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Navigating Beauty Standards: How Makeup Impacts Confidence and Femininity for Black Women

While waiting for me to finish putting on my makeup, a friend asked me, “Why do you wear makeup? It seems like more time than it’s worth.” I was actually really glad he asked me because it was the first time I had to verbalize a very complicated relationship.

My story with makeup starts at church. The Bible is unequivocal on the topic of makeup, dressing up, and hair:

“Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as elaborate hairstyles and the wearing of gold jewelry or fine clothes. Rather, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.” —1 Peter 3:3-4 (NIV)

Ellie Vilakazi reading 1000 Tales of Johannesburg

The lesson I ultimately absorbed was that wearing makeup was akin to indulging in vanity. The more time I spent on my outward appearance, the less time I would have to cultivate "good" biblical virtues. Additionally, my desire to become an academic reinforced this idea for different reasons. When my mother was completing her PhD, she would take me with her to lectures and workshops, where I saw how "real" academics presented themselves. Ironically, the messaging was the same: the more makeup, accessories, and color you wore, the less seriously you were taken. The assumption was that if you had time to put on makeup every day, you weren’t dedicating that time to your research. As I moved on to grad school, this perception intensified. The issue came to a head when, shortly after I failed my exams, my advisor said to me,

“It’s time to put away the clothes and makeup and focus.”

Needless to say, I was crushed. My anxiety over dressing up was confirmed: when you put effort into the finer details of getting dressed, you are perceived as unserious.

 

Now to actually answer the question. If make-up takes time and created the impression of being unfocused: why wear it? I wear make-up because it makes me feel more feminine. In South Africa, I find that just being a girl (who identifies as such) is enough for people to treat you as such. Not wearing make-up does not make me more or less feminine at home.

 

In the United States, however, I feel that femininity is more precarious. Less makeup means I am taken more seriously, but then I am not seen as a feminine woman with romantic potential. This precariousness has a historical context, especially for Black women. Due to the legacy of slavery, Black women were actively de-feminized. Many scholars have explored this phenomenon extensively.

 

In dense prose that operates on two argumentative levels, Hortense Spillers explores how the matrilineal inheritance of slavery shaped Black womanhood in her article, “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” She explains that if your mother was a slave, you are a slave regardless of your father’s status. The consequence of this matrilineal inheritance is that Black women become bodies to be avoided if one does not want their child to become a slave. Spillers argues that although the fact of having a womb was exploited by male enslavers, gender as a sociocultural construct was fundamentally disrupted during the Middle Passage (Spillers, 72). She writes,

“the historic outline of dominance, the respective subject-positions of ‘female’ and ‘male’ adhere to no symbolic integrity” (Spillers, 66).

A headshot of Ellie Vilakazi

In other words, when it came to the work, expectations, and treatment of enslaved people, being male or female made no significant difference. Spillers uses quotations around "male" and "female" to acknowledge that masculinity and femininity are cultural constructs. Despite being cultural creations, these constructs have profound impacts on how individuals develop and find their place within any given culture. A real-world example of how this dynamic plays out can be found in Barack Obama’s presidential memoir, A Promised Land. In Part Two, Chapter Seven, Obama writes about how this historical burden affected Michelle during their campaign trail. He notes that

Black women “didn’t meet the standards of femininity… they were not just ‘emasculating,’ but masculine. Michelle had managed this psychic burden all her life, largely by being meticulous about her appearance” (Obama, 133-134).

I appreciate how he seamlessly connects the de-feminization of Black women in the United States with Michelle’s approach to her presentation. What he observes resonates with me on an affective level. No one ever explicitly told me that I am less feminine, but I could feel it. I sense that I need to put a bit more effort into my appearance in the States because my Blackness seems to “decrease” my femininity. Makeup serves as an easy solution to this unspoken, affective experience that Michelle and countless other Black women feel.

The moment I am seated next to a woman who aligns more closely with the beauty ideal in America, I feel myself shrinking inside. All the socio-historical reasons I just outlined seem to vanish in those moments. Instead of being present and engaged, I find myself ruminating about all the ways I don’t measure up. I would much rather wear makeup and feel confident than experience that internal shrinking.


To conclude: makeup has a complicated place in my life. On one hand, I am perceived as frivolous for wearing it. On the other hand, I feel less feminine without it. Ultimately, I feel more confident in myself and my appearance when I wear it. Like Laverne Cox and her relationship to her blonde hair,

“It's a choice that I made, but I'm aware that I have not made this choice in a vacuum.”

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Works Cited


Obama, Barack. A Promised Land. Crown Publishing Group, 2020. Apple Books,  https://books.apple.com/us/book/a-promised-land/id1528894495. Accessed 29 Aug. 2024.


Pérez, Laura. “Laverne Cox Talks ‘Bad Hair’ and Empowering Black Women.” PopSugar, 21 Oct. 2020, https://www.popsugar.com/beauty/laverne-cox-on-bad-hair-movie- empowering-black-women-47859264. Accessed 29 Aug. 2024.


Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2, 1987, pp. 65–81. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/464747.

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