Beauty blindness does not exist

When I was 12, the only make-up I was allowed to wear to school was black eyeliner, scribbled all over the lower waterline. Then came the turn of liquid eyeliner, which I remember as if it were yesterday. I was 14 or 15 years old, and before going out to the piazza, I went with my friend Fiammetta to buy one. I spent minutes and minutes in front of the mirror trying to apply it, discovering firsthand that it was much more difficult than the beauty tutorials I avidly watched on YouTube made it seem. Naturally, I still went out with my crooked eyeliner. Something similar happened shortly after with false lashes, which I eventually gave up on. Honestly, it's not even an age issue. Just a couple of years ago, for a girls' vacation in Venice, I decided to sport a line of white graphic eyeliner in the center of my eyelid, Euphoria-style. It’s been only 2 or 3 years, but when I look at the photos, I feel a bit of cringe.

Beauty blindness according to TikTok

Now, if I were a Gen Z on TikTok, I would talk about these make-up experiments as eyeliner or lash blindness. But what does it mean? Using this expression, more and more girls and boys show photos of their past and then their present to demonstrate how they didn't realize they were overdoing or messing up something. It can be anything: from the color of foundation (too light, too dark, too orange) to lip fillers, hair bleaching, or a fringe cut too short. Many users also show their current look and ask the potentially infinite audience of the app what their blindness is now to improve aesthetically because sometimes – when we're inside it and used to seeing ourselves in the mirror every day – we don't realize it.

Unsolicited opinions

On social media, often, it’s all a game. To go viral, to seek interaction. However, if you've hung around a few comment sections in your life, you can imagine how this game of beauty blindness has, in some cases, turned into a real bloodbath. Some use it to insult and self-insult, and others talk about blindness even in videos where no one was asking for anyone's opinion. In short, it has become a barely veiled way to attack others based on their appearance. It doesn't matter if they are things that can be changed (buying a new foundation, blending it better, canceling the appointment with the cosmetic doctor, or taking a crash course in eyeliner), what we contest here is the attitude, the impulse to say something, to express opinions about others' appearance even when not explicitly requested.

The beauty of experimenting with make-up

And let's be clear: make-up, if done at an amateur level, is beautiful because it allows us to experiment, to try, to send messages. And these messages don't have to be positive; just think about unapproachable make-up, a defense mechanism against unwanted attention, or clown make-up, which plays with the grotesque and colorful to ward off the male gaze. So, why not allow it? Why not accept that what we like exists and can be worn and flaunted even outside current trends and that this doesn't make it some kind of blindness? To put things in perspective, we just need to think – and it's just one possible example out of a million – about Cara Delevingne's eyebrows in 2016/2017. What would now undoubtedly be labeled as eyebrow blindness, dictated trends for months on end back then.