Wearing makeup can be an artistic way for a female to express her femininity. Makeup can show your boldness, your delicacy, or whatever word you’d use to show your style. People have made careers out of selling their own makeup, and even made the front page of well-known magazines such as CoverGirl due to their talent. In fact, the beauty industry has only increased in sales since 2013, reaching approximately $86 billion in 2018. With these facts laid out, there’s no denying that beauty truly sells.

But is that a good thing?

Studies show that a woman spends an average of $15,000 on beauty products in her lifetime. To get into specifics, $1,780 is spent on lipstick, $3,770 is spent on mascara, and $2,750 is spent on eyeshadows. To add on, there’s also a hefty price of buying the materials to clean the makeup off of your face along with keeping your makeup tools clean as well. To sum it up? A lot of money and effort is put into makeup.

The more that makeup is idolized and seen has a way to gain true beauty, the more pressure there is on women, and young girls especially. There’s nothing wrong with wearing makeup, of course, but to say that our society doesn’t push it onto women wouldn’t be accurate.

I was constantly bullied not only by my own classmates in middle school, but my family as well, all of them saying I need to wear makeup to cover up my acne or look a bit prettier. When I rejected this, I was told that I’d change my mind–that I’d wear it eventually, most likely when I reached high school.

Sophomore year was the year I let my friends do my makeup; we were all bored and had nothing to do in class, so I got a full makeover. And the first thing I noticed was how much prettier I looked, and how people treated me a bit better because I looked that way. I’ve always been insecure about how I looked, and after that happened I was seriously considering buying makeup so I can learn how to do it on my own. My thought process was that if I were to wear it, my family and friends would enjoy my company, boys would like me and talk to me, and I’d hold more worth than I ever did before.

And I’m not alone in this.

Girls as young as ten years old worry about not being pretty enough to be likable, thinking makeup is an absolute necessity to show how mature and worthy they are. In a way, we’re pushing the thought that girls need to look mature to be mature, which is why so many of them feel pressured to show off more skin than they need to. Girls should be enjoying their youth while they still can, and by rushing the process and forcing society’s beauty standards onto them, will not help them.