There was a time when wearing make-up was seen as being the height of vulgar: good girls simply didn’t wear make-up or paint their nails. We are mercifully far past this time or, at least, some of us are.
I know I shouldn’t have been on the internet at 3 in the morning: indeed, the same rule that ‘nothing good happens at parties after 2am’ is almost certainly applicable to internet browsing. However, my insomnia wouldn’t hear of it and I ended up on a web page where full grown women were tearing into each other with all the ardour of a pack of starving hyenas. The bone of contention: make-up.
The beginning of the thread was simple enough. A concerned friend was recounting how her friend had changed since she had started going out with a new man. Among other things, this gem of masculinity had insisted that his girlfriend not wear make-up anymore as he said that it wasn’t tasteful and that make-up cheapened women.
If someone doesn’t like you for all that you are, blusher and all, there’s no point in dimming your shine to accommodate them
I didn’t think I needed to steel myself for the opinions of my fellow sex but, boy oh boy, was I wrong. I expected the odd puritan opinion here and there and the usual embellished Pinterest quote about how smiles say it all, but what I didn’t see coming was that a great number of women were openly advocating that you should change whatever is necessary to make your man happy and roundly calling make-up users fake and superficial. It was like I had gone into a time machine and landed in a small village in rural Sicily where make-up users were sinful ladies of the night.
Now, I’m not one who believes that one should pile it on as if they were decorating a figolla; God knows, I don’t. However, what I do believe in is the choice of people to put on whatever make-up they want, whenever they want to, without being torn to pieces.
If you don’t like make-up, don’t use it but, if someone else does, you can either get a life and not comment about their choice in a derogatory way or you can do what has become unthinkable in 2018 and not share your opinion.
As for the part about not wearing make-up and changing yourself solely to please a man you barely know to pander to whatever insecurities and issues he may have, the less said about that, the better for everyone.
If someone doesn’t like you for all that you are, blusher and all, there’s no point in dimming your shine to accommodate them or crying over it; your mascara is too expensive anyway.