Every girl experiences it — the first time you wear makeup and look at yourself in the mirror and everything just seems to change. You see someone different, someone more defined, someone more mature. Couple that with all the compliments from friends and family and boom…you feel like you can never go back.
I never really wore makeup until I started college. Once I started, however, I felt like makeup made me feel more confident about myself. As someone who struggles with health issues that are often reflected in my skin tone, I felt like I could hide my struggles from the world and myself by wearing makeup. However, I recently went through a period of illness where I was no longer in the mood to hide anymore, and so I didn’t — and it was extremely liberating.
Each day that I chose not to wear makeup, I began to realize that there were so many things about my natural self I liked; I also noticed that no one treated me differently because I stopped wearing makeup and, most importantly, that I shouldn’t fear judgment. I still felt like myself and I felt confident. Through this experience, I look at makeup very differently now: I see at it as something I can do for myself if and when I feel like it, and specifically as something I want to do rather than need to do.