'Glam-shaming' is more than just a problem on 'The Bachelor'

Jennifer Gerson Uffalussy
·Contributing Writer


On Monday night’s episode of The Bachelor, not a single contestant picked a fight with Arie Luyendek Jr. for lording a group date over their heads by daring them to drink their own urine. Instead, the biggest blowout was between Marikh Mathias and Chelsea Roy — over makeup.

While on the survivalist training and mountain traversing group date — that the women luckily did not have to imbibe anything to get invited on — Mathias, a 27-year old restaurant owner from Utah, took a break to use her compass to check the direction of her flyaways.

Then, later on in the show, Roy, who has been positioned as the villain of the 22nd season, confronted Mathias for macgyvering the compass for beauty purposes.

“I saw with my own eyes you brushing your hair, I wouldn’t makes something up,” Roy, a single mother and administrative assistant, said.

Ultimately, Mathias tells Roy that she felt that the latter was engaged in “glam-shaming” — something that, Mathias said, is like fat-shaming or slut-shaming — both of which make women feel bad about who they are based on their appearances.

Mathias isn’t the first person to publicly call out this phenomenon.

In March of 2017, YouTube star Nikkie of NikkieTutorials called this very concept out in a video entitled “Ending Makeup Shaming!” that quickly went viral.

“We makeup lovers don’t wear makeup because we’re insecure or we don’t feel confident enough about ourselves,” Nikkie said. “No! We wear makeup because as makeup lovers wearing makeup is a way to express our art, to be ourselves, and we just love the process of seeing yourself transform.”

She continued, “What harm does it do to you to let someone play with makeup and feel like their best self? So many people out there say, ‘She’s playing with makeup because she’s insecure’ or ‘She’s playing with makeup to impress boys.’ And that’s totally not the case. When you love makeup, you love the transformative power of it….It’s not about impressing others. It’s for us.”

For Julie Fredrickson, the founder and CEO of Stowaway Cosmetics, a line of high-end, clean cosmetics made affordable by only being offered in travel sizes, glam shaming is so much more than just hurling hurtful words. “I think glam shaming is both fundamentally classist and racist,” Fredrickson tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “Because glam shaming is the flip-side of wellness virtue signaling.”

Fredrickson says that increasingly, the cultural trend is for women to look “natural” — and naturally perfect. “Whether it’s organic cucumber being placed on your face or mascara, either way you are wearing something that’s not a part of you,” she says.

While it’s more cost effective to wear makeup than get intensive skin care treatment, she explains, the idea that glamour should be effortless pushes women to think that they should be doing all these expensive things to themselves that no one can see. “You can see makeup, but it’s a lot harder to see if someone has fillers or really good eyelash extensions,” Fredrickson notes. “So anytime you’re glam-shaming someone, you’re saying, ‘We want you to look good, but not that you took the time to look good.’ And only people with excess time and cash can work on these artificial beauty standards without showing the effort.”

However, the main point is that women should wear makeup or care about how they look if they want to and not be shamed for it — and same goes for those who want to go au natural. And that no one should have to drink their own body waste in order to go on a group date with a reality star race car driver.

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