No, you're not wearing makeup "for yourself."

When conformity exists within the constraints of an oppressive system, there is no way for that conformity – which upholds the system – to be fully voluntary.

I wear makeup. I like how it makes me look and I feel better when I look, well, better. Or what we’ve come to understand is “better.” Older (or, if you’re already old: younger), livelier, glowier. More stereotypically feminine. More like how a woman “should” look. And yes, there are parts of it that are fun and can be artistic – I like blue eyeshadow, I love glitter, I love my stamp pen that allows me to put a perfect heart anywhere I want on my face. But I am not deluded for one second into the myth that I am doing it for myself. In a patriarchal culture where beauty is capital and has been for centuries, there is no such thing as a woman pursuing beauty strictly for herself.

Now, please stick with me, because I know this statement can provoke defensiveness.

Makeup is empowering; I don’t wear lipstick for a man, I do it because I like it. I shave my legs because I want to, not because society told me to. I’m a lesbian, I pursue beauty not for men’s attention, but women’s.

I hear you. I do. And I do believe that adhering to beauty standards can feel empowering, in the same way a tiger in captivity can feel empowered to stay in its den all day instead of entertaining the masses. Screw you, I’m not performing for everyone who can see me, I’m doing this for myself! But where would you be if the cage didn’t exist at all? The tiger wouldn’t feel the need to hide. The woman wouldn’t feel the need to be beautiful.

When conformity exists within the constraints of an oppressive system, there is no way for that conformity – which upholds the system – to be fully voluntary.

We all know beauty standards are oppressive, and most women have spent years of their lives trying to meet these standards, always striving to be thinner, have perkier boobs, defy any signs of aging. By the way, we should be proud of aging; what a wonder it is to have made it so far! I know far too many wonderful, intelligent, funny women who, in spite of how great they are, suffocate under the pressure to look as though they haven’t lived rich, accomplished, and yes, long, lives.

What could these women do with all of the time, money, and energy spent fighting their bodies?

What could you do?

Whether we like it or not, in a patriarchal society, looks are capital. Think back to when women weren’t allowed to get an education. Think back to when women were exchanged as property. Think back to when an unmarried woman was unable to support herself enough to survive. (For some societies, you don’t have to think back at all: all of these restrictions are still in place.) In this way, being as beautiful as possible had real, concrete benefits, and those who weren’t deemed desirable were left to suffer. Looks can easily become either a ticket or barrier to a woman’s survival.

The patriarchy thrives on women’s submission to beauty standards, regardless of why that individual woman feels she is participating in them. To the patriarchy, it doesn’t matter why you’re doing it; it just matters that you’re doing it. As Paris Mwendwa writes so eloquently in her essay, “Being ugly will set you free,” “[t]he point is not for you to become beautiful, it’s for you to always be trying, because a woman pursuing beauty is a woman who is always spending money, is always insecure and easily manipulated and most importantly, is always distracted enough to not be able to identify the real problem: patriarchy.”

Nowadays, as more and more women begin to openly defy beauty standards by refusing to shave, or giving up dieting in favor of self love, or dressing more masculine, brands that depend on women’s insecurity are scrambling to prove that their product is, in fact, empowering. Loving yourself is in, and the brands that rely on your self-hatred are panicking, selling the idea that they’re totally on board with the whole self-love thing as long as it means you’ll keep buying their product.

Take Billie, for example, a razor company made specifically for women. Billie’s advertisements show women with body hair, and this is supposed to be ground-breaking. In some ways, maybe it is. A note on the company’s website reads “The first women’s razor brand to show hair.” Wow! Yes, they show women’s body hair in the advertisements — as the women shave that hair away. Right underneath this statement is “Women have body hair, yet showing it is a prickly subject. It’s time to change that.” What have you really changed, Billie? The messaging here is clear: it’s okay to have body hair, as long as you are taking the necessary steps to get rid of it.

Where do these standards even come from? Have you ever stopped to think about why grown women are pruning themselves to resemble pre-pubescent girls whose bodies haven’t begun to produce hair yet? Why is that the standard? Particularly for the bikini area. Who benefits from us trying to look like little girls, and why is that desirable? The beauty standard is exploitative, oppressive, and yes, often pedophilic.

Or what about Botox? On the Botox website, the brand boasts testimonials from customers as young as 27. I may be only 23, but I believe your 20’s are for self-discovery, forging your own path in the world and figuring out what – and who – brings you meaning and purpose, not worrying about how old you look. Moreover, a video posted on the official Botox Instagram (@botoxcosmetic) on April 2nd claims that the company is all about empowering women entrepreneurs through their new program called “The Confidence Project.” Confidence, really? The very thing that, if women had more of it, would put injectable companies out of business? Has a woman ever gotten Botox because she feels confident in herself the way she is?

The video features women of different ages, sizes, and races. The advertisement is so feminist-coded you almost forget that their product is designed and primarily marketed towards women, and that the company relies on women hating their bodies enough to pay for Botox to be injected into their skin to get rid of wrinkles, fine lines, and crow’s feet.

Finally, take a look at this statement from Millie Bobby Brown, a 21-year-old actress who has been criticized recently for looking too old: “We always talk about supporting and uplifting young women, but when the time comes, it seems easier to tear them down.” This is a noble message, sure, and nobody should be torn apart for how they look, but as Jessica DeFino points out in an article called “Shutter Your Business, Millie Bobby Brown,” the star’s makeup line, Florence by Mills Beauty, sells countless beauty products that promise to “correct” your face: “Millie Bobby Brown helms a cosmetic company that generates $30 million a year by framing near-universal physical traits as problems to be solved — essentially, tearing young girls apart for “simply existing” (although the tone is of course upbeat and positive) and profiting from it.”

There it is again: the reiteration that there is something wrong with you for looking the way you naturally do, delivered in a verbiage that suggests conforming to change these flaws is empowering. It’s not.

The website for the company reads on its home page, in all lowercase letters to appear hip and cool, the way young people tend to type: “florence by mills is about defining beauty on our own terms. no rules. no struggle toward perfection. no boring beauty standards.” Meanwhile, the Call it Even Color-Correcting Powder promises to “revitalize a dull complexion” and fight the “appearance of dark spots,” and the Built to Lash Lengthening Mascara promises lashes that look “*almost* too lush to be real.” What part of this defies beauty standards? What part of using this makeup renders the pursuit of beauty done on “our own terms”? It seems to me that the products only reinforce the idea that there is something wrong with women for looking the way they naturally do.

There’s been a societal shift; a rebrand backed by makeup companies themselves that suggests conforming to beauty standards is somehow empowering, or done for oneself. What we have to realize is that it is impossible to divorce beauty standards from their origins and their functional purpose in society: suppressing and devaluing women. Additionally, many beauty standards exist to further marginalize features associated with people of color. The allure of thinness itself comes from white people wanting to distance themselves from the so-called “savage” Black people being carted to the Western world. (Recommended reading: Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fatphobia by Sabrina Strings, Belly of the Beast by Da’Shaun L. Harrison, or What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon.) Plastic surgeons across the world post before and after transformation photos making people’s noses smaller, narrower, and closer to the European (read as: white) beauty ideal, and social media is overrun with beauty tutorials on how to contour your nose to achieve this same aim. Everywhere you look there is an advertisement, a TikTok trend, or workout program pointing out one more thing for you to be insecure about and one more product you can buy to “fix” it. All in the name of self love, isn’t that it?

Beauty is a means of subjugation by the patriarchy, and you can’t erase that fact just because it’s inconvenient to.

When people say “I just feel better when I weigh less” or “I just feel more empowered when I have makeup on,” I get it. I really do. Both of those statements are ones I agree with, unfortunately. Part of me is ashamed to say that, but the other part knows that I’ve been conditioned for 23 years to think this way. And I’m not suggesting that everyone suddenly accept their bodies, stop wearing makeup, or quit their diets. As I said before, looks are capital, and with capital comes survival. Or at the very least, higher self-esteem. Both anecdotally (from any woman you know) and statistically, women are treated better when they look “better.” More like human beings. And that feels good. A brilliant essay on the matter is “Fascism thrives on self doubt” by Sisipho Mbuli. I’ll include an excerpt here:

“Fascism does not need to tell women to submit. It simply creates conditions where submission looks like self-improvement. And so, beauty is transformed into duty. Thinness becomes discipline. Grooming becomes morality. Aging becomes failure. We have been told that beauty is a personal pursuit, a harmless aspiration, a choice. But when an entire society is structured around the relentless demand for women to strive toward an ever-moving standard, it ceases to be a choice at all. Beauty has never just been about attractiveness. It has always been about legitimacy. About who is allowed to take up space without hesitation. About who gets to be seen, who gets to be heard, and who is forced to shrink themselves in the hopes of being accepted. About who is granted ease, protection, desirability, and ultimately, humanity.”

One of the worst parts of all of this is that so many beauty (and body) trends are marketed as fun, harmless. I don’t have TikTok, but somehow against my will I seem to hear about every trend that’s happening on there, like “strawberry girl” makeup, pilates arms, the “that girl” aesthetic, or clean girl makeup. These microtrends have devastating effects not only on the environment, as brands like Shein and Temu scramble to reproduce cheap versions of whatever fashion is trendy at the moment, products which will eventually end up in landfills surrounded by all the other formerly-trendy clothes, but our senses of self, too. These aren’t just aesthetics, they’re tools of oppression. Mbuli highlights exactly what is wrong with all of it, saying about the clean girl aesthetic, “it’s not just a look, but a performance of orderliness, restraint and quiet femininity. The slick-back hair, the minimal makeup, the neutral tones— an aesthetic that whispers: I take up space politely. And the way that this idea is connected to the belief that conventionally attractive women are often assumed to be more competent, kinder, and more trustworthy— a longstanding bias that authoritarian systems exploit.”

I’m tired. I’m tired of women needing to look a certain way to be taken seriously, I’m tired of hating my body for not looking the way I know it could with plastic surgery, I’m tired of so many of the women I love feeling like there is something wrong with them for having a body and being who they are.

I wish I had a better conclusion to this. May we loudly (or silently, if that’s the stage you’re at right now) rebel against the systems that keep us restricted, may we uplift those around us whether they do or don’t play into beauty standards, and please, for the love of God, may we never again say that we’re manipulating our bodies “for ourselves.”