No Makeup, No Shame

Next month, Libertyville will be encouraged to break away from society’s beauty standards and norms. In November,“Fresh Faced Friday” will be coming to LHS and AdvoCATS is encouraging students to come to school without makeup on.

AdvoCATS as a club focuses on gender equality in the world and at LHS. They educate students on issues in society regarding gender concepts, as well as create a safe atmosphere for people to share, discuss, and put forth their own ideas and feelings.

“One of our main goals, especially being a club in a high school, is to educate students on issues surrounding gender equality and inequality in society because a lot of people don’t think that exists,” senior club founder and president Julia Thurau explained. “Especially at this age, it’s not something that affects us directly in many ways. So our main goal is to educate, but we also raise money for different organizations.”

According to Thurau, the point of their November campaign is to have girls understand both the importance of appreciating themselves and their beauty, and the fact that they do not need makeup to conform to societal beauty standards.

The idea was originally proposed by senior club members Kate Vittore (a Drops of Ink staff member) and Julia Wilson. After reading a blog post about it, Vittore brought her idea to Wilson, and then the pair brought the concept to the club. In proposing the idea, their main goal was to help girls realize that wearing makeup is their choice, not society’s decision.

“The point of this day is to show everyone that girls are beautiful without makeup, and that it shouldn’t be necessary for them to wear if it they don’t want to,” explained Wilson.

Instead of just supporting the idea of not wearing makeup to school, AdvoCATS created a specific day for their campaign in order for it have a bigger impact.

“We did it as a specific day just so that people could feel unity and solidarity in it,” said senior club vice president Monica Martin. “So instead of just saying ‘oh, you shouldn’t be afraid of it,’ we’re saying ‘this is a week in which we can all do it together, to conquer it together.’”

While hoping for a successful campaign, they do understand that not everyone will feel comfortable ditching their makeup for the day.

“There is the problem that it is something different. It is girls, or whoever, stepping out of their comfort zone, so of course it’s always hard to get participation for something like that, but we do hope that people realize that it’s going to be a lot of people doing it, and they can feel safe doing it as a group,” Martin said.

Not only girls are being targeted by this campaign. According to Wilson, “every high school student” is a part of the target audience.

Thurau explained: “There’s always guys, you hear them say [something] like ‘oh, she’s not wearing makeup today, she doesn’t look good,’ or something like that, and there’s also guys that say ‘oh my gosh, she’s wearing so much makeup, she looks so fake, it’s a lie’ and there’s two opposite sides to the spectrum. So obviously if the message gets to guys that they don’t get to judge a girl’s worth on what she does with her appearance, then that’s good too.”

While enthusiastic about the campaign, Thurau and Martin want to remind people that they should not feel obligated to take part in it.

“We just want to really stress that this isn’t an attack on people who wear makeup at all. If you wear makeup, that’s your own choice. We want everyone to feel comfortable in making that decision on their own and not feeling pressured from other students or society in general that this is a necessary thing to do. We just want people to make the decisions by themselves,” Thurau said.

Martin emphasized that the campaign was designed to allow girls to reclaim the decision to wear makeup:  “It’s to really take back ownership of it, so that you can choose when you put it on and when you keep it off, instead of feeling like you have to do one thing and you can’t do that other.”

This campaign, like AdvoCATS, is meant to support everyone in their pursuit of educating LHS on gender equality in society and in high school.

“We just want people to see this and get the impact that other people are doing it and other people are showing them that you don’t need to wear makeup to feel beautiful. You’re already beautiful, and you should be comfortable in your own skin,” said Thurau.