for that. She’s a product of her culture. My culture just happened to be the boys I played soccer and football with during recess in grade school. Most of them probably don’t wear makeup these days either. If they do wear makeup, they are trend-setters. People might call them odd, queer, or brave.
It never occurred to me until recently that choosing not to wear makeup as a woman was not only freeing, but also an act of bravery. Many people see a naked female face as unprepared or unfinished, as though I left the house in nothing but undergarments. I’ve certainly been passed over many times in my life, in conversations at parties, in job interviews, in bars where other girls were getting picked up. Was it ever because the alternative to me was a young woman with false lashes and red lips that made her look doe-eyed and sultry at the same time? I don’t know, but perhaps. I certainly could be seen as not trying or as not caring. Perhaps men or other women have looked at me as someone who didn’t bother, or someone who didn’t want to look pretty.
But I do care, and I do bother, and I do want to look pretty. Just not like that. So not wearing makeup, if you are a woman, seems to be a small act of bravery, just like wearing it is brave if you are a man.
I’ve always hated wearing makeup, so it’s not a difficult type of bravery for me. Makeup is uncomfortable. It works its way into creases. It gets smudged. It gets in your eyes and makes your lashes stiff. It makes me feel heavy, dirty, and mess-up-able. I want my skin to be free to breathe. I want my husband to know that he can reach out and touch my cheek without consequences.
Sometimes I do worry I will be discriminated against subconsciously, just a little, for not looking as pretty or as “put together” as other women who clearly spent a lot of time on their routines. But I have to trust that whatever I am bringing to the table is more than enough to make up for what I didn’t.
This is my face, and that’s all it is.
