This is a guest post by the blogger, Alle Malice. Check out her blog to follow along as  this “sequin-loving, lipstick addicted drag queen trapped in a girl’s body” navigates relationships, becomes a grown-up and handles all the WTF that the world can dish out.

When Rachel started tossing around the idea of No Makeup Week, I was scared.

“What am I meant to write about?” I asked.

“Whatever you want!” she said.

Well then.

Before I begin, here is a picture of me without my usual defenses. No makeup, no Photoshop, no goofy faces. 100% nakedfaced.

Liberating…?

I’ll be honest: taking that picture felt really awkward. Which is weird, because there are plenty of times in my life that I don’t wear makeup. Why do I feel like so exposed now?

Why do I feel exposed without it in general?

And then I knew what I wanted to write about.

Collected here is a series of reasons why we “have” to wear makeup. Looking closer at these assumptions helped me understand my relationship with artifice a little better. Maybe it will for you, too.

Now repeat after me: I wear makeup because…

It makes me look better.

When I was talking to people about why they wear makeup, unsurprisingly this was the number one reason. It’s certainly mine. I don’t dislike my face, but I like it a lot more when my skin tone is evened out and my eyebrows are shaded darker to match my hair.

I, like many other girls, want to look perfect. We see these images of perfect models and celebrities and it’s baked into our subconscious as something attainable, yet a good ninety percent of it is powders and Photoshop. I know this for a fact because I used to model. Hours under hot lights with foundation cemented onto your skin…oh, the scarring acne! The yanked out eyelashes! The glamorous reality of making a living off your image! What could be less perfect?

It’s polished.

It’s a particularly rough fact of life that almost any woman who’s ever worked in an office will tell you: makeup isn’t optional. Along with the well-kept hair, the sleek clothes and the appropriate shoes, chic cosmetics are a necessity. It’s part of being a well-groomed woman in a way that there’s no equivalent for men.

A friend of mine who is a flight attendant told me that makeup is required by the airline she works for; it’s a part of her uniform. Having to wear it for every flight, sometimes as long as 14 hours at a stretch, has basically sucked the fun out of it for her.

While researching this, I saw a frequently cited study by Hamermesh (sometimes misspelled “Hammersmith) and Biddle which said that women who wore makeup earned 20 to 30% higher incomes than those who didn’t. This turns out to be incorrect. The article, Beauty in the Labor Market, doesn’t mention anything about cosmetics.

It’s part of being a girl.

I remember being a wee mini-Malice of three or four sitting on the edge of the bathtub, watching my Mum get ready for dinner parties. She’d take out each individual powder, palette and cream from her makeup bag and explain what it was. The shimmery silver eyeshadows and lightly scented lipsticks were like magical keys to me, keys that would someday open the door to the glamorous world of adults.

It’s a way for us to bond, too. In a million high schools around the world, a million teenage girls are crowding around the mirror. It’s a common point of contact for girls to connect to one another.

Of course, it’s probably no coincidence that all of this actualization places an emphasis on girls’ appearance. The only comparable male experience that I can think of is boys learning to shave, but even that’s not really the same thing. Shaving is not only a skill for men, it’s a practice that they can choose not to engage in without being “marked” by society as one thing or another. Beards, stubble, clean-shaven; all socially acceptable. Women, of course, can choose whether to wear make-up. But whichever we choose, we are marked by that choice. It SAYS something about us.

It’s fun.

Remember being thirteen and wearing crazy makeup? Bright blue eyeshadow! Black lipstick! Glitter everywhere! When was the last time you felt giddy and happy applying concealer or beige eyeshadow? EXACTLY.

Guys like it.

Though I couldn’t find any science to support this, anecdotal evidence tells me that hetero guys in general know very little about makeup. They can stare at a face full of subtle, well-applied cosmetics and not really know what they’re looking at. They may say that they don’t like girls who wear it–but to them, “makeup” means Tammy Faye Baker style; overdone, overblown, overpainted.

I’ll never forget the day a guy friend of mine was whining about his bad luck in love. “I just want to find a girl who’s pretty and who doesn’t wear any makeup,” he sighed. “You know, like you. You never wear it and you look great!”

I had to laugh, because he’s never seen me without makeup on. Not once in five years. He had no idea.

It makes me look good in photos.

Almost everything we do now is documented by someone and posted in Facebook albums for the world to see, because if you aren’t having fun on Facebook, you aren’t really having fun. And if you aren’t pretty on the internet, you aren’t pretty in real life. Enter makeup.

I think the underlying thing reason for this is anxiety. Social media makes it easier to connect with people that we want to hear from, but it also makes it harder to avoid people that we don’t. Much in the same way that you don’t want to run into an ex when you have just-woken-up hair and a hoodie with pasta sauce on it, you also probably don’t want your first boyfriend/third grade bully/Mom’s friend from church group seeing pictures of you at a barbecue with a giant zit on your forehead.

It used to be that people used to be most particular about makeup on special occasions:  their wedding day, big parties, etc, because they knew that everyone would see the pictures. But now that everyone can see pictures from every occasion, the pressure is on to always look good.

I want to look older.

I started wearing makeup on a regular basis when I was thirteen. This was partly motivated by my desire to fit in with the other girls and partly because I wanted to seem older. Older girls were taken seriously. Older girls were pretty to boys.

I want to look younger.

Wrinkle filler, collagen plumpers, fine line hiders. Because a woman is only as valuable as her hide dictates. Youth is valued; age is something to recoil from in horror.

I probably don’t need to explain HOW rotten this is. Women are seldom seen as sexually appealing as they age, while men can go on being babes well into their seventies. That wonderful double-standard is then taken by the beauty industry and turned into a fear–of aging, of growing old, of being past the sell-by date of femininity.

I talked to my mother about this.

“Well I don’t wear much…that stuff in a stick (concealer), powder, blush, mascara sometimes. I suppose I wear it because I don’t want to look haggard at work.”

So, it’s just the work thing?

“No, not just that. I want to look nice. Not wearing any powder or anything makes me look OLD. I might be sixty, but I don’t feel OLD.”

So makeup makes you feel younger and more vital?

“No way, it makes me feel pissed off. I feel like I never get it right, and that eye stuff smudges when I laugh.”

Then why do you wear it?

“When you’re my age, you don’t care as much about what people think of you. Those trash magazines? They aren’t trying to sell things to me anymore. They did when I was your age and cared, but now? What are they gonna tell me, that I’m old? I know I’m old, and nothing in a bottle is going to change that. I still look good. I’m comfortable with who I am, it doesn’t mean as much to be so self-obsessed.

I wonder out loud if I’ll ever feel that way. If I’ll ever feel like who I am is more valuable to the world than what I look like.

“Sure you will, honey. Sure you will.”

I know that I can’t ignore the world which constantly tells women that how they look is somehow wrong and can be “fixed.” All that I can control is how I internalize it, and I’m making the conscious choice to do so starting right now. Makeup is not going to change my life. It will not make me happier. It’s a tool and a mode of expression, not a mask or a wall to hide behind.

Ultimately, I am not my face or what I shellac on it. I am what’s in my head; my ideas, my thoughts, my words. These are the things that I am the most confident in, and these are the things that will last.

Loves you!