lesbeet:

you can try to defend the beauty industry all you want but aside from that video of the girl chemically burning the shit out of her face on purpose to make a “permanent contour” i also know women in my life who have gotten their eyebrows and their eyeliner tattooed on (respectively) simply because they thought it was a better alternative than applying them onto their faces every single day for the rest of their lives or risk being judged/ridiculed/punished by society

like think of how delicate the skin of the eye is where your eyeliner goes. imagine getting a fucking tattoo there. imagine thinking that pain is worth it because you feel so doomed to wearing makeup and yet so exhausted by the sheer idea of putting it on every day for the rest of your life

one of these women is my grandmother and the other is my aunt’s grandmother, and both of them have explicitly told me that they regret getting these tattoos, and neither of them got them redone when they eventually faded, years and years later. this isn’t a matter of “they love makeup and it helps them express themselves so let them do what they want!” it’s a matter of desperation, of resignation to the constraints and expectations of a society that wants women to look fuckable at literally all costs, even if it means undergoing significant, and even permanent, physical harm.

“beauty is pain” is just another (condescending) way of saying “your priority should be your looks, not your personal well-being” and no amount of loving makeup as a hobby and form of self-expression is going to make that stop being true