A few days ago, I was volunteering on a Q&A panel for parents to ask high school-aged children, such as myself, about what helped us high schoolers when we were growing up. How did we find connection and belonging? What helped us expand our social circle?
Prior to the start of this Q&A, the moderator warned us volunteers that some parents may ask us about social media because social media is a new thing that is becoming an unavoidable part of our lives. Eventually, that question came. A mother expressed concern over her middle school-aged daughters’ new interest in their nails and hair, and their new interest in getting TikTok and Snapchat. Social Media can be good and bad at the same time. It is like a knife. A knife can be good for cutting vegetables, but it can also be used to harm. The danger of a knife at the end of the day depends on the wielder. I want to give everyone my and my co-volunteers’ answer to that mother’s question because I believe many of us could use it. I know some of you in the audience will find my response obvious. You will be saying, “You are not the first person to think of this. What is the point?” My point in this article is not to share new information like I usually do. My point is to give advice from my own experiences as a child in the Information Age. Even though you know the answer, you need someone else to say it as well sometimes. That was remarkably easy to see among the parents who attended the Q&A. Now I am going to dive into the question.
Hair and makeup are honestly something I think every girl gets into at a certain age. I remember always wanting long hair and wanting to dye the ends like I saw many other girls do. I associated dying my hair with being cool because I thought so many people were doing it. I always expressed frustration at my split ends, dandruff, and other imperfections I saw in my hair. I was truly willing to do anything to eliminate that because then I would have perfect hair, and it would automatically grow longer. What would perfect hair give me? To be honest, I never gave much thought to the answer to that question. I had never had long hair in my life, but I saw so many of my friends with longer and healthier hair, and I wanted it too. As you can see so far, reasons for wanting things as children are often seeing other people with stuff you do not have. As for makeup, it makes your face more perfect. Your lips have no chance to look as red as roses without any kind of lip tint. That showstopping red hue is simply rare in us humans. As we grow up, we see more unpleasant blemishes on our skin: pimples,zits,eyebags(I am not being sarcastic). We would want to cover it up with concealer. Even without social media, anyone who is anyone would want to cover it up. Social media simply motivates us more to cover it up. When you live on the Internet, you live through the filter of makeup,camera, and camera filters. How we look on camera has become more important. You do not want your friends or the world to see you with pimples. In that way, makeup is a shield, a perfect shield to protect us from our insecurities and imperfections. But this is not hair and makeup’s sole identity.
I have a friend who comes to school every day wearing makeup like many of my friends, except she does not wear makeup or clothes the way they do. I would say she has the best (and unique!) fashion sense in my friend group because while she comes into school with blush and tinted lips, she does not even try to hide her pimple scars. She wears extravagant and baggy sweatshirts and pants, accompanied by even more ornate jewelry, including a jeweled belt and so many bracelets. If I saw that style on someone else, I would wonder if they were on their way to a costume party. However, with my friend, it seems normal because you can tell that the extravagant jewelry and baggy dressing style are simply aspects of her personality. Her fashion sense does not conceal her from the world. It is a way to distinguish her from millions of other teenagers traversing the world. It is a way to express herself to the entire world without speaking. In fact, that style of dressing shows a lot about her personality before you even meet her. So yes, hair and makeup do have a positive aspect. It allows us to show the world who we are, and besides makeup, there are other ways to do it. For example, I have another friend whose instrument case has so many stickers that you could glean her beliefs just by looking at the case.
As for social media, it is kind of unavoidable to use social media in this day and age. It is just necessary for connection, whether that connection is frivolous or not. For instance, I installed TikTok on my phone simply because my friends sent so many TikTok reels, and I could not watch them because I had not installed it. Then they would launch into these discussions about how these reels were so “real,” and I would be lurking all mum because I had no context in order to participate in their discussion. Eventually, I could not take it anymore, and I downloaded TikTok. I currently do not have a scrolling problem, but I may have inched myself on the path of developing through the act of installing TikTok. And once I installed TikTok, I barely even used it to look at the reels that my friends sent because, to be honest, I stopped caring about them. The lesson from that story? Sometimes our mind makes things out to be more crucial than they truly are. On the other hand, I had to install Instagram because most communications about clubs at my school were done on Instagram. Chances were zilch of me consistently being able to find out about meetings through flyers, so I needed Instagram to be aware of what is going on at my school. There is even my high school Instagram account, where days off are announced, which makes Instagram all the more important to me. I cannot speak for Snapchat since I do not have Snapchat, but what I do know is that it provides a variety of camera filters, which makes it easier to improve your pictures. And it provides another way to text people.
There is no one answer to the concerns of parents in the digital age. It all truly depends on the child, and it is up to the parent to figure out what scenario applies regarding makeup and social media usage. Again, social media and makeup are mere tools. The morality of them and their usage depends on the user behind it.
Leave a Reply