Making up is hard to do
Personal grooming and the boundaries between public and private space
As my commute now happens on the tube rather than by bus, I have a lot more opportunity to study other passengers – primarily because I am no longer restricted to seeing the backs of people’s heads. One phenomenon that has repeatedly struck me since I started taking the tube regularly is how often I see women putting on makeup during their morning commute.1
For the record, I’m not talking about women reapplying their lipstick.2 Even the Queen did that in public, although it was apparently a covert signal for ‘Get me out of here, stat!’ Rather, what I am talking about is women completing their entire makeup routine on transit – a phenomenon I see at least once a week.
Basically, a woman sits down on the tube, pulls out her makeup bag, balances it on her lap and then proceeds to put on foundation, skin corrector, contour, blush, mascara, eyeshadow and lipstick. Sometimes they even curl their eyelashes – an act requiring a device that, quite frankly, would not look out of place in a museum of medieval torture and puts you at serious risk of yanking out your eyelashes in the event that you sneeze or the train stops suddenly.
Although I try not to stare too openly, I find the process both fascinating and weird: fascinating because it requires a degree of coordination and skill in applying makeup that is completely beyond me, and weird because women have chosen to engage in an act that most of us consider to be private in public.
Although it has rarely been the subject of either public commentary or scholarly analysis, in a 2017 Metro article by Ellen Scott, she highlights the way that the act of putting on makeup in public blurs the boundaries between public and private space. As she notes, ‘There are some things we still deem to be acts we can only do in private, at home. Like wearing pyjamas, preparing a meal, brushing our teeth’. However, she then goes on to argue that the boundaries between public and private space have increasingly blurred, so no one should be bothered by seeing a woman put on her ‘face’ on the tube. In her words, ‘We do plenty of things on the Tube that we previously only would have done at home. We watch TV. We read books. We catch up on emails’.
The flaw in her argument, of course, is that none of the activities she lists are actually private. We’ve always read and watched films in public. Moreover, I’m not sure where she thinks people read emails in the 1990s, but I can only assume that she is a millennial, unfamiliar with the early days of dial-up internet, which many people didn’t have at home, and the fact that emails were primarily read in offices, libraries and internet cafes.
It’s certainly the case that the digital era has served to break down the boundaries between public and private activities. After all, if you so desire, you can now sext3 or read erotica on your morning commute. In fact, much of the success of EL James’ Fifty Shades of Grey is attributed to the fact that it was published around the time that Kindle was taking off. To quote Zoe Williams, this meant that ‘women who wouldn’t be seen dead reading smut on the tube could read it on their Kindle, and this launched a whole world of sales’.
But putting on makeup on transit is the exact opposite of covertly carrying out a private activity in public with no one any the wiser. Instead, it’s more like reading Fifty Shades of Grey or Dr. Jensen’s Guide to Better Bowel Care in hard cover4 – or, better yet, as an audiobook, except you’re not using headphones, so everyone can hear the narrator say ‘How did I ever become involved with the bowel?’ and ‘Desire pools dark and deadly in my groin’.5
Anyone brave enough to commit such acts in public is probably going to raise a few eyebrows, so I’m not convinced that the patriarchy is to blame for the stares that women putting on makeup on the tube frequently receive. Yet, this is the primary explanation proffered in the Metro article and a Reddit thread on the topic. To quote Scott, ‘Part of the reason putting your face on while you’re on the Northern line is so unsettling to people, I think, is because it takes down the ~illusion~ that women just wake up like that, revealing the work that actually goes in to a perfectly made up face’.
Certainly, research has consistently highlighted the existence of gender norms that require women to put constant effort into looking good, whilst simultaneously disguising the existence of that effort.6 This is something played on for comedic effect in TV shows like The Marvellous Mrs Maisel, where the titular character initially hides her evening beauty routine from her husband, so that he never sees her in her ‘natural’ state. Indeed, while men frequently insist that they don’t like makeup on women, they are generally more attracted to natural-looking faces enhanced by cosmetics than ones that are actually au naturel (although research suggests that women likewise find cosmetically enhanced male faces more attractive).
While some of the stares may well be due to the expectation that women hide the effort of maintaining their appearance, in my view the bemused reactions to women putting on makeup in public speak more to broader social norms than specifically gendered ones.7
Notably, of the 449 people the Metro surveyed on Twitter on the topic, which presumably included both men and women and makeup users themselves, only 34.1% thought that putting on makeup on the tube was acceptable. Forty percent thought that this should be restricted to ‘light touch-ups’ and more than a quarter (26.1%) categorically rejected any form of public application. Indeed, from the comments featured in the Metro article and on the Reddit thread, it’s clear that lots of women think it’s odd to put on a full face of makeup on transit.
Despite this, the view promoted in the article and the Reddit thread is that if it’s not harming anyone else or interfering with them, people should be able to do whatever they like. This sentiment is encapsulated in one Reddit user’s comment that ‘I’mma put my makeup on where I want… You’re not bothering anyone and if they don’t want to see it, they can feel free to close their eyes, get up and move, or do anything else that allows them to turn their eyes away from you’.
However, this logic doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny, given that you could make precisely the same argument about gimp suits and the Scream mask, yet we’ve mostly8 agreed that public display of such outfits is best limited to Halloween and pride parades. The fact is that we have all sorts of social rules about what is and isn’t acceptable in public dress and behaviour, so arguments that invoke individual liberty and autonomy are basically treating makeup as some sort of special exception to the normal rules around personal grooming.
Makeup aside, it’s clear that many forms of grooming are largely deemed to be private matters not fit for public consumption: clipping your nails, squeezing your pimples, flossing, whitening your teeth, plucking your eyebrows and oiling your beard9 immediately spring to mind. Arguably, none of these things impact anyone else (at least, any more than putting on makeup), yet most of us avoid doing them on transit.
In my view, these general rules around personal grooming explain why the majority of people look askance at women putting on a full face of makeup on the tube. Intentionally or not, a woman choosing to do her makeup on the tube is conveying a message to fellow passengers that they are non-entities – that she might as well be in her own bathroom for all the difference their presence makes. This sentiment comes across strongly in a comment by another Reddit user, who notes ‘You didn’t hop on that bus in the morning to spend some quality time with a bunch of strangers’.
The problem with this view is that our ability to use public transit without the experience descending into chaos or violence (the ‘apes on a plane’ problem I’ve discussed here) depends on everyone pretending they are in a private bubble whilst simultaneously being acutely conscious of other passengers. This is why taking calls on speaker phone, watching shows without headphones, and practices like shebagging and manspreading are considered to be rude: because they impinge on other passengers. Putting on makeup is seen to be disrespectful in a different way, because it doesn’t just maintain the illusion of privacy, it treats it as real.
And if you are effectively treating a train carriage as your own private bathroom by ignoring the presence of everyone inside, then don’t be surprised if they stare at you in turn. Because by acting like everyone else is part of the furniture, you have effectively become part of the furniture yourself. In essence, you are now the equivalent of a beauty influencer on YouTube or TikTok who is broadcasting her makeup routine from her bathroom for the world to see and critique. So if you don’t like the idea of being the morning entertainment on the tube, you might want to consider waking up ten minutes earlier and doing your makeup at home – although I, for one, will be sorry if you do because I still haven’t caught the hang of contouring.
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Due to the constant veering across traffic, I’m reasonably confident this doesn’t happen as much on buses, unless you want your makeup to look like it was put on by a five-year-old.
Arguably, we often find the sight of women putting on lipstick in public glamorous; sexy, even. This is probably because of the tendency to treat lipstick some sort of literal and figurative phallic symbol.
I only know people actually do this because I constantly check out what everyone around me is scrutinising on their phones – mostly, they are so caught up on their phones that they don’t notice, although I occasionally get annoyed glances from people catching me peeking.
Based on what I’ve seen, people who read physical books on transit are often fans of high-brow literature. I saw a woman the other day reading Nietzsche. Nietzsche!!! I haven’t yet figured out if this is because people attracted to high-brow literature don’t like e-readers or commuters tend to read paperbacks in a performative fashion. Certainly, there are some people (Nietzsche woman was one) who make a bit of a production out of the book they’re reading, primarily by holding it in a way that seems more designed to display the book’s cover than to facilitate comfortable reading. Further data are required before I can write something about this topic but watch this space!
Although it sounds to me like she might be confusing desire with thrush or herpes. Either way, she probably needs to seek medical advice.
I assume this is why so many actresses feel compelled to post selfies of themselves sans-makeup, which I guess is intended to counter unrealistic, airbrushed images of beauty but mostly ends up reinforcing them, given the flawless, glowing skin that some of the actresses sport, and all the judgy comments such articles attract about who looks good and who doesn’t.
When I used to teach a course on gender at the University of Northern Colorado I noticed that students frequently confused the two. This was particularly apparent in the gender norm violation project I got them to complete,* where they had to pick a minor gender norm and then intentionally violate it. For example, for her gender norm violation project, a female student peed in a sink at a party and a male student chose to strike up conversations at urinals. I had to explain that as far as I knew, men don’t generally go around peeing in sinks and that women likewise do not typically strike up conversations with strangers at stalls in public toilets, so they were both violating social norms, not gender ones.
*For the record, this was well over 20 years ago. From a health and safety perspective alone, there’s no way you could get away with the assignment now.
I say ‘mostly’ because a few months back I was on the tube when someone entered wearing a Scream mask. As it was not remotely close to Halloween, everyone in the carriage tensed when he entered in the expectation that we were about to be stabbed (or maybe that was just me), although he did nothing remotely threatening.
Oh, wait, did you think that beards don’t require any maintenance aside from the occasional trim? Then you clearly don’t understand beards, which for many hipsters represent not merely facial hair but a journey. As ‘How to Apply Beard Oil like a Boss’ demonstrates, you need to oil that baby on a regular basis. Imagine it’s a pet that requires constant attention: massage it, stroke it, comb it and fluff it like it’s a prize-winning poodle. Properly oiling your beard requires a good ten minutes of dedicated effort.