Yes, getting up extra early to do your face is time-consuming, but it’s a time-honoured ritual
Parents bringing up Snapchatting, selfietaking, screen-dependent digital natives have come to realise there is no map for raising children in the social media age.
There’s even less guidance for parents of young women — tweens and teens who are taking their cue from ‘Hey Guys!’ YouTube beauty tutorials, and coming of age through the techniques of ‘contouring’, ‘strobing’, ‘baking’ and ‘squinching’.
It’s a phenomenon author Zadie Smith has been watching closely, which is why she has imposed a time limit, not on screen time, but on mirror time, for her seven-year-old daughter Kit.
The author laid out her rationale at the recent Edinburgh International Book Festival. “I explained it to her in these terms: you are wasting time — your brother is not going to waste any time doing this,” she said.
“Every day of his life, he will put a shirt on, he’s out the door and he doesn’t give a sh*t if you waste an hour and a half doing your make-up.”
This isn’t the first time women’s exhaustive beauty routines have been identified as a barrier to female progress.
A couple of years ago, ‘hair-and-makeup tax’ created a buzz when Hillary Clinton was asked about her grooming routine in an informal Q&A session on Facebook.
“Every morning, as my boyfriend zips out the door and I spend 30+ minutes getting ready, I wonder about how the ‘hair-and-make-up tax’ affects other women,” read Facebook staffer Libby Brittain.
The subtext, of course, is that maybe the answer to smashing the glass ceiling and narrowing the pay gap lies in our vanity cases.
Maybe we’d have more time to read books and ponder the complexities of consciousness if we weren’t perpetually searching for a foundation that matches our skin tone. Maybe we wouldn’t even need Touche Éclat if we could stay in bed for an extra half an hour every morning.
It makes perfect sense in theory, but it misses the crucial point. Sure, getting up extra early to put on your face is unnecessarily timeconsuming, yet for most women, it’s not a daily routine they begrudge — it’s a time-honoured, sanity-saving ritual they require. Yes, some women spend unfeasible amounts of time in front of the mirror and, yes, some women really do look better without it, as men are wont to say. Yet rituals aren’t meant to make sense. On the contrary, they are designed to help us spend vast swathes of time on the seemingly inconsequential.
The time a woman spends in front of the mirror each morning is often the only uninterrupted time she has to herself during the day. It may even be the only time her shoulders come down from around her ears and her mind drifts away from electricity bills, school fees, health checks and work deadlines.
The ‘morning ritual’ has become a popular, Oprah-endorsed concept in recent years. The idea is you get up 20 minutes earlier to incorporate some sort of centring practice — meditation, yoga, breathing exercises — to your morning routine. Yet most women already have a morning ritual: make-up.
Mindfulness has also become a popular relaxation technique, yet any woman who takes the time to slowly and meticulously apply two coats of mascara from root to tip — even when the dog is barking, the kettle is whistling and the clock is ticking — will know that she’s already practising it.
Would we really get more done if we limited our time in front of the mirror, or would we simply find another outlet for quiet introspection? Likewise, do men really have more time to get things done, or do they find these meditative outlets elsewhere?
They may wonder how women spend so much time on something as frivolous as make-up, yet women often wonder how men can go to the pub with only a crossword for company; how they can sit on the toilet, reading the back of a shampoo bottle, for what seems like 45 minutes; and how they can potter about in the shed, moving objects from one side of the room to the other, for hours.
Men may not spend as much time on beautifying as women, but make no mistake, they have their own mystifying, time-consuming rituals that help them cope with the pressures of daily life. As for women and make-up: our hair and make-up dues are fully tax-deductible.