Women are confronted with a bevy of tough choices to make all day, every day. What should we wear? How much skin should we show? How little should we eat? What color hand towels should we hang in the downstairs powder room? Will dying our hair red turn us into wanton sluts?
Of course, most of these quandaries stem from the core issue that motivates each and every one of our questions: how do the men feel about what we’re doing?
So we were relieved when the following pitch came into our inbox from dating site Zoosk: “How Do Men Really Feel About Women Wearing Makeup?” This reporter has racked her brain for the answer to this for years. Men are usually so shy about giving their opinions about a woman’s appearance, after all.
Most importantly, it’s really hard to get hit on by strange men on the Internet. So Zoosk was kind enough to furnish the data, which is as follows:
• Women who wear eye makeup receive 139 percent more first messages than women who don’t, so line those lids, uggo.
• But make sure and wash it off before the date; 66 percent of men do not find a date more attractive if she’s wearing dark makeup.
• Women wearing blush receive 24 percent more first messages than those who don’t. This ignores the fact that nobody, male or female, can ever tell when someone else has blush on.
• 82 percent of men find a relaxed and natural hairstyle to be most attractive. This does not jibe with my anecdotal experience, which is that 100 percent of men ask me if I’m sick when I go out of the house with my hair in its natural state.
• Only 9 percent prefer pin straight hair, so get an ’80s perm.
• 84 percent prefer a natural-looking hair color over obviously-dyed hair, so think twice before taking a pic of Katy Perry to the hair salon. A man who will reject you because your hair is hot pink is a man you want to be with.
• Women who wear lipstick in their profile photo get 119 percent more first messages than those who don’t. BUT, 57 percent of men do not think wearing red lipstick on a date is attractive. So we should all probably kill ourselves.
Zoosk also “surveyed over 1,800 of its males members to see which look they prefer for celebrities,” because Zoosk cares about making the world a better place. Here are the findings:
“The results show that while men may prefer makeup on women they may potentially date, they prefer a more natural look over dramatic makeup on celebrities. For shots of Beyoncé, Jennifer Lawrence, Kim Kardashian and Jessica Alba, guys preferred the natural over heavily made up look in every single case. Lesson here: whether they realize it or not, guys like makeup, but they don’t want it to obscure a woman’s true beauty.”
Actually, the lesson here should be that it doesn’t fucking matter whether a man likes your makeup. We’ll start following advice like this when men start, say, getting pedicures to tame their gnarly hobbit feet, or NOT shaving the perfect five-o’clock-shadow we’ve been begging them to keep.
Bottom line: It’s your face. Do whatever you want with it.
