Ten-year-old me stares, entranced by the screen of my iPad with makeup influencer James Charles guiding his audience on a simple eyeshadow look. Every swirl, tap and swipe lures my young mind away from the outside world towards a colorful land of highlights and contours.
Since its creation, makeup has been a driving force in women’s beauty.
The second a customer steps foot into any cosmetics store, they find themselves surrounded by endless advertisements featuring fearless young women rocking bold cat eyes and fierce red lips.
However, it seems that for quite some time, the makeup industry has had a noticeably large hole in its market: men.
Traditionally, makeup is considered a feminine concept, a field of interest seen as only being geared towards women. This ideology is especially held in conservative communities, where blurring gender norms is automatically shunned.
However, this wasn’t always the case.
Throughout history, men wore makeup for several purposes, including aesthetic and spiritual reasons, according to GQ Magazine. For example, In ancient Egypt, pharaohs were spotted wearing a variety of makeup styles, including kohl eyeliner to shield their eyes from the sun and red ochre to tint their cheeks and lips.
Despite this history, in modern-day society, these founding principles have been lost to a storm of toxic masculinity and repressive gender norms.
Growing up, I found myself shattered by these same ideologies.
I spent hours beating my face with a mixture of powders, creams and pigments, excited with the odd reflection staring back at me, who had pink eyelids, glittering cheekbones and glossy lips.
Marching downstairs with anticipation, I witnessed my parents’ horrified reactions as twelve year old me proudly presented my painted face. Uncomfortable at the sight of their young son wearing his older sister’s makeup, they remarked that I looked “like a girl.”
This was one of several moments that damaged the way I viewed not only makeup, but myself, and a shift happened. I stopped wearing makeup, stopped presenting as “feminine,” and stopped expressing any ideas or interests that may have received social backlash.
What began as self-expression soon became part of a systemic pattern.
The cycle of gender policing has been adopted worldwide, pursuing young boys and grooming them into forming the false ideology that femininity “weakens” one’s identity as a man.
As a result, they project these fears outwards, belittling those who don’t fit their golden standard of being a “macho man” or an “alpha male,” particularly those who are part of the LGBTQ+ community.
This soon becomes generational, as fathers teach these same beliefs to their sons, creating a domino effect.
People must stop mongering the fear of femininity into generations of men, dismantling the belief that makeup and self-expression are reserved for only one gender.
