Learning to Live Without Makeup

"I felt angry. Angry that I was looked at as unprofessional without manicured nails and eyelashes as thick as ants legs."

LEARNING TO LIVE

WITHOUT MAKEUP

STORY AND PHOTOS BY

BRIANA MUTLU

IN trying to write this article, I remembered one of my earliest memories. When I was 5, my grandparents were coming to visit. I put on a little yellow dress, combed my long brown hair and looked at myself in the mirror.

I started to sob, so loud my mother came in from the other room.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

The three little words that would follow me and so many other young girls fell out of my mouth without a push: “I am ugly.”

My mother lifted me up on her bathroom counter. She said something about making me feel better and started to put makeup on me.

A cure for my insecurities was born.

From the time I was 9 until I was 15, I would spend an hour and a half doing my makeup and hair before leaving for school. I seldom missed my alarm, but if I ever did, the solution was simple. I wasn’t going to school that day. I spent roughly 2,000 hours doing my makeup by the time I was a junior in high school.

Instead of becoming a piano player or reading classic novels or even doing my homework, I became a master at contouring my chubby cheeks and painting the perfect wings on my eyes. Without ever getting closer to being comfortable with my actual face, I painted it in lies and hoped that people would believe it.

But I never really got close to beautiful because it was never my idea of beautiful. This concept of beauty was imposed on me ever since I watched my first movies

where the women, if they weren’t just there for an obligatory sex scene, always had soft blemishless skin and full red lips.

When you think of famous men, the names that come to mind are often people like Albert Einstein, Bill Gates and Muhammad Ali. Men who never looked gentle or weak, and often weren’t even attractive. They were fighters and creators and visionaries who were too concerned with a vision of something much larger than themselves to focus on combing their hair or wearing something besides a turtleneck and jeans.

Yet when we think of famous women, there is often one inescapable name: Marilyn Monroe. The obsession that American society has had with Monroe for over 60 years now is almost ironically indicative of its definition of what a woman should be. Her platinum hair, her flawless cream skin, her perfect figure always dressed in white to emphasize her own whiteness. Monroe’s greatest invention was the sexy baby voice. She never angered a man or made him feel uncomfortable, she was there only for his pleasure. For decades, she has been the inspiration and the bane for so many young women who, without understanding the implication of idolizing her, have seen her image plastered on shirts, billboards, movies, and lists of the most influential people of all time.

The Monroe effect, whether we are conscious of it or not, gives women very limited inspiration for the figure we hope to cut in the world. She embodied a very simple message that has been multiplied as time goes: Women must be beautiful, or they are nothing. Even at the age of 5, I knew this. It had gotten to me already.

Yes, I was afforded some pseudoliberties when I had on a full face of makeup. Doors were held open for me. I was given unwanted attention on the bus from someone usually 10 years my senior. I was able to get into bars despite not being 21.

When I came to college, I thought about the 2,000-plus hours I had wasted in front of the mirror. I kept thinking about

how I had been forced to believe that my natural face was inherently deficient.

Above all, I felt angry. Angry that I was looked at as unprofessional without manicured nails and eyelashes as thick as ants legs. Angry that I worked so hard trying to make myself “presentable” for the pleasure of others. Angry that my asymmetrical face, big-nosed and acnescarred, would never be beautiful to the world in which I bide my time.

I felt small and as if my fate had already been prescribed to me by some big, faceless, complex with which I could not communicate. In my frustrations, I swore to never wear makeup again.

But like an addict, I would relapse. After weeks or even months of being barefaced, I would crack when I was supposed to attend a party, go to work or even just to avoid the ever-present question: “Are you sick?”

The goal of this article isn’t to shame anyone for wearing makeup, but I just want you to think twice when you feel the urge. Stop and think about the time spent depending on false confidence.

Barefaced, we will never attain the beauty standard that has been pushed on us. But we have to create our own standard of beauty. We should feel comfortable in the face we wake up in, the face that greets us in the mirror after a shower. We are all beautiful, but the definition of beauty that they have taught us to believe simply keeps women as mere decorative objects.