Wearing Makeup to the Gym

More recently I’ve heard and seen a lot of comments making fun of women wearing makeup while at the gym.  Being a woman who often wears makeup to the gym, these comments are particularly offensive and unnecessary.  If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve likely seen a couple tweets about it.

A popular question asks, “Who are you trying to impress?”  Or it could be something like, “You don’t have to look pretty to work out.”  Any knowledge I may have on health and fitness is doubted or disregarded because I have makeup on.  There was a comment on the Huffington Post’s article regarding this topic that said something along the lines of women who wear makeup to the gym don’t sweat anyways, they’re just there to pick up guys, etc.  I have heard it all.  While I understand what sweating in makeup can do to your skin, I don’t think it’s anyone’s business to make me or someone else feel bad about it.  I seriously doubt that women who wear makeup to the gym don’t know the risk, but rather they just disregard it, whatever their reason.

Let’s start with what any Cosmo article will tell you about sweating in your makeup: it clogs your pores.  Your skin needs to breathe when it gets warm, so your pores open and enlarge and it’s easier for the makeup on your face to be trapped.  Since Cosmo (or Seventeen, or Vogue) said it, it’s true and you should tell everyone you know because you’re an expert now.

The fact of the matter is that your pores are just holes in your skin.  They are a hair follicle and also a gland for your skin’s natural oil, but there is no muscle around their opening.  They do not open with warmth or close with cold.  The reason we think this happens is purely because steam can make it easier to clean excess oil and debris out of your pores.  It just loosens things up better than cold water would, similar to when you’re hand-washing a dish with some dried oatmeal stuck to it.  That oatmeal is going to loosen up and come off much more easily under very hot water and steam.  It’s true that your skin needs to breathe, but heat is radiating off of your face regardless as your capillaries dilate (the reason you get “flushed”).

That’s all well and good.  Clogged pores can cause break outs.  Being someone who knows a thing or a hundred about breakouts, this is not foreign to me.  I get it.  I don’t have a problem understanding this, I just blatantly ignore it for two reasons:  I have to make time in my schedule to go to the gym, and I already have shitty skin.

First of all, when I have work and/or class 5-6 days out of the week, I am wearing makeup.  I’m likely wearing some kind of makeup when I am just hanging out at my house.  If a day passes where I don’t wear makeup, it’s likely because I know I won’t be interacting with a single living organism outside of my bedroom the entire day.  I know that I am not the only person who wears makeup to work or class all day and has to fit the gym in somewhere.  If you say it’s doing too much to wear makeup to the gym, I’m going to tell you that it’s doing too much to go home and wash my face to go to the gym.  If I have plans to go work out, I’m not going to interrupt them by detouring to take my makeup off just to please any self-righteous bare faces.  For many women, having time to go to the gym at all is a miracle.  At the gym I used to go to, where there wasn’t a dress code, I would see people doing a business-casual treadmill walk.  You gotta do what you gotta do.

And let’s talk about something else: the people who don’t want me to wear makeup to the gym are the same ones with clear skin who made fun of me for my zits.  Enough years of ridicule for the way your skin looks will make a person feel pretty bad about not wearing makeup.  Today I have breakouts here and there, but most of my face has hyperpigmentation from past breakouts that would still warrant stares and chatter when uncovered.  That’s not something I’m comfortable with at this point in my life.  I feel more comfortable wearing makeup 100% of the time that I’m not sleeping.  I hope to have clear skin at some point, and it has gotten a lot better, but I’m still nowhere near ready to show it off to the world.  It should be said that if you want the coverage, there are lighter ways to do that and on days where the only thing I do is work out, I will still wear some form of coverage that is not as heavy on my skin.  I have had minimal problems with breakouts after working out by just going home, taking my makeup off and washing up.  Fully removing my makeup and then using a gentle cleanser has been sufficient for me.  In my opinion, what you should worry about first after your workout is putting food and water back in your body.  You can be smelly and still eat.

I realize this is not a post you all are used to seeing, and kind of a weird way for me to reappear after my partial hiatus, but I have had the overwhelming feeling of wanting to write about it because of the things I keep seeing that shame me for leaving my makeup on.  What do you guys think?  Does anyone else have the same problems I do?