Nowadays, you can find girls as young as 10 or 11 with faces full of makeup.
When I was 10 or 11, the only makeup I knew was my LipSmackers lip gloss that I snuck into my mom’s grocery cart in the checkout line.
However, nowadays girls in middle school can be found wearing more makeup than some middle aged women even own.
Why?
A survey conducted by the Renfrew Center Foundation in 2013 found that one in five girls who have worn makeup between the ages of 8 and 18 years old have negative feelings about their looks when they do not wear makeup.
These feelings include self-consciousness, unattractiveness or as if something is “missing” from their faces.
Of the girls who wear makeup, 65 percent started wearing it between the ages of 8 and 13 and 27 percent hardly ever leave the house without wearing any.
Where do girls feel most comfortable not wearing makeup? The survey found that girls said their own home, the pool, the beach and the gym were acceptable places.
However, friends’ houses and school are considered completely unacceptable to go bare faced.
School is a place where learning should be going on and it most certainly is not a fashion runway.
However, girls and boys in middle and high school are going through such a time of self doubt and insecurities that the only solution they can come up with is to cover it all with makeup and filters.
Society has completely changed the idea of what it means to be beautiful and today, women especially feel an entirely different level of pressure to be “perfect.”
On any given day, people can open their social media apps and will be bombarded by pictures of girls dressed to the nines with their friends from the previous night.
Dressed to the nines meaning hair done, full face of makeup and an outfit that shows the perfect amount of skin, no matter the weather.
Do not forget the filter.
Scrolling past pictures such as these can bring about a range of emotions for other girls.
“Why don’t I look like her?” “Wow she’s perfect.” “I need to lose weight to look like her.”
These comments that women (and some men) tell themselves when they are on social media only add to the layers and layers of insecurities that have become the new norm for our society.
Girls feel pressure to constantly wear makeup because they feel as if the picture they post the next day is going to define them in someway.
If they have extra makeup on, they will look prettier and therefore get more likes, right?
Even if it is the dead of winter, they need to look perfectly tan in order to convince their followers it is all natural, right?
Girls will spend hundreds of dollars on self-tanners, bronzers, eyeliners and mascaras all to put on a mask for the people that they only interact with on the Internet.
It is sad to see that there are so many girls who would not be caught dead running on the treadmill at the gym or buying a cup of coffee without a full face of makeup on.
However, there are plenty of good examples out there of women who could not care less and want the more natural look.
Ladies, next time the camera is about to flash, think about the kind of standards you are feeding into.
Your followers may actually be more impressed by your bare face and willingness to be natural than your caked on filter.
