Why do women use makeup

Make up is as dear as anything else to all women in the whole world. It is the perfect foil to women in quest of beauty. Make up and cosmetics are indispensable aids for the fairer sex. Meticulously drawn eye shadows add honey to their stares, and deftly sprinkled skin powders add a celestial glow to their faces. Make up is a cover to the flaws on their faces. Make up gives women the Midas touch, in some sense at least. Though well applied make up definitely invigorates the beauty of a woman, too much of it can spell doom.

It is common misconception that make up is the heartthrob of today’s woman. Of course it is, but it has remained so from centuries back. It might be downright startling for some to note that lipsticks were in use nearly five thousand years ago also. The fashion bug struck at Ur, an ancient city near Babylon and ladies didn’t hesitate experimenting with extracts and powders of semi precious stones like lapis lazuli to color their lips up. Cleopatra is said to have worn lipstick created from beetles, thus giving her lips the killing red color. The Ancient Greek were more relenting in their search for beauty enhancers. The stuck to herbal extracts and seed derivatives to work as cosmetics. Historians argue that unscientific usage of herbal extracts sometimes led to skin diseases in that era and this even aggravated to fatal diseases in many cases. The plague flagged a bit with the approach of the Middle Ages, but got rejuvenated with the endorsement of natural beauty preparations by none other than Queen Elizabeth I herself.

Though lipsticks became more refined, another strange little pattern developed in this age. Application of white lead as a facial cosmetic led to the falling of hair and consequently reduced the hairline in women. The feminists celebrated the use of make up, whereas there was a fraternity of men who denounced the idea of artificial beautification as ridiculous. The popularity of make up encountered another crest and trough through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There came a time when the pursuit of beauty descended all barriers of restraint and women didn’t even mind risking their health to beautify themselves. This became particularly true when womenfolk took to consuming prescribes amounts of poison to suppress the supply of oxygen to organs. Thankfully, constructive research has made available less caustic products as beautifying agents. Whatever be the era, make up and the quest for beauty never died out, and never would.