Attractive women who wear lipstick and mascara are deemed more ‘aggressive’

A touch of lipstick and mascara can often do wonders for how we feel about ourselves.

But it can also affect how other women feel about us, a study suggests.

Psychologists asked female participants to look at pictures of women of varying attractiveness with and without make-up.

They found that the highly attractive women were deemed more aggressive when made up compared to when they were bare-faced.

Make-up on the plainer types, however, only made women judge them as “better leaders”, the researchers discovered.

In a second experiment, women were again asked to view pictures of attractive or plainer women both bare-faced and wearing make-up. 

But this time they asked them to report how attractive they themselves were, and how desirable they thought they themselves were as a partner.

The more desirable participants who viewed the photos of attractive women in make-up experienced a slump in how they felt about their own looks. 

But the less desirable participants were not impacted.

The team, from Charles Sturt University and Federation University in Australia, said make-up may serve as a form of ‘intrasexual competition’ in highly attractive women, but performs a different social function among plainer women.

Intrasexual competition is behaviour aimed at increasing the chance of attracting a high-quality mate, but which is targeted at members of one’s own sex – who are in the market for the same men – rather than the actual love interests. 

‘When highly attractive women wear make-up it’s like, “I’m here, I mean business, you can either step aside or take me on, but I won’t be stepping aside for you”,’ said the study’s co-author Dr Danielle Sulikowski, from Charles Sturt University.

Psychologists asked female participants to look at pictures of women of varying attractiveness with and without make-up (pictured: file photo)

‘Other highly attractive women seem to “get” this signal and respect it.

‘Consciously, we don’t think “oh, she’s wearing make-up, therefore she’s on the war-path, so I’ll just sit back and be a bit of a wall flower and not get in her way’,” she added.

But by feeling intimidated in their presence, and subsequently downgrading their own looks, these women may then be less likely to go after the same men. 

This would save time and energy, increasing their chances of successfully reproducing elsewhere.‘

They essentially withdraw to some extent from the mating market in that situation, hence the make-up has done its job.’

The plainer women wouldn’t be ‘competing’ for the same men anyway, so the women’s make-up doesn’t affect them in quite the same way. 

The findings were published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.