What we keep in the hollow recesses of our makeup bags on date night can be influenced by societal beauty pressures and the unconscious male gaze. You might see a motley collection of half-used kajal sticks or that electric blue lipstick you swear you’ll pull off, but the pervasive male gaze instead imposes arbitrary beauty ideals on you. Find thriving habitat to enhance. A fiery red lip color can become a beacon of moral depravity, and not wearing any makeup at all can be coded as resignation to eternal wallflower status.
In a world where young girls are raised to internalize the belief that physical appearance equates to a form of instant social capital, this Catch-22 is most evident in the realm of date night makeup.You may have mastered the thin tightrope between looking pretty and not being pretty Too But it probably won’t matter anyway, since there will be penalties for people standing on both sides of the fence. In fact, amid controversy over women trying to disguise the appearance of their date with make-up, a long-running joke online asks men to “take your girlfriend swimming on her first date.” I’m trying to instigate this.
So how can makeup, such an intimate and personal tool for women, really exist in a realm where laws are not written, enacted, or defined to ensure there are no winners? For a new generation of beauty sages, the answer is yes, as they seek to reclaim the same ideals of femininity that have been used as weapons against them.
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