A Rash On My Face Made Me Reassess My Relationship With Makeup. Here’s What I Learned.
Can you wear makeup and still call yourself a feminist?
I was 14 when I started wearing makeup seriously.
On vacation in Tenerife, my mum noticed me gloomily studying my acne-flecked reflection in the mirror of our hotel room. “I think you’re old enough for a little bit of foundation,” she said, pulling out a little bottle of liquid that was almost (but not quite—for it was the 90s and we worked with the tools we had) the same color as her skin. She pumped a splodge onto the back of her hand, and began the process of smearing it onto my face.
In my teens, spare money from my Saturday job went straight to filling my makeup bag with little compacts and palettes. Pillowcases were ruined by striped eyeshadow and lurid blush—I didn’t yet understand the importance of cleansing after makeovers. One day at school, a teacher angrily handed me facewipes to remove the iridescent green eyeliner-and-purple-mascara look I had gotten up 30 minutes early to apply. Worth it: In the 20 minutes I’d worn it, one of the cool girls said she liked it.
In my 20s, makeup became my war paint as I tackled the early years of my career. I was working for a property trade magazine in the days when everyone needed a “personal brand,” and mine was “going out of my way to look like I don’t belong at this real estate industry event.” My strategy of trying to look like the “fun one”—bleached hair, winged eyeliner and red lips in a sea of men in grey suits—made me stand out to sources. They were curious enough to want to talk to me.
The day after I had my first child, my best friend offered this piece of advice, which I followed to the letter: “When you feel exhausted and you haven’t had a shower and your boobs are leaking, put some red lipstick on before you go out. People will just see the red lips and say ‘wow, you’re doing so well.’” She wasn’t wrong. Also, the bright red lips made me feel less exhausted.
But now, that fun is over. My skin has started to reject makeup.
It started small: a few spots at the corner of my eyes. But before long, it started to spread, scudding across my eyelids like clouds. Nearly three months later, it is a mainstay of my face. On good days, the color fades and it is just a cluster of bumps, which now spill down the side of my face, with a matching set around my nose. On bad days it flares, the red patches circling my eyes, an angry shadow of the smokey eye I would spend hours perfecting in my early 20s.
“Kind of like a funny panda…?” I ventured to my 5-year-old when she first noticed it.
“You don’t look like a funny panda, Mummy,” she replied with a look of deep concern. “You look weird.”
Applying anything to my face makes The Rash (I capitalize it, like the title of a horror movie) angrier. I can’t wear moisturizer, or SPF, or serums. I certainly can’t wear foundation or eyeshadow or powder or blush. I feel exposed. My many imperfections—oily forehead, large-ish pores, acne scars, The Rash itself—are all on display for the world to see. When I meet friends, I feel I need to warn them: “The Rash and I will see you later. It’s angry today.”
Yes, But What About Feminism?
It’s hard to square this feeling of vulnerability with being a feminist (and frankly even harder to square it with the real issues that are going on in the world). Good feminists don’t care about makeup (or so we’re supposed to believe), because they know makeup is designed to ensure women conform to Arbitrary Cultural Norms—a coyly-flushed cheek or a thin nose or a full lip (we always use the Beauty Singular) or whatever is en vogue at the time.
These cultural norms have been around for a long time. For as long as society has existed, women have looked for ways to adapt their features to fit with trends: from Neanderthals, who may have used the caveman equivalent of body shimmer, to Cleopatra’s kohl (which may also have protected against eye infections) to Elizabethan courtiers’ pale, lead-based face powder.
This is the case around the world: In the 18th century, the Japanese geisha gained prominence, with their white-painted faces, red-and-black eyes and red lips. Actually, red lips seem to be something of a global (and historic) makeup trend. In wartime Europe, it was a symbol of defiance; in ancient Greece, sex workers were mandated to wear it.
These days, we have Kim Kardashian’s contouring. We have Korean face lifts and Brazilian butt lifts and companies marketing their skincare products to children.
In fact, according to a study by YouGov, 74% of American women wear makeup at least occasionally. (The survey didn’t look at men.) Almost half of women—46%—spend less than 10 minutes applying it: a lick of mascara or a slash of lipstick; ready to go.
The question, really, is why women wear it. Asked to select all that apply from a list of reasons, 49% said it’s for a confidence boost, 30% said it’s to cover blemishes. And 35% chose “societal expectations.” For me, it’s all those things—plus a little bit of creativity, and enjoying the ritual of it. It’s 30 minutes I get to spend on myself before I spend the day on others.
Tool of the Patriarchy?
Makeup is used so much that even noted feminists can’t agree on whether or not its use makes the user a tool of the patriarchy. The feminist writer Andrea Dworkin was against conforming to conventional standards of beauty because, she wrote in her 1974 book “Woman Hating,” they “prescribe [a woman’s] motility, spontaneity, posture, gait, the uses to which she can put her body… [and] the relationship between physical freedom and psychological development, intellectual possibility, and creative potential is an umbilical one.” Standards created by the male gaze should not define women’s lives, she argued.
Meanwhile, Gloria Steinem, one of the most notable and recognizable feminists in the world today, appeared in a marketing campaign for Jones Road Beauty, a brand owned by her friend Bobbi Brown. In a video posted to the company’s Instagram feed for International Women’s Day in 2023, a voiceover by Steinem urges women to “speak up when you’re in a room that should be 50-50 male and female, but isn’t.” It’s accompanied by shots of her wearing a sweater emblazoned with the Jones Road logo while peering into a compact and having powder applied to her face. The ad sets up a tricky juxtaposition for me: Feminism x Makeup. Somehow they don’t go together.
Jessica DeFino is an award-winning beauty writer who publishes the newsletter, The Review of Beauty.
She says her “Big Beauty Awakening”—the realization that our culture’s obsession with beauty might be somewhat unhealthy—came when she went through an experience similar to mine: a rash on her face which meant she couldn’t wear makeup or use skincare products “for months.”
“How could I have lived 27 years of my life and not found something else worthy in me [other than how I look]?” she wonders now.
“Because we are operating within systems that are powered by patriarchy, of course plenty of our decisions are not going to be explicitly feminist. That's just kind of part of the modern condition.”
In her book “Pixel Flesh,” the author Ellen Atlanta tries to understand why women feel the need to change their appearance to fit an idealized version of beauty. She quotes the psychologist Dr. Sophia Choukas-Bradley, who points out that “women and girls are socialized to believe that the most important thing about themselves is how they look and their sexual appeal…For girls, how they look is the number one predictor of how popular they are.” Perhaps that is why I feel the need to warn people about The Rash—because I know, subconsciously, that my appearance might underlie my popularity, and even feminists want friends.
Atlanta also points out that the wearing of makeup, the straightening or curling of hair, the shaving of legs and underarms, the painting of nails, the concealment of some features and the emphasis of others—is all effort. In finding ways to conform to society’s ideal of beauty, we are doing work—and in a capitalist society, labor is “the most vital of virtues.” That is a lesson we begin to learn at our mother’s knee.
DeFino agrees: “Beauty culture demands women invest their time, their money, their energy and their brain space to the pursuit of this standard that men are not held to. So if we want to be beautiful in the standardized, industrialized way that is upheld as a woman's duty, we have to participate in our own oppression by giving up our time, our money, our energy, our brain space.”
Labor of Love
As for me? Yes, applying makeup is labor—but it’s a labor that women have undertaken, often together, for generations. My mother insists (though I cannot verify) that she wore a “full face of makeup” during all three of her labors. My grandmother did not let chronic alcoholism disrupt her weekly hairdresser appointments—in fact, they were so important that when she traveled, she had to find a local salon, thus ensuring her hair never lost its zhuzh. My great-grandmother never allowed herself to be seen without a slash of red lipstick, even when she barely had any lips left, well into her 90s. “They were very glamorous women,” my mother still says of her mom and grandmother.
Wearing makeup makes me part of that: I still kiss a tissue after applying lipstick, just like my grandmother taught me. I have regularly scheduled salon appointments, because that’s what she did. So yes, maybe wearing makeup hasn’t made me a good feminist. But it does make me part of a good sisterhood.
Mara Altman
Suchandrika Chakrabarti
Josie Cox
