I’ve been doing my eyeliner since I was 15 years old, perfecting a cat-eye for the last seven years, for which I’m famous for with my friends. I don’t go anywhere without winged eyeliner, arched brows, and highlighter.
When I was a teenager, my interest in makeup stemmed from a combination of societal expectation; seeing glossy magazines with gorgeous celebrities, and the desire to impress my peers.
The popular girls started wearing makeup and all the boys responded positively, so, like most teenage girls, I wanted to wear makeup to impress them.
Now, as a queer feminist, I am no longer interested in impressing boys — but the confidence that comes from wearing makeup has lingered.
Female-identifying people often feel societal pressure to wear bras, shave their body hair, and wear makeup; but with many of us working from home during lockdown, there has been an opportunity to rebel against those standards.
While I admit that I haven’t worn a bra or shaved my legs in quite a while, wearing makeup is one ritual that I have kept.
Over the three lockdowns, I’ve been around family or housemates that couldn’t care less whether or not I put makeup on, but I continued to do my makeup every day as if I were going to work or to see friends simply because it made me feel better about the situation we were in.
Not only does makeup allow me to feel more ‘put together’ while lounging on the sofa in tracksuit bottoms, it gives me the extra boost I need to get through the day – a boost that so many are sorely lacking.
The small novelties we found during the first lockdown, such as baking sourdough and playing animal crossing, don’t feel the same now that we are nearly a year into a global pandemic that has killed over 100,000 people and separated all of us from our friends, family, loved ones, and normality.
For me, makeup is a sense of that normality. It’s a ritual that I do every day, and my mental wellbeing is massively improved by completing it no matter what I do or don’t get done that day.
It gives me confidence to see my face ‘transformed’ by makeup, and the time I carve out to do my makeup is peaceful, unencumbered by doom scrolling on Twitter and a thousand emails all labeled ‘urgent’.
During the pandemic, I’ve had the opportunity to experiment more with my makeup looks. I often will do outlandish colours and eyeliner styles that I wouldn’t have had the courage to do before for fear of judgement or criticism – I can’t exactly paint a butterfly on my face if I’m going into the office can I?
This experimentation has done wonders for my skill and my confidence. I feel more comfortable doing non-traditional makeup looks now and am happy to showcase them without the fear that I used to have of doing it ‘badly’.
I started an Instagram account a few months ago to showcase my makeup looks, and to curate the accounts I follow for further inspiration in the future. While social media can have negative impacts on how you feel about your own face or body, my account has no followers and I like it that way because the beauty I find in doing fun makeup looks is for me and me alone. Don’t get me wrong, I love when a friend compliments me on that day’s eyeliner colour but compliments are not my motivation.
I’m not the only one who feels this way. Makeup has long been used as a form of self-expression and as a mood-booster, particularly for people in the LGBT+ community. Drag queens are a popular example of this as they use makeup to transform themselves completely – while not all drag queens identify as queer or LGBT+, many do, and being in drag allows them to express their sexual or gender identities in a unique way.
One in twenty British men wear makeup, according to a YouGov poll conducted in 2019, a stark difference while 28% of women wear makeup every single day. Additionally, even though we’re unable to see anyone, it doesn’t mean they’re not seeing us.
Social media, particularly Tik Tok and Instagram, is how we are keeping in touch with the outside world and makeup influencers are par for the course on either platform.
I understand those who have chosen to forego makeup throughout lockdown and possibly afterwards, suggesting that it is either pointless or simply a product of a patriarchal world that forces us to wear makeup and look presentable at all times.
But, I think that feminism has allowed us to view makeup as something empowering, that we do for ourselves rather than for the patriarchy, so I will not be stopping my makeup routine anytime soon.
It fills me with confidence and positivity to meticulously go through each step and to subsequently see the final product in the mirror or in the standard work-from-home selfie.
Doing a full face of makeup every day has got me through the previous lockdowns, giving me hope that one day we’ll be out of this crisis and I can do my makeup for a dinner date or a night out instead of for my living room, and I will keep doing it until that happens.
