Is makeup inherently unfeminist?

My 13-year-old daughter says yes. I say it's a little bit more complicated

My daughter in makeup in her first professional film. She says the only time we’ll see her wearing it is when she’s acting.

My daughter recently turned 13. She’s an awesome tiny feminist firebrand and wants to smash the patriarchy. Whenever she smashes things, though, I always have to pick them up and put them in the bin, so hopefully she won’t do much patriarchy-smashing in the house.

Anyhow: she recently read an excellent YA (young adult) novel, You Could Be So Pretty by Holly Bourne, about how women and girls shouldn’t wear makeup. We aren’t forced to, the book argues, but society makes us feel as though we have to, and punishes us with a lack of opportunities if we don’t. As women, we are mainly valued for our looks. Only when we stop wasting time and money on cosmetics can we be free.

There is a lot of truth to this: after all, it’s not as though men spend years of their lives preening, fussing over and slathering gunk on their faces, unless they’re David Beckham. 90% of cosmetics products are used by women, and accordingly, the roughly $1,000bn women’s beauty industry is 9x the size of the men’s.

It is time-consuming and costly to regularly apply gloop to your face - time and money which men are free to spend on things which matter, like books and education (even if they’re statistically more likely to spend this time and money on drinking fermented yeast or watching other men kick around an inflated sphere of air).

Anyhow, spoiler time: we get to the end of the novel, both female protagonists have fallen in love with each other, wiped their makeup off and feel free and happy. THE END.

Next we have an explanatory page by Holly about how this isn’t really a novel, but is actually happening in real life to women and girls everywhere. Not really necessary, but fair enough.

And then we turn the page and there’s an author photo of Holly Bourne… in full makeup! WTF?!

This would be like getting to the end of my atheist YA novel and finding a pic of me decked out like the Pope with a massive crucifix dangling from my neck.