Eleven days into my senior year, I decided to try something new. Usually that involves some active effort: purchasing supplies, acquiring a skill set and/or participating in an activity. But this something new was different: it was about restraint and inactivity, it was a brave act of doing nothing at all. I was going to skip my daily makeup routine. To be more specific, I decided to go makeup-free every Monday, both on campus and online at my blog Fashionably Frum, a place where I post modest fashion and beauty inspiration, as well as articles on Judaism, feminism and marriage.
It wasn’t that I disliked what had turned into a daily makeup regimen. Au contraire–I loved it. I adored staring into my reflection, my lips parted into an oval, one eye closed, my elbow bent at a forty-five degree angle with a mascara wand poised between my fingers. A swipe of hot pink or cool purple lipstick helped me feel fierce. A perfectly applied line across my eyelid made me feel like I had my life together. (Author’s note: As if.) A dusting of coral blush lit up my face and brightened my mood.
My problem with makeup was that I had stopped liking how I looked and felt without it. My journey with makeup has already been documented in my post about deciding to participate in Makeup Free Mondays, but let’s just say that it started as a pure pleasure and morphed into a habit that I felt I wasn’t allowed to quit. I embarked on Makeup Free Mondays in an effort to reclaim my face so that makeup wear could feel like a true choice again. I wanted to fall back in love with my bare skin, so that a day without makeup didn’t feel like a small failure in the art of femininity. Going without makeup not only gave me more confidence about rocking a bare face, it also brought the joy of novelty back into selecting sparkly eye shadows during the rest of week, feelings I sometimes missed when daily makeup wear turned into an obligation.
Almost every Monday since the start of the semester, I’ve skipped makeup and posted a selfie on Fashionably Frum’s Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr pages. The responses I’ve received in the form of Internet comments from women I don’t know personally and conversations with my friends and acquaintances have varied from applause to apathy.
Some of these women have lauded me for having the courage and confidence that it apparently takes to post selfies of my bare face. They’ve told me they would be too afraid to post a makeup-free selfie, or even leave the house with a bare face. They’ve confessed that they feel ugly or bad about themselves on the days they skip makeup.
Some have completely side-stepped the makeup free thing, ignored the paragraph I wrote on the matter and just let me know that my tichel or sheitel or whatever I had on my head was ‘killing it.’ My thick eyebrows have elicited envy on multiple occasions. (I must confess that in learning to love my face, I didn’t feel the need to toss my tweezers and embrace my naturally occurring unibrow.)
Some of these selfies are met with not a single comment, just loud silence. Perhaps the loudness of this silence is a reflection of how vulnerable I feel when I post a photo of my blemished face in hopes of sparking conversation, inspiration and body positivity. Perhaps I’m vain, just like anyone who posts selfies on Instagram in the hopes of receiving likes, comments and affirmation. Still, it’s interesting to note that the absence of comments on my Makeup Free Mondays selfies bothers me more than this same void when it appears on my Outfit of the Day posts.
Whether I receive seven comments or none, the one glaringly absent response to my makeup-free selfies is criticism. I have not received a single negative comment regarding these posts. Not that I usually receive negative feedback on my pages; my friends and followers are an especially lovely group of (mostly) women. But does an overwhelmingly positive response indicate that Makeup Free Mondays is an entirely positive and worthy endeavor?
The consistent affirmation that I look beautiful even without makeup serves some good. It reassures me that I don’t need makeup to look beautiful, as my inner beauty shines through no matter what. These comments (and the selfies themselves) hopefully help other girls and women internalize this message, which is one of my goals for Makeup Free Mondays.
But is that the only thing this reassurance accomplishes? I captioned one post as follows:
“Did you even notice the constellation of persistent zits on my chin or that one pimple by my nose? Was your first thought upon seeing this selfie that I’m not wearing any makeup? The acne is all I see and the lack of makeup is all I think about when I look at this picture. I bet a lot of women can relate when it comes to their own makeup-free faces. Which is kind of sad, because we are SO much more than whether or not we decide to put on makeup in the morning! #Makeupfreemonday is a sometimes challenging, sometimes freeing experiment and experience for me. I’m learning to #embracemybareface and realizing that no one scrutinizes or judges my bare skin and “imperfections” as much as I do. #iwokeuplikethis #flawless
My followers rushed to assure me that they didn’t even notice the flaws to which I called attention. They promised me that I always look beautiful. They complimented my eyes, my tichel or my entire face.
These are lovely comments, but I did not post the picture or the caption as a cry for this reassurance that I’m beautiful with or without makeup. I did not really need to be told that no one else noticed the zits on my chin. I acknowledged that I’m usually the only one who sees my own facial ‘flaws’ with such intensity. I shared the photo and wrote the caption to illustrate this phenomenon of self-scrutiny.
The compliments that immediately followed actually made me feel…uncomfortable. The immediate “Don’t worry! You look beautiful, even though you aren’t wearing makeup!” response reminds me of the way we rush to sooth a woman who expresses self-consciousness about her body by assuring her that she’s thin. This reassurance serves to reiterate the discourse that being fat is unacceptable. Similarly, assuring me that I’m beautiful no matter what implies that as a woman I must be beautiful. It implies that being anything but beautiful is the worst thing I can possibly be. It connects my worth to my appearance in ways with which I’m uncomfortable. And yes, of course Makeup Free Mondays also implicitly connects self-worth with appearance, but…Makeup Free Mondays does not exist in a vacuum. The effort to love my bare face and turn makeup wear into a truly free choice is not a private struggle, but one shared by a larger female demographic. It is not my initiative, but a larger movement across social media that aims to help women engage with contemporary ideologies about women, beauty, self esteem, appearance and self-worth. The Makeup Free Mondays movement is a response to Western culture’s obsession with feminine beauty; a response to absurd, transient and artificially constructed beauty ideals; a response to the media that constantly pressures and obligates women to beautify ourselves using whatever means of beautification currently on the market.
But does assigning a specific day to go makeup-free imply that wearing makeup is — and should be — the default? In a way, designating a day for going without makeup serves to reinforce the very beauty ideals that Makeup Free Mondays sets out to question. Perhaps it sets up new standards for what women should do with our faces. Perhaps it makes women who wear makeup every day and women who never wear makeup feel bad about these decisions.
I like to think that any bad feelings this initiative creates are evidence that it’s working — not only is it comforting the disturbed, but it is also disturbing the comfortable. Of course it’s as valid to wear makeup every day as it is to never wear makeup or to only wear makeup occasionally. But a movement that encourages women to skip makeup once a week encourages all these women to consider or reconsider the motivations behind their choices. Perhaps they will come out of this with a reaffirmation of their choices and their behavior won’t change. Perhaps they will realize that they’ve been making decisions unconsciously and will begin to question their motives more and to live with more intent, whatever beauty choices they make. Either way, the goal is to encourage critical thought about an issue that might feel like a non-issue and to challenge the current norms. That doesn’t happen without making a few people at least a little uncomfortable.
Makeup Free Mondays should not need to exist. Women should feel that the decision to wear makeup is a true, self-determined choice, whether we want to wear makeup every day of the week or not. But all the positive feedback I’ve received means that women, at least the sample of women who have reached out to me, don’t feel this way. It means that we do need Makeup Free Mondays. It means it’s changing the world, at least insomuch as it’s changing the way that some of my readers engage with makeup, their faces and their experiences of the world.
We receive messages daily that encourage us to be self-critical, because an entire industry thrives on women’s insecurities in order to sell us products that we probably don’t need. Advertising executives and the companies they represent feed their bank accounts on our low self-esteem. Intentionally skipping makeup, even once a week, is about changing that dialogue, with myself and with my followers. It is a radical act of self-love and self-acceptance in a society that enforces and feeds off of our low self-regard.
It says, ‘my bare face is just right.’ It says, ‘I am enough.’ It says, ‘I am good exactly how I am, exactly at this moment, whatever acne pops up this morning, whatever I have to face this afternoon.’ It says that my looks aren’t everything and it’s okay if my eyeliner isn’t on fleek, because my soul always is.
Ready to join the movement? Post your makeup-free (or makeup-minimal) selfies on Facebook, Instagram or Tumblr and add the hashtag #gomakeupfreewithfashionablyfrum to be reposted. Don’t forget to follow @fashionablyfrum for more on fashion, feminism and Makeup Free Mondays.