A Response to: “Should Girls Wear Makeup?”

Link: http://thequietvoice18.wordpress.com/2012/06/13/should-girls-wear-makeup-and-why-not-to-call-girls-pretty/

What’s with all this hype about if girls should wear makeup?

It is implanted in some minds that girls who wear makeup somehow lack intellect and brains.  They are looked down upon for wasting more time on their appearance instead of learning how to perform brain surgery, becoming president of the United States, or finding the solution to the water crisis in lesser developed countries.  Thomas Le, the author of the article linked above, states “there comes a time when excess leads to error.”  He goes on to prove that today’s younger generation spends too much time worrying about their appearance as opposed to worrying about the world around them and the problems that must be solved.

All of these articles that try and point teenagers away from makeup seem to miss a major point – why girls wear makeup.  Although I recognize it is not exactly fair for me to be the voice of all of teenage girls, I can say why I personally wear makeup.  I wear makeup because I feel a million times better about myself when I have it on.  There is no way I will ever be capable of changing the world or “enhancing my mental abilities” if I do not even have an ounce of self-confidence.

But for some people, it is wrong of me not to have confidence without makeup.  They expect me to take refuge in their dry, unsympathetic words “Everyone is beautiful!”  Here’s the thing about confidence and beauty – a million people could tell a girl she is beautiful, but it will never change the way she feels about herself.  There are multiple ways I gain confidence; I should not be shunned since makeup happens to be one of those ways.  

Then, there is the phrase “brainwashed by society” and “society’s expectations” which are referenced multiple times in the article.  I am sick and tired of seeing that phrase to the point where I cringe in disgust.  It is a plague of the mind; it infects me with anger and makes me unbelievably irked.  What does that even mean?  Who and what is ‘society’ and why is it made up of such bad people?  The answer is we are society, and we are not bad people for deriving our view of beauty from the media.  Why is it so wrong of me to praise aesthetics in certain people and brains in others?  There is nothing wrong with liking a celebrity like Selena Gomez just because she is pretty, just like there is nothing wrong with liking the winner of the Google Science Fair for teens, Brittany Wenger, just because she is smart.  Although Gomez gets much more media attention than Wenger, it does not mean I value one over the other.  I look up to them both for different reasons.  Although we do not have absolute control over the media, after all we cannot control advertisements on billboards or what magazines we come across at the checkout of a grocery market, isn't it ultimately our choice whether we watch E! News Style Watch or Jeopardy at night?  

In response to the question that sparked Le to write his article, "Should girls wear makeup," that question should not even have been proposed in the first place.  It should be universally known and accepted that girls can do absolutely whatever they want to do with their face and their body without being shunned by "society" and degraded into a status of intellectual inferiority.