Make-up can help individuals to feel a new sense of self, and its enhanced use for expressional and protective functions can increase confidence.
Women use make-up to emphasise certain aspects of their physique, such as their eyes or cheekbones, and to improve self-confidence in social settings.
Self-Expression
Externally, makeup helps you express what is going on inside. In one study, women who applied facial cosmetics judged their attractiveness higher than those who had not. [25]
Applying make-up daily as ritual or routine can provide a certain amount of control and consistency (for example, you might apply your make-up in the same way and to the same standard every day to maintain your identity, but the flexibility is there to vary what you apply for different occasions).
Make-up can also help disguise imperfections: someone suffering from spots or scars could use it to help conceal what needs concealing. It could also be used to accentuate or carve out certain features of the face, such as making hobbit-like eyes ‘pop’ by cleverly applied black eyeliner or rinsing your face in fake tan to sculpt up the cheekbones and make you look more presentable for an interview or a date (!!). Don’t be confident because you’ve used make-up; be confident because you don’t need it!!
Enhancement of Features
Small, but meaningful, shifts can make them be more comfortable with being a woman and more comfortable in their own bodies. Cosmetics allow women to bring their best features forward, and hide their least favourite – a shift towards beauty that might be valued more by the culture.
Selective feature enhancement can even make us more confident in social situations. One 2021 paper showed that participants wearing make-up throughout an experiment were more prosocial than those not wearing make-up.
Makeup’s connection to confidence is fraught with complications and internally contradictory. Using makeup to boost your confidence temporarily is just fine, but relying on cosmetics to compensate for not having constructive experiences in your life – or replacing the cultivation of a psychologically healthy self-concept – is a problem. Makeup should supplement and enhance your sense of self, not replace it.
Transformative Power
Make up can be magical to hide pimples, scars and other defects and become more self-confident. Also, makeup permits individual show various charque characters depending on the events and have assurance no matter what they do and put on.
When make-up becomes a vehicle for emphasising natural features such as the eyes, lips and cheekbones, there is the potential for a positive self-image and a boost in confidence that is likely to transfer to interpersonal interactions.
Moreover, it can help women socially armour for stressful or unfamiliar situations, making them feel more comfortable in unfamiliar settings. It can also make it easier for women to step out of their comfort zones and access new opportunities.
Empowerment
As a device for female empowerment and transformation, self-decoration has boundless benefits: make-up can be used as a form of self-expression, a resource for feature embellishment, as well as a transformative and performance practice. Make-up makes women feel better about themselves and how they look – which in turn leads to improved levels of self-esteem and emotional wellbeing [24]. More: make-up makes others perceive you as more attractive. It can also increase prosocial tendencies [24]. Make-up alone never made an authentically confident woman, just as it never will. Make-up is an empowering trick of the trade, but a trick nonetheless, designed to boost confidence instead of replacing it outright [25, 26].
Several studies indicate that women who use cosmetics are generally more socially and globally self-esteem, while simultaneously pointing out that the relationship between the variables is complex; Robertson et al found a negative correlation between self-esteem and cosmetic use, while the authors Al-Samydai et al found positive correlations, not allowing for individual differences in accounting for these seemingly contradictory findings; regardless, a Kendall correlation found moderate-to-high correlations between the frequency of makeup use, cost of makeup purchases, amount of time spent on applying makeup each day, and appearance orientation, either appearance evaluation and evaluation evaluation or appearance-social self-esteem.
