Men like women to wear less makeup? No, they don't

Whizzing round the internet right at this very moment in time, is a “fact”. There are of course many “facts” out there but this “fact” stuck in my craw. According to entirely trustworthy (water please, I appear to be choking on my own sarcasm) “fact”-spewing Twitter accounts such as @GoogleFacts and @WhatTheFFacts, “studies show that men like women who wear less makeup”. @GoogleFacts then helpfully illustrates their point with a photo of Victoria’s Secret model Miranda Kerr in her bare-faced glory next to an impeccably made-up version of the multi-millionairess global beauty. Helpful.

The ladies of Twitter were quick to pour scorn on this “fact” for many, many reasons, not least of all because even in this day and age we’re constantly having to defend our bodies against the opinions of men. But my main problem with the so-called “fact” is that it takes simplicity to the point of being wilfully misleading in its implication that what men really want is a woman devoid of a single dab or dot of cosmetics, and that you, silly women, are doing it all wrong.

Women, and men, have worn makeup for as long as faces have been a thing, and our reasons for wearing it are as varied as the dictionary-defying names to describe “pink” on a Boots makeup counter. I personally wear it to feel more confident - it’s a painted mask of the person I would like to be that day, regardless of how beige and broken I feel inside. But apparently “studies show” I’m doing it wrong and should just pinch my cheeks-and-go if I hope to secure a husband by teatime. Putting aside the fact I have no desire to catch a husband any more than I have to catch a cold, I smelled the faecal matter of a bull and decided to prove it.

If this 140-character-constrained “fact” and accompanying pictorial evidence is to be believed, the less makeup I have on, the more attractive I will be to men. I, however, know from owning a mirror that I look like a freshly washed potato before I’ve fired up the cement mixer, so I put this to the test with the highly-flawed-yet-convenient method of a Twitter poll. I offered my self-selected sample of fellas a picture of yours truly in Maris Piper form - not a scrap of camouflage - and one of me with natural-looking makeup. Both pictures taken in daylight, both offered without threats of violence or promise of riches (got to reduce the confounders, after all). The result was that 81% of the brave souls preferred me wearing MORE makeup. OMG WHO WOULD HAVE SEEN THAT COMING?! Oh yeah, I did.

The sources I can only assume these tuppenny ha’penny Twitter oracles are quoting (St Ives Beauty for one and Bangor University and Aberdeen University being the other I found, although links to the actual published studies are suspiciously hard to find), make one vital error - “less”. The word “less” here is completely misused. They claim, having conducted tests very similar to mine but in, like, labs and white coats and stuff, that men prefer women wearing “less” makeup, when what would be accurate is “more natural looking” or “subtle”. There is a huge difference between the oft-mocked Crayola face and a natural glow, and trust me, it isn’t the volume of makeup. The made-up picture in my poll? Looks fuss-free, but here’s what it took to get that “barely there” look:

• Foundation
• Concealer
• Contour powder - two shades
• Translucent powder
• Highlighter
• Blusher
• Eyeshadow - three shades
• Mascara
• Eyebrow pencil
• Eyebrow wax
• Lip liner
• Lipstick

And you know how many products it takes to give me a dramatic night-on-the-tiles look? Exactly the same.

Show a man a celeb’s “who me? I just woke up like this” selfie and he’s likely to appreciate her candid raw beauty. Show the same picture to a woman and we will list at least four of the cosmetic items she’s trowelled on before carefully sculpting the sheets and applying her Instagram filter of choice. Don’t blame yourself, chaps, it’s just that we’ve spent centuries perfecting this craft and we didn’t think to send you the almanac.

So, I got my 81% lippy-loving majority, but what numbers did the St Ives Beauty study turn up? Hold on to your knickers, kids, here it comes. 40% of the men they asked preferred less makeup to full caked-on coverage.

40% - less than half the group. That means that the majority of the group didn’t say they preferred lasses with less. And yet this has has led to a commonly assumed fact through implication, that ALL men prefer bare-faced women. Get in the bin, @WhatTheFFacts and take @GoogleFacts with you.

Something my little poll brought up in my Twitter mentions feed, as well as one thoroughly heated skirmish in the great battle of A over B, was that men voted for very different reasons. Some voted for the potato because they prefer the honesty of the freshly washed spud, or because they felt they were betraying their feminist sisters if they didn’t; some voted for the slap because they frankly found looking at it less likely to cause the re-emergence of lunch, but my favourite reason came from men who voted B, the face keeping the cosmetic industry afloat, because they felt that a woman (me) who regularly wears makeup (as I do) is happier when wearing makeup (I am), and they preferred the woman (yep, still me) to be happy - not for how she looks to them, but for how she feels inside. Stop press! They’re out there, ladies, men who just want you to be happy!

And that brings me to the most important part of these studies, the part that @GoogleFacts et al chose to ignore and, in my opinion, the singular finding worth shouting about. Only one in ten women wear makeup to impress men. That’s a paltry 10%, meaning 90% of us couldn’t give one solitary hoot what men think about the mask we use to face the day, to hide our scars, to fill us with the confidence to nail a board presentation, to feel our absolute best self - be it a hint of a tint or full-blown clown. Sure, we are happy for men to have opinions, it’s just that when it comes to things with as much pertinence to them as airline luggage allowances have to a squid, we don’t care to hear them.

If they can create an outright fact from just 40%, we can sure as sugar tax do it with 90%. This right here is the only fact you need on cosmetic coverage preference: “Studies show that women couldn’t give a rat’s rectum what men think about their makeup”.

Martha Mills can be found on Twitter @MittenDamour