Every morning as I get ready for school I deal with constant bickering between my teenage skin and the makeup waiting in my bathroom drawer. When I glance at my cheek, my first thought is often that I need to prioritize keeping my skin healthy and let my acne breathe in natural conditions, but more days than not, my insecurities take over and I find myself applying a bit of concealer again. Walking through the hallways at school I often see girls’ makeup and mascara caked so thick that I’m not really sure what they really look like under it all. I have been asking myself how society has ever gotten to a point where teens feel such strong urges to fit beauty standards that they spend hours tending to their makeup, removing hair from their bodies, hundreds of dollars on various cosmetics, and, all in all, sacrifice their hormonal and blemish full skin for an unnatural amount of makeup. The answer is clear; we just want to feel beautiful.
While I can easily sympathize with the struggle and admit that I too wear face makeup occasionally, I do not in any way believe that we should be teaching our children that makeup or any unnatural cosmetic such as fake tanners are beautiful. As much as I feel that makeup can be used in positive ways when embracing femininity, individuality, and creativity it also creates a toxic makeup filled society when it becomes a daily habit of application. Today, girls will often put on makeup just to snap a boy they like and then obsess over how they look because of our new generation of catfish. The line between natural beauty and unnatural beauty is sometimes now more than ever, difficult to decipher, and has many harmful side effects on the confidence of today’s teens. Additionally, as I looked more into the different ingredients inside my makeup I was disgusted at the fact that a certain few of them were being absorbed into my skin daily. All of the unnatural chemicals and pigments surely do not affect anyone’s skin in a positive way. We already have plenty of hormones and crazy stuff inside us as teens that there’s no need to be adding all of this other stuff. This has motivated me to limit my wearing of face makeup to special events or occasions. Not only that, but when buying makeup we are paying way more than we should be for simple little palettes of pigment or small tubes of liquid to color your eyelashes which in turn just help to age your skin. When scrolling through tik tok to come across a sephora or ulta haul it is no surprise that girls are throwing their money out the windows on products that influencers praise. The overall process of putting makeup on every morning is truly just too time consuming to be worth it as well. According to an article by Elizabeth Denton on “How Much the Average Woman Spends on Makeup In Her Life”, women generally use 16 different products everyday before leaving the house, averaging a total of $300,000 spent on these products over a lifetime. However, this does not even account for the amount spent on products used to style hair or remove it from our bodies. Let’s face it; meeting today’s beauty standards is outright inconvenient.
The origins of makeup and societal beauty standards date back for centuries. In Asia, painful foot binding and the wearing of white powder on faces to look more pale used to be the social norm. While footbinding obviously takes it to a whole other level I believe our forms of plastic surgery and products such as lip injection lip gloss are not too far out from that. The kind of makeup filled society we live in today has become so toxic for young girls that we are so out of touch with what really is natural beauty and individuality. Wearing makeup and purchasing other beauty products is ultimately us giving into our insecurities and forming new ones for the people around us. It is a never ending cycle. As many pop culture stars have been recently standing out for body positivity and other social stigmas in today’s world, I think the wearing of makeup should be spoken about more. Not only spoken about, but acted on, by disclosure of their bare faces and hairy bodies to the world. It only takes one person to change thousands of minds and yes, the movie stars look fabulous with all that glamor on their faces, but is it really worth all the drama that comes with it? When raising my daughter in the future, I will teach her to embrace her natural beauty and value uniqueness rather than a plastic looking face and skeleton. Nonetheless, I know that my advice and teachings alone cannot suppress the pressure from society to look a certain way so encouraging our generation to welcome all people is vital by avoiding a makeup filled fake society.