When is wearing makeup a choice

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It is also to accept their real skin. But is it true or just another social media trending campaign or a publicity gimmick? Get yourself out of this mess and listen to your heart. There must be more of us who want to, so why aren't we doing it?

Maybe it's because waking up, having a shower and putting our make-up on is so ingrained. Even after my skin improved and I decided not to wear make-up if I didn't feel like it, I'd still feel some trepidation when going to a new office or meeting a new client. A small voice in my head asked: "What if they thought less of me for my plain face? What if they thought I just couldn't be bothered? But then, a stronger voice asked: "Is it right that someone should think less of you for how you naturally look?

No, I don't think it's right. We should be able to go to work, to the pub and to weddings able to legitimately say, "I woke up like this," without feeling any shame whatsoever. If I feel like perfecting a red lip or a feline eyeliner flick or a contoured cheekbone, then fine. But if I feel like brushing my hair, brushing my teeth, and ignoring the shelves of make-up altogether, then that should be my choice. My experiment has made me realise that if people think less of me when they see a plain face, I'm not the one who should be ashamed.

Don't get me wrong, I still wear make-up. I still buy several lipsticks I don't need every time I step into Boots. Far from it, in fact.

It's a skill I can even take a certain pleasure in exercising. But I do think it's telling that society encourages women to frame wearing makeup only as a matter of simple personal choice — and as something that indicates self-love "Because You're Worth It". The pressure to frame the use of cosmetics within the discourse of individual choice reminds me, a little, of the pressure on women to never admit the lengths to which they may go to embody our culture's equally stringent and fraught physical ideals: every skinny actress is always supposed to tell her interviewers that she eats burgers and milkshakes and never really works out.

The ideal is always supposed to be "natural," a matter of sheer, unperspiring excellence. We're only supposed to appreciate or be interested in makeup as a form of play and personal expression; we're supposed to ignore the social and political contexts of makeup.

I'm not interested in that narrative. I think it's overly simple, and it does a disservice to the varieties of women's lived experience in the complicated and politically inflected arena of what the women's magazines refer to, grandly, as "beauty. I have a meeting with an editor this afternoon. I have to go put on some concealer and mascara.