From self-confessed “makeup whores” to hard-core feminists, college students have strong views on cosmetics. For those who admit they can’t live without it, makeup is a rite of passage, status symbol and endless source of entertainment. They find makeup empowering, bonding women and attracting men. Others dismiss makeup as a crutch for low self-esteem, a necessary evil or just plain silly. If, when and how a young woman wears makeup often reflects upbringing, peer pressure and social status. One jaded, bare-faced upperclassman may show disdain for an eager, overly made-up freshman, while other seniors may have started to make up and dress up in preprofessional mode.
At Emory University in Atlanta, Nola Weinstein, a junior majoring in journalism and American Studies, says she and many friends are “obsessed” with makeup. “I wear something every day, and many of my friends have to have a full face of makeup from morning to bedtime,” says the Long Island, N.Y., native. To class, she wears blush, mascara and lip gloss, and more on days when she feels she that she needs a lift. “Makeup gets you going,” she says. Weinstein can’t walk by a cosmetics counter without stopping to play with products. She spends about $100 a month, shopping at Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdale’s and Sephora, which she calls a “makeup museum.” She likes Stila, Trish McEvoy and Nars. “They’re young, trendy and fun, and they don’t make me look like my grandmother,” she says.
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Compared with those of her friends, Weinstein’s habits aren’t extreme. She claims to have more than one friend whose bath caddies boast $1,200 jars of Crème de la Mer, “and I even know some who are having Botox treatments,” she says. “I know it’s sick.”
Amy Birdsong, a senior at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, calls herself a “makeup whore.” The Memphis native feels that love of makeup — “putting on your face” — is in the DNA of Southern women. “It’s a rite of passage that starts in middle school,” she says. “I still remember the smell of Clinique’s Almost Bare makeup that made me feel so special.”
Birdsong never leaves home without a full face of makeup. She shops on a monthly basis and estimates that she owns four foundations, four mascaras, three powders and about eight eye shadow palettes. She loves Kevyn Aucoin and Chanel foundations and Laura Mercier’s powder. Nars and Paula Dorff are also favorites. Yet the quantity of product belies the desired result: “The funny thing is, with all that, I’m going for a very natural look,” she says, “except at night, when I like eye shadow colors and more drama.”
The natural look will dominate when Weinstein starts a job in marketing with Lehman Brothers in New York after graduating this month. “In the navy-suit world, there’s no room for supershiny lip gloss,” she says.
At the University of Florida in Gainesville, sunscreen is the most important product for day, according to Tracy Toole, from Orlando. She also wears mascara and lip gloss, but the heat and humidity make heavy foundations unbearable. Toole makes liberal use of counter freebies passed down from her mother’s “Clinique Room,” named by her family for its green walls and abundance of the company’s products. As a careful consumer who doesn’t believe in animal testing (Clinique is on PETA’s “happy list”), Toole checks labels or searches the Internet for information on every cosmetic she considers.
Unlike Toole, many of her senior friends opt for a few extra minutes of sleep over time spent primping for class. Conversely, “freshmen often show up for class dressed like they’re going to a bar, with lots of makeup,” she says. “It takes a while for them to catch on.”
While Florida girls check their SPF, some students at Northeastern universities wish they had to. Westchester County, N.Y., native Allison Schultz, a sophomore at Syracuse University, says bronzer is big among her friends on campus (her personal favorites are from Bobbi Brown and Nars), along with blush and concealer to cover circles after sleepless nights. “Paranoid” about skin care, Schultz uses Clinique’s Total Turnaround Visible Skin Renewer religiously. She believes that starting young will prevent wrinkles later.
Melissa Knowles, a Southern Methodist University senior from Plano, Tex., spends about $500 every six months on beauty products. She calls SMU students extremely status- and designer-conscious and might be more appearance-obsessed than their peers elsewhere. Knowles herself has strong beauty preferences on everything down to brushes, sponges and sharpeners. A broadcast journalism major, she wears heavy, carefully applied makeup on-camera. And she loves to work a trend, taking beauty cues from movies, celebrities and media. The day after she and a friend saw “Mona Lisa Smile,” they rushed out to buy a red lipstick like the one Julia Roberts wore. When she read that Tyra Banks attributed her mother’s lack of wrinkles to the use of Vaseline, the lowly petroleum jelly has become Knowles’ favorite under-eye cream. She took advice from a beauty expert on “America’s Next Top Model” and never, ever matches her eye shadow to the color of her outfits. And when a beauty magazine suggested that fuller brows compliment a heart-shaped face, Knowles abandoned her monthly trips to the waxing salon. “Brows can make or break a look,” she says. “I now like natural brows with red lips.”
Knowles acknowledges that though “unspoken, it’s a competitive thing that makeup gives you [an advantage]” with men, and swears that a lip gloss by Pout that she bought in London “draws more guys.” Still, she says she wears makeup less to attract men than to impress other women.
At Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., Molly Dunlap, a senior from Scottsdale, Ariz., is equally enthusiastic about makeup. So, too, are her friends. Recently, they posed a philosophical question: What if makeup didn’t exist and nobody could wear it? While Dunlap pondered the question, another friend readily answered, “Then everybody would be ugly.”
Dunlap estimates that she owns $1,000 worth of cosmetics, a drawer full, with more than 30 eye shadow compacts alone. “I’m at the peak of my makeup-wearing now,” she says, “and I love doing other people’s makeup.” To that end, knowledge is power. “Application is so important. Girls really should work on it. They should go to department stores regularly and ask the professionals, ‘How do I do it?’”
Other students don’t take beautification quite so seriously. “It’s silly a lot of the time,” says Brooke McLane-Higginson, in her first year at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. “I see people wearing way too much makeup, and I think that they’re just insecure about the way they look.” She wears moisturizer and sunscreen daily to protect her fair skin but rarely makeup, which she sees as “more of a fun, dress-up-when-you’re-a-little-girl thing.” She divides the eye shadow-and-blush set into two groups: the overbearing and falsely confident, trying to hide insecurities, and the extremely shy. And though McLane-Higginson concedes that her mother wears makeup, she doesn’t see her mother in either of those two categories, because “she’s a really confident person and always raised me to be myself.”
Dessa Cosma, a New Orleans native who is now a junior at the University of Georgia in Athens, considers makeup a “necessary evil,” but considers herself weak for wearing it. Like Cosma, her friends are ardent feminists, and most reject makeup altogether.
As a person with a lifelong disability that confines her to a wheelchair, Cosma learned early on to look beyond appearance, an idea reinforced by her family. Still, at 17, she began using minimal makeup, in part to encourage others to concentrate on her face. She says she prefers to wear makeup for herself, rather than for others, including her boyfriend, who prefers a natural look.
Cosma says that avoiding early conditioning toward beauty stereotypes is almost impossible in American culture. “It’s sad,” she says, “because there’s more to women than the way they look. They’ve been tricked by fashion, by the media, which are all connected to the patriarchal system. I think the media should just calm down, and women should be taught that they’re valuable no matter what.”
Alison Eldridge, who studies writing at Evergreen, would disagree. The Highstown, N.J., native says she uses makeup to express her individuality. “It’s fun that you can look however you want on any given day,” she says. She says some students in her feminist theory class disagree and maintain that makeup puts a constraint on women, but she laughs at that idea. “I’m not trying to make myself more conventionally attractive so that I can find a mate. It’s just another way to express myself.” Nor does she think that makeup runs necessarily counter to the ideals of feminism.
“I would hope,” Eldridge says, “that people would be more open to different interpretations of self-expression.”
— With contributions by Caperton Gillett
TOP FIVE BEAUTY
WWD surveyed 50 coeds and asked what five beauty items a college student should never leave home without. Here’s what they said. — Kim Friday
- Shimmer eye shadow (especially the ones from Cover Girl)
- Mascara (Maybelline’s a favorite)
- Straightening iron
- Eyeliner (particularly black)
- Lip gloss (MAC’s Lipglass scored points)