In case you don't watch NBC's The Voice or truly couldn't care less about popular culture, Alicia Keys has stopped wearing makeup. She even performs barefaced, usually modestly dressed, with her unprocessed hair tied in a colorful wrap. While I'm long past the point of copying celebrities, her decidedly counter-cultural decision has still managed to make me think about my own contradictory relationship to visual self-enhancement.
Although she is by far the most consistent, Ms. Keys isn't the only celebrity who has appeared without makeup. While there are still websites and tabloid articles devoted to showing how awful famous people look “undone,” there are multiple links to candid, flattering photographs and selfies of unadorned people with household names, young and somewhat older, women of European and diverse backgrounds (feel free to ignore the opinionated comments in this video). The trend even has a hashtag (NoMakeup). My reactions? A lot of young, gorgeous women have freckles! And why is this a big deal?
Sex, Death and Power
The question is disingenuous, because makeup is just one of the many ways women (including me) feel we have to modify ourselves to be acceptable. There are practical aspects of grooming—washing our skin, combing our hair, brushing our teeth, putting on some sort of clothing—and there are aspects that are frivolous. Makeup tops of the list.
Then again, maybe not, because if we look a little more closely, wearing makeup is tied to the usual suspects of human motivation: sex, power, and avoiding death. We play up our eyes and mouths so that someone will gaze into the windows of our soul, and maybe even kiss us afterward. Foundation is supposed to make us look ageless, as in, not close to death. Blush is often used to create the illusion of a healthy glow. As for power, consider Richard Nixon's television debate with John F. Kennedy. With a better face powder, who knows how things might have turned out for Tricky Dick?
My relationship with makeup
My own relationship with makeup is friendly, although we're not as close as we used to be. I started an elaborate daily routine as soon as I was allowed, in high school, because I wanted to be attractive to boys. When I realized that less could be more, my makeup got simpler, but I still felt self-conscious going barefaced in public unless I was about to swim. Having children in my 30's meant doing my makeup in 5 minutes or less, but I still felt that I wasn't putting my best foot forward if I didn't have at least some eye makeup and lipstick on outside the house, even to run errands.
Then I got smile lines. I tried to cover them, but only briefly. Instead, I took a long look at my face. It wasn't the same, it would never be the same, but it occurred to me that there is no shame in being older. In addition, thanks to my bad marriage, focusing on how men perceived me had become a very low priority. Maybe I was hiding from that attention for a while, maybe not. Doesn't matter; either way, I decided that my face is my face.
That said, I still wear makeup when I'm performing, because using that face as a canvas can be fun. I rarely spend more than five minutes even then, but I'd be a hypocrite to look down on women who like to wear makeup every day. I just wish that being made up weren't so often synonymous with being “presentable.”
Makeup shouldn’t matter
The correlation isn't new—historically, how long we spend preparing for an event demonstrates how much that event matters to us, which might be why, the first time I saw Alicia Keys on television without makeup, I thought she looked unfinished. Similarly, the first pictures in the collections I've included above of celebrities without makeup on appeared bland. The more pictures I examined, however, the more it made sense to me that I so rarely bother with anything but moisturizer. Human females' faces, it turns out, are quite wonderful au naturel.
To get philosophical, am I a better person if I'm wearing eyeliner? Then again, am I a better person with earrings, or wearing something other than sweatpants? The ritual of putting on a gown before I go onstage helps me get into the mindset for performing, but maybe that's just because I never got used to going onstage in jeans. The thing is, I like wearing pretty dresses. They shouldn't matter, though, anymore than most people care about dressing up to listen to me perform, these days.
Alicia Keys' response to the inevitable question about makeup during a recent TODAY show interview was this: “Do what feels good to you...All of us should be honest to ourselves...instead of trying to please every damn body.” This sounds obvious, but it isn't. When you are already famous, it's easier to rewrite the rules, and when your fame is in the arts, the rules are a lot more fluid. A woman who wants to climb the corporate ladder has to dress according to the code, or risk seeming unprofessional or even lazy, as one link to pictures of barefaced celebrities lightheartedly described it. This is ridiculous, unless we're models, and wearing makeup is part of our job. Whether or not that should be the case is a whole other article.