Are the Women Wearing Too Much Makeup? and Why Does the Atlantic Care?
This 2014 article gains traction again with its inflammatory headline. This is a fairly straightforward summary of the study, but the headline elicits angry voices for being blamed on women.
Caption: Why So Many Women Do So Much Makeup? (Atlantic Ocean)
Story: Based on the assumption that women wear makeup to be attractive – to attract men sexually and because attractive women gain social power among their peers – the researchers wanted to test whether makeup wearers’ perceptions were correct about what makeup will help. … They photographed women with naked faces and put on makeup for the night in the city. They then used imaging software to create a spectrum of differently shaped images that viewers could appreciate.
Researchers have found that women tend to overestimate how much makeup they should wear for maximum attractiveness. The men and women viewing the images were asked to choose the face or faces that they considered most attractive — to themselves, to men, and to women. Viewers of both genders found women the most attractive with about 65% of their makeup, but they suggested that other viewers would have liked more makeup, especially when they predicted what men would find attractive. However, even this exceeded roughly 85% of actual makeup models.
These findings are based on the encouraging strain of research that finds that the over-the-top claims about attractiveness we receive from the media and society at large are not true. We see very skinny, very white, heavily painted women – or very muscular men – and assume that this is what people find attractive. It is encouraging that this is not the case.
However, this is not a particularly comprehensive or progressive study. It is based on a lot of assumptions and narrow gender concepts: primarily that women wear makeup to be attractive, and that go-out makeup is makeup for attractiveness. (It may be amplified so that your features are visible in the dark stripe.) The women photographed were all white and young, averaging about twenty years old. The authors of the study consider gender as a pure binary, and attraction as heteronormative, believing that women want to be attractive to men for sexual reasons and to women in terms of social status. Yes, there is someresearch to support this, but many women may view this concept as patriarchally imposed, and this premise is unlikely to apply to all women and should not be taken at face value. So to speak.
Takeaway: If you are a woman and wear makeup to look more attractive, you may be better off achieving this goal by wearing a little less clothing than if you were going out at night. But that’s not the only reason a person might use makeup – a fact that is accidentally missing from this study and the heading above.