The mores of makeup

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The mores of makeup      

         By Christine Ottery |         Jan 17, 2011 12:00 PM |         4     

                 

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                        Is it best to make like Lady GaGa or go barefaced? Christine Ottery talks to evolutionary biologist Mark Changizi about makeup.
She layered up the base with concealer and powder, and applied 10other products to make her eyes pop and her limps plump. Watching oneof my best friends put on a mask of makeup on for a date, I suddenlyfelt sad, despite my own love of a slick of red lipstick or a sweep ofpeachy blush.
It seems virtuous, somehow more honest and brave, not to wear anymakeup. For example, an acquaintance proudly stated in her onlinedating profile that she was wearing no makeup in her shots. What,barenaked skin!
Meanwhile, I had been reading The Vision Revolution, evolutionary cognitive theorist Mark Changizi’s latest book. In it, Changizi puts forward his thesisthat our colour vision as humans has evolutionary roots in a mutationof the cones in the retina that proved advantageous to humans over 500generations ago by allowing us to distinguish the subtle changes inhaemoglobin in someone’s face. "It is really hard to see how thismorphology is a coincidence," said Changizi when I spoke to him on thephone.
If you think about it we would all notice on some level if someonewe were with flushed bright beetroot from embarrassment or anger, wasyellow or green from illness or shock, or blue from cold or choking.The colour of the skin therefore allows us – via the concentrationlevels of haemoglobin and its oxidation levels – to find out vitalinformation about health or subtle emotional indicators. It’s likefaces are TV screen displaying colours that we can read, Changizipostulates, meaning that we could be unconsciously more empathetic thanwe realise.
Another argument that Changizi uses to construct his theory is thatskin colour is really hard to describe. It varies greatly, which hasprovoked debate about whether the word ‘nude’ is racist among the fashion pack.Changizi reckons our difficulties in naming the colour of our skin –try and label yours satisfactorily - has to do with the fact that werarely notice skin as a colour in images or situations because it is anoptical baseline. He thinks this is useful so we can see "deviationsfrom the baseline", in the same way we don’t taste our own saliva butcan taste the things we put in our mouth. "It is as if special skinspectacles have been sewn over our eyes," he writes.
Another part of Changizi’s theory is that us humans have evolved tobe mostly naked, with dense fur only occurring where it isn’t importantto anticipating different states your fellow humans are in: on the topof the head, under the arms and between the legs. When you compare usto the primates to which we are related, this theory seems to followthrough; apes with less skin on display tend to have more monochromaticvision while apes with more skin on display on their faces tend to havecolour vision, or only the females have colour vision.
There is a kind of elegance to Changizi’s theory in the way that ittethers several mysterious loose ends. This is true especially comparedto its nearest evolutionary theory competitor that we can see colour toidentify fruit and leaves to eat, which raises the question: Ifprimates who see in colour eat specific coloured things, shouldn’tthere be a variety of vision types (as some animals do) instead ofcolour vision to match their staple diet?
Although I tend to take evolutionary biology theories with a pinch of salt due to a shift in neuroscientific thinking towards neuroplasticity,Changizi’s skin theory of colour sight sent my brain buzzing off inlots of different directions. I wondered: Is wearing makeup adisadvantage or advantage to our social skills? Are we shutting peopleout from detecting our feelings by simulating our health or arousal bypainting our faces in rosy tints? What role does culture have to playin all of this?
It’s probably not as simple as saying that wearing makeup is damaging to our social interactions. Changizi told me:

"This is speculation but one counterargument is that youquickly adapt to the blush as a baseline state. Some women have a flushon their faces and once one realizes that, your brain doesn’t attributeit to a change in state.But if you just meet someone in a bar they might feel as if you’reblushing at them in a good way, drawing them in, like fishing. In factit could hurt you [the makeup wearer] later in that they are unable tosee the true modulation of your skin – for example if they are makingyou laugh you are now unable to show that."

Consider, however, that the popular girls in high school might wearmakeup from a younger age and that sunglasses appear cooler the darkerthey are. If you think about it from an evolutionary point of view,it’s very strange that we would want to make ourselves look bug-likewith large sunglasses frames, Changizi says. Covering up your truereactions appears to make you cooler – as it always did. "Generallyspeaking, fashion implicitly knows things no cognitive scientist hasfigured out yet, and has stumbled on truths," he adds. But all this ishypothetical and needs more research.
Some men wear makeup too, as do performers, people in front of thecamera and clowns. But for everyday women, the ones who are targetedfrom all angles by the media to look almost impossibly glamorous, Ipersonally think the message from this is optimistic. We are in controlof how much we makeup wear, so we can choose to be pokerfaced orexpressive in different situations. You might want to wear base in theboardroom to hide any blushes, but wear less makeup on a date, when youwant your skin modulations to be natural and responsive.
** Biology Letters, Bare skin, blood and the evolution of primatecolour vision Mark A Changizi, Qiong Zhang and Shinsuke Shimojo, Biol. Lett. 22 June 2006 vol. 2 no. 2 217-221 doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2006.0440
About the author: Christine Ottery is a freelance science writer who writes on for the Guardian, TheEcologist.co.uk, SciDev.net and Wired magazine. She recently graduated from a MA Science Journalism at City University London, U.K. She blogs at Open Minds and Parachutesand tweets at @christineottery. In her spare time she can be founddancing around the kitchen with her boyfriend, who she's just moved inwith.

The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.