In the modern world, cosmetics play an important role as a decorative technique used by young girls and women. Today, women and girls also wear more cosmetics than ever before. In earlier decades, a “painted” woman was automatically an immoral one. During the Twenties, mascaraed lashes, face powder, rouge, and red lipstick appeared on most women and girls who wanted to appear fashionable. They often plucked their eyebrows into a high arch, like the film stars of the decade, and used lipstick to shape their lips into a “beestung” look, tiny and pouting. Today, fashion demands that women use decorative cosmetics and makeup to look fashionable and charming.
The topic is important because it influences the appearance of a woman and her self-identity. On the other hand, the cosmetics industry is one of the most powerful and influential determining our tastes and priorities. Thus, fashion and appearance are as important as behavior when people look to the movies as models. Girls wear very tight sweaters and heavy makeup. The flamboyant styles of black rock singers also influence these teens, who adopted the stars’ extreme “drapes,” or loose-fitting trousers with narrow bottoms, shirts with wide collars, and, in imitation of the famous song, blue suede shoes. It is important to understand what good taste is and how to use cosmetics and makeup properly.
At the beginning of the 20th century, makeup was used to protect and project a sense of self. As already noted, techniques of decoration were not distinguished from fashion. They were regarded as traditional and unchanging reflections of social hierarchies, beliefs, and customs. Makeup embodied meanings of feminine nature and freedom while also encoding power relations. Occasionally, makeup was also acknowledged as an art form with aesthetic meanings. In doing so, they found that there were individual variations in makeup behavior as well as changes in decorative techniques over time. In short, new social and political ideas changed fashions in the details of the headdresses and makeup. Makeup became a part of style defined as a combination of simplicity, practicality, and suitability (Peiss 136-137).
Critics explain makeup as a ‘body technique’ which displays social behavior expressed and displayed through a unique personal image by a girl. Rather than restricting fashion to culture, fashion is a general technique of acculturation. Following Peiss (1998): “Even women who identified themselves as feminists found themselves caught in contradictory impulses” (76). Makeup is often associated with feminist ideas and fashion. It shows the rules, codes, and language of the garments and how they should be worn. Cosmetics and bright images in glossy magazines appeal to young audiences popularizing new makeup trends and colors. Small shops selling the latest fashions, called boutiques, attracted trendy teen girls who wanted to sample miniskirts and new makeup.
Peiss (1999) explains that makeup becomes a language of women’s culture and feminist identity. She shows that makeup is ‘read’ not as individual units composed into a whole, either in terms of the ‘social type’ evoked by an outfit (for example, housewife, hippie, businessman) or in terms of ‘the look’ as a whole. Where an outfit cannot be interpreted, people either take one item of clothing as being the most salient and classify that or else produce an account that can reconcile the codes attached to different items of the outfit. Makeup displays certain body techniques and highlights relations between the body and social habits. Today, for many women makeup symbolizes personal expressiveness and the ‘inner self. “Makeup is very important because your face is the first thing people see when you’re in the workplace” (Riordan 85).
For me, makeup means the possibility to create and underline a unique identity and the self. The notion of individuality produces a rationale for cosmetics in terms of constructing a ‘unique identity. The desire to approximate perceived ideal makeup is a prominent attribute of American women. Femininity is complex and contradictory work against the home, conservatism against progressiveness, and habit versus change.
The pressure to manipulate and actively control facial expression shape stems from the emphasis on appearance as the hallmark of contemporary western women. I have started to use makeup not a long time ago and try to avoid heavy and black colors. Little makeup is the best way to preserve your identity and unique facial expression. My first cosmetics was lipstick, and only in several years started to use eyes shadows and liners. To learn the main rules and secrets of good makeup, I read fashion magazines and try to apply these lessons “into me face”. The first experiments were very successful but I decided to avoid dark colors and power.
A lot of my friends have highly styled hair, elegant makeup, tight but tasteful dresses, and high heels represented self-confident womanhood. They share the same ideas about make-up and suppose that it helps a girl to underline her beauty but it is important to avoid too many colors. Makeup is a form of ‘dress’ that provides both a badge of identity and a personal signature. Fashion systems are important because of their accessibility and visibility as commentaries on political exigencies as well as practical ways to negotiate the conflicting departments of existence.
A lot of information is available about this topic, but I would like to know about 17-th-18th century makeup culture and the main ingredients used by women during this period. I know that makeup was opposed by religious believers and those women and men who shared old traditions and reject new cultures. But the Victorian women used makeup and natural substances to underline their feminine identity and beauty. The Victorian women partook of a new range of social engagements.
The development of the store allowed women to enter this public space as consumers and bought cosmetics. Makeup suggested that women were drawn into this expanding consumer culture partly as an attempt to diffuse some of the demands of feminism which was fuelled by the expansion of the numbers of women in paid employment, and by their demands for economic independence (Riordan 92).
In sum, modem American society perceives makeup as modernity except for strong religious believers and the older generation of women. Makeup is extremely popular among young women who cultivate a sense of style, develop a multi-purpose wardrobe and learn the social values associated with new order and culture. “But fashion, beauty, and domesticity are not static concepts linked to the feminine” (Peiss 65). Modern women’s magazines carry advertisements for makeup, yet continue to publish only limited information or advertising for cosmetics.
Works Cited
Peiss, K. Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture. Owl Books, 1999.
Riordan, T. Inventing Beauty: A History of the Innovations that Have Made Us Beautiful. Broadway. 2004.