Beauty and Freedom

This Ayibopost is in response to Moumousse’s article « Authentique avec mon maquillage! »

« et je n’essaie de faire passer aucun message philosophique dans mes choix vestimentaires, mes choix de coiffure ou mon maquillage. »

Unless we have reached Buddhahood or Christdom, our physical reality is a mammoth reflection of internalized ideas, perception, often unknown to us. This is why we call it the subconscious. Therefore, to me, this above statement is hard to swallow. Both men and women, in their choice of clothing are communicating a message of the “self”. In any case, I certainly respect your (Moumousse) opinion and perhaps you are right that you are as free as you claim to be, but the list of make-up experiments you listed certainly suggest that you are influenced by the corporate money making machine that engineers new ways of looking beautiful. You might not have low self-esteem, actually I’m sure you don’t, but you are not completely free from the bullish interests of the billion dollar cosmetic industry. Besides, people confuse the ability to choose from a myriad of options with freedom. It’s not freedom if those options are offered by some invisible third party that works days and nights to benefit from insecurities they often create themselves. The freedom lies in overlooking all such options and making a choice unrelated to them at all.

Not saying that you wear make-up because of any sort of social or cultural intention. Nonetheless be careful describing the ability to change your appearance as a form freedom. It is dangerous to limit your mind as what you perceive to be freedom. Because one needs to understand that choices they make whether they are consciously or subconsciously made are influenced. In our case, the fact that you have decided to wear make ups or change your look every now and then is not you being free to take decisions if these decisions have already been taken for you.

Now I am in no position to judge or to tell anyone how to dress or better yet how to look in order for them to feel accepted or simply feel good about themselves. However, I can advise someone to take their time and think before choosing to change their look with superficial artifices that the corporate world so delicately convinced you is necessary to attain true beauty (beauty standards they created). Your natural beauty reflects your true personality, not one corrupted by society, or invented to feel accepted by society. This text is not a question of whether wearing make up is right or wrong, but rather why do you need make-up in order for you to feel beautiful? “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our mind.” I leave you this famous quote from Bob Marley, hoping that it will put an emphasis to the point I tried to make throughout the this text!

 

Richard Martin