The Misconception: Makeup is used by women to reduce the appearance of blemishes and aging.
The Truth: Makeup enhances the contrast of the human face, allowing for faster recognition of gender.
Read more at You Are Not So Smart, one of my new favorite blogs.
Lipstick has been used to advertise certain sexual proclivities by prostitutes since Roman times and before.
Lipstick also serves as a sun protectant. Women who regularly wear lipstick have a significantly reduced risk of getting skin cancer in that area.
And wasn’t eye makeup, worn by both men and women, in Egypt used as a means of reducing sun glare on the eyes?
No, that was the NFL.
And cricket matches.
While this may be true as to why women as a whole wear makeup, on a personal level, most young girls do in fact use makeup to cover blemishes. Some men do this as well with skin-colored acne medication.
This article is interesting, but it makes a lot of assumptions about the decision making process women go through when applying and choosing their cosmetics.
I’m not convinced.
Firstly, makeup has been used by men and women throughout history. This article fails to show any examples of differences between the way men and women use makeup which would support the idea that makeup is explicitly about the distinctions between men and women.
I think it’s fair to say that modern makeup is about accenting the face to make it more like an “idealised” female face. That face has all of the things the author mentions – contrast, and the subtle appearance of fertility – but being idealised, also includes a freedom from imperfections. The two uses, which the author treats as mutually exclusive, aren’t really.
I also take exception to his assertion of causality. He suggests that women use makeup to emphasise (to the point of caricature) the differences between men and women; I think there’s an argument that our perception of femininity has a strong cultural element. It’s fair to say that a woman who wears makeup is more instantly definable as a woman, but whether that’s because the makeup is accentuating a universal concept of femininty, or because we are conditioned to recognise someone with features exaggerated by makeup as feminine is not so clear.
The more I think about it, the more I’m annoyed by the reductionist, not to mention gender binarist, idea that the point of makeup is communicated “I’m a girl!” – makeup is about communication, and your gender identity might be one of the things you’re communicating, but it’s not the only thing, and may well not be the most important thing.
Yeah, I’m with you on the ahistorical bit. Makeup has never been uniquely female (use of kohl by both genders in Egypt being the most obvious example).
But even more than this, the forms of makeup for women have changed significantly through the years. In late medieval Europe it seems likely that eyeliner/eyeshadow was really not in use, while lightening foundation and lipstick were in use – since it would have been quite possible to have eye makeup (same sort of ingredient spectrum as the other cosmetics in use) this rather drives a bus through his evolutionary psychological bullshit.
As for becoming more fair during ovulation meaning women want to be pale – I totally call bullshit. Women want to be pale when rich women are pale, they want to be brown when rich women are brown. It’s a marker of wealth and status – same as whether fat or thin women are considered the ideal.
Bluntly this assumes a singular model of female beauty that exists for evolutionary reasons, without considering any socio-cultural issues. In other words, run of the mill evolutionary psychology ‘just so story’ bollocks.
The Wodaabe would like a word with you.
Visit our gay community…..good luck. I live in it and some nights I can’t tell the difference between man, woman or it! I’ve known men that wear make-up and not just on Halloween!
Meh, men can wear makeup too.
I don’t wear any because I’m rebellious (and lazy) like that.
and dresses, and long eye lashes, and bras, and girdles, just as lesbians don’t usually wear any make-up or any of the items previously mentioned. The sexes, on appearance, are getting so mixed up, I almost can’t tell the difference….unless of course I pass a gay bar and see a bearded man in a dress calling out bingo numbers…..REALLY attractive……ugh! How could “god” get everything so utterly mixed up….trans-sexual….trans gender. You’d almost think he’s probably in some lab,cooking up another genetic mess and getting a good laugh out of it….if he or the lab existed.
Gender ambiguity could be one way we’re subconsciously dealing with overpopulation. Approaching girls used to be hard – now we’re not so sure it’s girls we’re even after.
..That could be interpreted in a few ways. That’s probably for the best.
Oh, the possibilities!
Thanks for the link to the site, I think it has a lot of great thought provoking articles.
Way back in school, an archeologist said that it is a form of sexual signaling. If you observe a couple going at it hot and heavy you could notice, if you look, that the girls lips will increase in size and get more red, as will the cheeks and the virginal area, too. This also happens in the related areas on men. The wearing of lipstick, rouge (in various places) mimics this arousal and tells the people around you (potential sex partners) that you are hot and ready. We all wanted to try to duplicate the experiment but were vetoed so I only have her word for this.
I also was going to mid-east culture classes at the Pennsic War (google it) where they said the women used the henna as a way to accent the mouth, eyes, and hands to make following their speech or dance movements easier.
Also the henna, tattoos, and other body marks were used because to islamic men rape is against the kakaran but since xtians & jews were not true people its OK to rape them, and xtians & jews of that period were forbidden to mark their bodies, so islamic men can tell the difference.
The above is 2nd hand , but it makes some kind of sense.