Participants rated the faces as appearing more attractive, more feminine, and as having higher status when wearing professional makeup than self-applied makeup; professional makeup appeared heavier and less natural looking

Professional Versus Self-Applied Makeup: Do Makeup Artists Add Value? Carlota Batres, Aurélie Porcheron, Sandra Courrèges, Richard Russell. Perception, July 2, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/03010066211029218

Abstract: While a number of studies have investigated the effects of makeup on how people are perceived, the vast majority have used professionally applied makeup. Here, we tested the hypothesis that professional makeup is more effective than self-applied makeup. We photographed the same target women under controlled conditions wearing no makeup, makeup they applied themselves, and makeup applied by professional makeup artists. Participants rated the faces as appearing more attractive, more feminine, and as having higher status when wearing professional makeup than self-applied makeup. Secondarily, we found that participants perceived the professional makeup as appearing heavier and less natural looking than the self-applied makeup. This work shows that professional makeup is more effective than self-applied makeup and begins to elucidate the nature of makeup artistry. We discuss these findings with respect to personal decoration and physical attractiveness, as well as the notion of artists as experts.

Keywords: face perception, visual perception, personal decoration, cosmetics, physical attraction

General Discussion

We sought to test the hypotheses that professional makeup is more effective and more heavily applied than self-applied makeup. We found clear evidence in support of this first (efficacy) hypothesis using the same faces photographed under the same photographic conditions. In Study 1, faces were rated as more attractive when wearing professional makeup than when wearing self-applied makeup. In Study 2, faces were rated as appearing more feminine and as having higher status when wearing professional makeup than when wearing self-applied makeup. These results demonstrate empirically that makeup artists are more effective at applying makeup.

Faces were also rated as appearing more attractive when they wore either kind of makeup—professional or self-applied—than when they wore no makeup. Similarly, faces were rated as appearing more feminine and as having higher status when wearing either kind of makeup than when wearing no makeup. These findings replicate previous results with attractiveness, femininity, and status. However, the effect sizes were consistently smaller when the no makeup condition was compared with the self-applied makeup condition than when it was compared with the professional makeup condition. This suggests that laypeople applying their own makeup are able to achieve many of the same benefits as they would from professionally applied makeup, but to a smaller degree. Future research on the effects of makeup on person perception should take this into account. More specifically, the effect of cosmetics on attractiveness, femininity, status, and related traits will be stronger if using professional makeup than if using self-applied makeup.

We investigated our second hypothesis—that professionally applied makeup looks heavier—with the belief that such differences could provide insight into how professionally applied makeup is more effective. Participants rated the faces as appearing to wear more makeup in the professional makeup condition than in the self-applied makeup condition, for ratings of overall amount of makeup in Study 1 and for ratings of facial skin makeup and facial features makeup in Study 2. Related to this, the professional makeup also appeared less natural than the self-applied makeup in Study 1, even though makeup artists teach techniques for seamless application of products to maximize the effects of the products while minimizing the noticeability of the products (Barnes, 2011; Brown & Iverson, 1997).

Our findings raise the question of what factors cause professionally applied makeup to be more effective than self-applied makeup. Professional makeup artists are presumably more skilled at applying makeup than ordinary people. This skill could include perceptual differences (this possibility is taken up in a subsequent paragraph), manual dexterity for applying makeup to the face, and expert judgment for selecting products and styles well-suited to particular faces. We also observed here that the makeup artists took more time applying makeup than did the target women applying their own makeup. We suspect that this difference in time spent applying makeup is a typical difference between self and professionally applied makeup, but we are not aware of other published data regarding the time spent applying makeup. The amount of time spent applying makeup could affect how well it is applied. Another possible factor is the quality of products and tools. Professional makeup artists tend to use more expensive products and tools, which could have an effect on the appearance of the makeup on the face. Experience with the particular face is another factor, as the target women had extensive experience with their own faces, while the makeup artists only saw them for the first time when they applied the makeup. However, this factor would have the effect of reducing the efficacy of makeup artists. Also, there may be differences between applying makeup to one’s own face versus someone else’s face that are unrelated to skill or experience, but instead related to self-concept and self-presentation. Disentangling the roles of these and other factors is an issue for future research.

There is one other possible factor underlying the difference in efficacy between professional and self-applied makeup that can be directly addressed by the current data. In Study 1, the faces appeared more attractive and to have heavier makeup with professional makeup than self-applied makeup. It could be that the observed difference in efficacy between professional and self-applied makeup is a result of the makeup artists applying more makeup. To test that possibility, we conducted a simple mediation analysis of the rated attractiveness and amount of makeup data from Study 1 using the SPSS plugin MEMORE (Montoya & Hayes, 2017). MEMORE implements ordinary least squares regression in a path-analytic framework for designs with repeated measurements of both the mediator and dependent variables. Makeup (professional, self-applied) was the independent variable, perceived attractiveness was the dependent variable, and perceived amount of makeup was the mediating variable. Ninety-five percent confidence intervals were generated from 10,000 bootstrap samples. The results of mediation analysis are presented in Figure 4.

[Figure 4. Ratings of amount and attractiveness from Study 1 were analyzed in a simple mediation model, with makeup (professional, self-applied) as the independent variable, amount of makeup as the mediator variable, and attractiveness as the dependent variable. Total effect is shown in parentheses. Asterisks indicate significant effects (***p < .001).]

The total effect and a path of the analysis are redundant with the results presented in Study 1. The total effect of makeup on attractiveness was significant, c = .13, 95% CI [.09, .18], p < .001, meaning that the faces were rated higher on attractiveness when wearing professional makeup than self-applied makeup. The a path was also significant, a = .64, 95% CI [.55, .72], p < .001, meaning that the faces were perceived as having heavier makeup when wearing professional makeup than self-applied makeup. However, the b path was not significant, b = .01, 95% CI [–.07, .10], p = .742, meaning that there was not an effect of makeup amount on attractiveness when the statistical effect of makeup condition was held constant. The indirect effect is the product of the a and b paths and measures how much of the effect of the makeup on attractiveness is mediated via makeup amount. The indirect effect of makeup on attractiveness via makeup amount was not significant, ab = .01, 95% CI [–.05, .07]. The direct effect of makeup on attractiveness while statistically controlling the influence of makeup amount was significant, c’ = .13, 95% CI [.06, .19], p < .001. The results of the mediation analysis do not support the notion that the amount of makeup applied is responsible for the difference in efficacy between professional and self-applied makeup.

We have provided clear evidence that makeup artists do add value, more effectively applying makeup than laypeople. From the specific context of makeup, these findings give some support to the broader notion that aesthetic professionals add value. The distinction we are drawing here between professional and lay practitioners is related to the notion of artists as experts (Chamberlain, 2018; Kozbelt, 2001), about which a key question has been whether artists have superior perceptual ability. This suggests several questions for future research about the relationship between aesthetic skill and perceptual ability in makeup artists and other aesthetic professionals. Do makeup artists have exceptional face perception ability? Recent work has shown that portrait artists have stronger than average ability to discriminate differences between faces and that perceptual discrimination ability is associated with portrait drawing ability (Devue & Barsics, 2016), possibly due to preexisting individual differences in this ability (Devue & Grimshaw, 2018). Is the ability to beautify the face with makeup similarly associated with the ability to perceive differences in faces related to attractiveness, age, health, and femininity? This in turn suggests the broader question of whether there are stable individual differences in these perceptual abilities. Currently, this question is unexplored, yet large individual differences in face recognition ability have recently been described, with people ranging from prosopagnosics who have severe impairments in face recognition ability (Duchaine & Nakayama, 2006), to super-recognizers who have exceptionally strong face recognition ability (Russell et al., 2009). Future work should investigate whether such individual differences also exist for other aspects of face perception, such as the abilities to perceive facial traits such as attractiveness, age, health, and femininity.

In conclusion, our results provide the first empirical evidence that professional makeup is more effective than self-applied makeup and quantifies the value added by aesthetic professionals. This has implications for the choice of professional or self-applied makeup in future research examining the effects of cosmetics on person perception. While most of this literature has investigated how the presence or absence of makeup affects person perception, our findings show that different kinds of cosmetic application can have different effects person perception.