Blogpost 3: "Make up one's self"

Make up has become a part of my daily routine. I wear it pretty much every time I go out even if I find it time consuming and sometimes even tiring. So why do I wear make up? Other than trying to protect my skin with all the spf my make-up has, I feel better about myself. I feel more ready and more confident to tackle the every day challenges I face because sometimes I feel like I'm not even me. I feel as if I have a sort of barrier protecting me from mistakes I might make. Of course my imperfections make me feel insecure. But why? Even when we all know that being imperfect makes us perfectly human. 

Why do females feel the need to wear make up?
I read in this article by Catherine Saint Louis: Up the Career Ladder, Lipstick In Hand, that when women wear make up, people tend to see them to be more competent with their work. People begin to judge and determine a woman's ability and job performance based on her attractiveness. It seems funny because we usually would think that an attractive woman isn't that bright because of a stereotype; however, because of the effects of make-up, women become or give out the impression that they are more confident. Of course, being a woman, I would take advantage of the effects of make-up because it benefits me more than it doesn't. I mean who wouldn't want to look attractive and at the same time confident even if it's just an effect of a temporary mask. Surely even for a little while, we would all like to have these traits to give us an advantage in work or just our everyday life.

Confidence as a result of all the make-up is short lived because we all know that at the end of the day, we still take off this masks.  
Even if it is already evident that we have to spend so much money, so much time and even so much energy for this artificial confidence, why do we do it? Funny thing about being accepted by the opposite sex is their specifications to identify that we are different. 
In the article Why Cosmetics Work: More Depth To Facial Differences Between Men And Women Than Presumed, a psychology professor, Richard Russell stated that: "We also use the amount of contrast in a face to judge how masculine or feminine the face is, which is related to how attractive we think it is." We use make-up because red lips, rosy cheeks and darker eyes appeal to 
males to show that we are feminine. It said in the article that these display that a female is already in ovulation period which means she is ready to reproduce.

Here we see how primitive we humans really are even if we have already evolved. It's interesting to know now that our make-up actually has a purpose other than to give us an artificial confidence; it also helps us find mates. I find it unfair however that women usually have to experience and go through pain just to attract mates. Pain as in emotionally, physically and figuratively because with this, it is painful for our pockets to spend so much money on makeup. What's worse than this though is the physical pain that we women voluntarily put ourselves in everyday. We allow this pain because we don't even notice it, we are merely trying to be accepted into society that searches for a certain type of beauty.