I tried to ditch makeup for an entire week

I wear makeup every day. In fact, I’d consider myself famous for the eyebrows I aggressively draw on my face every morning. I started wearing makeup in sixth grade, not because I thought makeup was fun or cool, but because sixth grade is when I found my first pimple. When I went to my mom in distress about this red, puss-filled growth on my face, she handed me a little tube of beige concealer and said, “Emily, concealer is your new best friend.”

Since then, I’ve been caking on makeup to hide the marks, bumps, pimples, and scars that have persisted over the years. I put sparkly, light-reflecting highlighter over my dark circles to convince people that I get sufficient amounts of sleep. I use black eyeshadow to heavily fill-in my eyebrows just to let people know I have enough confidence to walk around with thick black eyebrows.

I’ve never tried, however, maintaining that same level of confidence without the makeup. It’s not that I don’t like my natural face. I just get frustrated when I wake up in the morning and my dark circles give off the vibe that I’ve been punched in the face a few times, my skin doesn’t radiate youth and light like it does in the Covergirl commercials, and my pudgy cheekbones aren’t sharply defined like Kendall Jenner’s.

So, for the past week, I made it my goal to survive without the mask I’ve been wearing for about eight years. Would my friends make fun of me? Probably. Would my teachers ask if I was feeling OK and needed some sleep? Certainly. I wanted to see what would happen anyway. I secretly wished that after a week of having pure, unclogged pores, I would be rewarded with beautiful, flawless, acne-free skin. I wanted to sit down to write this article afterwards and tell the world, “I’ve discovered the source of all acne. MAKEUP” And stick it to corporate America by bashing cosmetic companies for being the sole cause of all teenage girls’ skin problems.

Take that, cosmetic industry

I’ll let you know right now that that totally didn’t happen. I think my skin actually looked worse at the end of the seven days. I’m not telling you to go slather foundation and cake powder onto your face to cure your acne. I am telling you that the source of acne definitely isn’t as simple as I thought.

Our lives are influenced by way too many variables to simply point our fingers at one of them and call it the cause of all our suffering. What we eat, the amount of sleep we get, how much water we drink, and how often we exercise all show up in our skin. Scary as it is, our skin tells no lies. I’ve learned that if you eat 4 slices of cheesecake at 2am, you shouldn’t be surprised to see the results of your actions on your skin the next morning.

Here’s my face at the end of the seven days looking worse than it did at the start. I’d also eaten 15 Oreos earlier that day, so that might explain it

As for my self-confidence, my makeup-less week taught me that people who love you don’t just love you for your dewy skin and winged eyeliner. They tend not to care what your face looks like nearly as much as you do. Before the week began, I’d prepared myself mentally for the many snide remarks I thought I’d get from my friends. As shocked as I was to not receive any of this criticism, I was even more dumbfounded to receive an unsolicited compliment on my sparse, naked, un-drawn eyebrows that week.

I’ve gotten plenty of compliments on my made-up face over the years because I’ve been wearing makeup for as long as I can remember. I’d never gotten a compliment on my natural face before, not because it’s ugly or any less beautiful, but because I hadn’t given it a chance to see the light of day since the sixth grade.

I do feel much more comfortable now painting my face on in the mornings knowing that I probably won’t break out the next day as a direct result of wearing makeup. So, go ahead, invest in a new bottle of that Mac liquid foundation and draw on those eyebrows as dark as you want them. Just make sure that the clean, naked face underneath it makes you just as happy as the made-up one.