Post Lockdown Beauty - An Ordeal or A Breath of Fresh Air?
Lockdown has undoubtedly changed many facets of our lives. Although measures have relaxed since March and we’re slowly beginning to gain back aspects of normality (well, as normal as life can be, given the circumstances), it wasn’t that long ago we were confined to the bubble of the household. Hours that would usually be filled by my busy pub job suddenly stretched ahead of me, melting into days, days into weeks and finally, weeks into months. We entered the ‘new normal’.
Though the mighty among us valiantly tried to keep up the façade of a routine, the reality was that days in lockdown generally consisted of rolling out of bed in your pyjamas, showering, putting the pyjamas back on, binge watching Netflix, instigating an argument with your family out of sheer boredom, leaving the house for your daily walk down the local park and coming back with the knowledge you get to replay the exact same scene again tomorrow.
One thing that became immediately obvious to me was the lack of a need to appear ‘presentable’. If I wasn’t leaving the house for any real reason, what was the point of bothering to apply a full face of makeup? With beauticians shut down for the foreseeable future, there was no chance of me going through the rigmarole of getting my eyebrows, upper lip and underarms waxed every month. Having to confront my natural face in the mirror became more of a normality than an ordeal. Like most women, I’ve always had a complicated relationship with my appearance. Being brown and constantly battling against Eurocentric beauty standards has made it even more of a struggle. As women of colour, we are conditioned to see ourselves as ‘ugly’ for not adhering to the mainstream standard of beauty. But what is ugly? When you break it down, it’s just based on a bunch of -ism’s and designed to keep us emptying our bank accounts on products that claim to eradicate the ugly.
Knowing all this doesn’t always help though. Let’s be real. Applying this knowledge to other people? Yup, can do. Applying this knowledge to myself? Ew, no way-have you seen how badly I’m breaking out right now?
Lockdown really changed the game for me in terms of helping me accept my self as I am. I now feel like I am able to go outside without covering up my ‘imperfections’ under foundation - something I might have done before but would have obsessed unhappily over for the duration of my time outside. Now, if I don’t feel like wearing makeup…well, I just don’t and I don’t think twice about it.
I’m not saying lockdown has ‘cured’ me but it’s certainly taken a lot of the previous pressure I’ve felt off, particularly as someone who has experienced body dysmorphia. Many friends I’ve spoken to have told me they feel the same-that makeup now seems like a chore, that they don’t really see the point anymore, that they are now opting for lighter foundations because they got so used to wearing nothing during lockdown -the list goes on.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m not anti-makeup at all. I enjoy playing around with crazy eyeshadows and creating the perfect cat wing. I just don’t like the unspoken societal pressure there is to wear makeup. We can’t deny there are differences in how we get treated when we wear makeup vs when we don’t, that women who don’t wear makeup are constantly told they’d look great if they considered it as an option and that we get told we look tired and haggard without it and so on. All of this is tenfold for women who don’t conform to the ‘standard’.
This is definitely one of the more unexpected things to come out of lockdown. Maybe in the grand scheme of things a more trivial one, but it’s something I’m glad of. In a society where women are constantly told they have to look a certain way to be beautiful, it feels strangely liberating to not even engage.
In a roundabout way, it’s also made me aware of my own biases. Of course, I still find myself comparing myself to other women. This isn’t particularly surprising considering we’ve been conditioned by society to think this way-but it shocks me that these types of thoughts can occur to me before I have a chance to fully dissect them. But since I’m now putting less pressure on myself to look ‘put together’, I’m also putting less pressure on others.
It seems to me that lockdown has provided women with an opening to talk about the pressures of makeup culture without backlash. We can all heave a universal sigh of relief and admit that yes, we’d actually love another hour of sleep in the morning rather than set an alarm just to carefully construct a better version of ourselves. In an era of Facetune and filters, this feels like a breath of fresh air.
Written by Sarah Nabi
Born and raised in Bristol, Sarah has always had a passion for writing. After graduating with a 2:1 in English Language from Cardiff University, she is now pursuing a career where she can put this passion to good use. Drawing on her experiences as a woman of colour, she hopes to bring awareness to social issues such as intersectional feminism, racism, environmentalism and mental health. In her spare time she can be found chilling with a good book in one hand and a cuppa in another.