Ep. 159 || Keeping Up With Appearances: The Gospel & Makeup Transcript
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Laura: Hey friends, Laura here. I know I popped in last week before the show, and I wanted to do so again today. I hope you’re all continuing to find ways to keep busy with the kiddos at home. I personally feel like we’re finally starting to hit our stride—I’m finding jumping jack contests in the basement are a helpful way to burn some of that energy. So the reason I wanted to come in, is that like I talked about last week, at Risen Motherhood, we typically record and edit our podcasts months in advance. Such as today’s show—we’re talking about makeup—it was recorded a long time ago—long before we knew about Coronavirus and its effects. We get that makeup feels like a small, trivial thing right now. But we’re continuing to trust that God knew about the events of today even back when we were recording and he’ll use it for his glory.
Before I go today, I just want to remind you: Remember that the gospel is not quarantined. We may be self-quarantined, but the gospel knows no such boundaries. This is the perfect time to spread the good news far and wide. Tell your elderly neighbor about Jesus when you bring them groceries, show the beauty of the gospel to your children when you have kindness in a tense moment, and if you’re on the internet, write it for the world to see. Risen Motherhood community, the gospel cannot be contained to the walls that shut you in. This is our time to show the world the hope to which we cling to. Thanks so much for joining us for today’s show. We’re glad you’re here.
Laura: Well hey friends, welcome back to another episode of Risen Motherhood. I’m Laura and I have my sister-in-law Emily here with me.
Emily: Hey!
Laura: Ok, on to today's show. I'm really excited about this topic today. This is one of those things that Emily and I just randomly mentioned to one another like, "Hey, we should apply the gospel to makeup. Wouldn't that be fascinating?"
Emily: Yes. It's kind of a lighthearted show, but we love to do some of these topics that can kind of feel like, "This is just secular." Or, "This doesn't really matter. What in the world could Jesus have to do with my mascara?"
It is really whenever you look at any topic or anything in our lives, there is not this separation between, "This is something that we apply the gospel to and that has value in the eyes of the Lord," and, "This thing over here, it doesn't matter at all. You can do whatever you want." There's always this intermingling of the sacred and the secular.
Laura: That's right. Yes, makeup is really interesting. Emily, you and I have really different backgrounds with makeup and different perspectives. We actually have had a lot of conversations about this now.
Emily: Girl talk! [laughing]
Laura: That's right. This show got it to another level with our makeup convo. But I guess for me, I was not raised with wearing makeup at all. I didn't start wearing makeup until college. It's just really because my mom was not super into it. She didn't encourage it. It wasn't like it was evil or we were against it. It was just not a thing and somehow—
Emily: And you're naturally beautiful. You have great skin. You have great eyebrows. I was complimenting her—I'm like, "She's got a great smile, she just doesn't need it."
Laura: [laughing] Okay. Well, and it was nice to not probably go through that or think about that too much in highschool. Now I do wear more makeup and I've slowly added to my routine over the years, especially that under-eye concealer. After I became a mom, I still remember the day that I picked it up for the very first time. But I don't know, makeup has never been all of that big of a deal to me.
In fact, I was telling Emily that if I could, I would literally probably wear no makeup. I would go makeup-free every single day. But for me, one of the main things that I feel concerning makeup is I often feel like I should put it on or I need to wear it. That's something that I've been grappling with as I prep for the show of like, "What does that mean for me?"
My thought process is often like, "Oh, I'm going to go out. I need to put on makeup."
I will say before I let Emily talk too much that Emily is a master makeup artist.
Emily: Oh, my! [laughing]
Laura: She's truly is, she's truly an artist, and I would definitely use that word. Emily did my wedding hair and makeup and she also did my wedding hair and makeup for the book launch. Some of you guys maybe saw those pictures online. She's really skilled, really talented. I always joke that in another life she could've been a full-time makeup artist for the stars.
Emily: That would have been so fun! Yes, as Laura mentioned. Like usual we have different backgrounds and different perspectives, but it's been fun to talk through because I grew up—My mom definitely had more cosmetics and makeup and stuff. Then I also was a competitive dancer growing up, in fact. At a pretty young age, I learned all about fake eyelashes and lipstick that doesn't rub out—all the things.
Then when I was in my early twenties, I did start doing hair and makeup for friends, as favors, for weddings and school dances and just did that for a little while. It's super fun. I wear way less makeup now than I probably ever have, but it's still something that I think of as fun and I really enjoy anytime I get an opportunity to do makeup for somebody else and have them feel extra special or—I don't know, it's just kind of a creative outlet, I think.
Laura: Yes. For sure. I've never felt more beautiful than when Emily has done my hair and makeup. I'm not kidding, and people notice too. Like when she does my stuff, I'm like, "Yes. Emily's around. It's been great."
Emily: Okay. Well, we wanted to look back on this because as we were doing some research for this show, we realized makeup fits under this broader category of cosmetics. And cosmetics are really anything that we put on our face or our skin to help our skin look a certain way, or any type of color. And so if you put it in this broad category, the reality is cosmetics have been around, well as long as we can look back and research on Google, they've been around.
[laughter]
Laura: Wikipedia says it's been a long time so I don't know.
Emily: Yes. If you even look over Western culture, if you want to confine it to that, we see like trends are always changing. Even every 10 to 15 years you can look back and watch those YouTube videos like “Makeup by the Decade,” and like every culture, every time period, if you go read about this online, they've all got their own thing that was of emphasis in that culture. Even makeup that looked subtle. I remember I was looking at some of the French, was like 18th century where they would do their face all white and put on a big mole—
Laura: How was that ever beautiful?
[laughter]
Emily: I don't know. But to someone that was aspirational to do that. Or even like Egyptians, I feel like that's a really common thing we look back and see they wore a lot of full-face makeup. And that was Bible times, where people were making up their faces in these really dramatic ways. It's definitely been around for a while.
Laura: Yes. I always think of Pride and Prejudice with Mrs. Bennett and she starts pinching Jane's cheeks. I think this is in the movie, I don't know for sure if this is in the book, I can't quite recall, but for color, to add color. There's just definitely something in us, they weren't even putting on makeup necessarily, but that we want to make sure there's rosy cheeks and pretty lips and long lashes or whatever.
It's interesting to think about Eve and what would she have thought of makeup or maybe that “artistic expression.” Who knows what could have happened in the garden and we won't speculate here, but the biggest thing to point out is that she didn't struggle with feelings of inadequacy or shame or failures or wanting to cover up something that she didn't like. Her worth was tethered to her ability to reflect God on earth as his image bearer.
So her beauty was really unobscured at the time. I think about Eve back in the garden and think, "What would have that been like?" She didn't feel any need to hide behind makeup or to cover something up like we often can feel with makeup, which we'll get into in a little bit because we know that the fall has really changed a lot of things for us. The other thing of note is just to consider God and his love for beauty.
He makes beautiful things when he doesn't have to. He gives us sunsets and beautiful mountains and landscapes and animals and I think of those birds that— Have you ever seen those mating birds?
Emily: Yes, they do like elaborate dances.
[laughter]
Laura: With their tails—they do these crazy dances with those feathers and they're weird, but so beautiful for no other reason than just to be beautiful.
Emily: Yes, it gives God glory. Yes. It's really neat to see that he is really the author of almost unnecessary or not utilitarian things. It's just beauty for his glory, but then in the fall, what we see is that previously Adam and Eve had access to the tree of life. One of the things we're going to talk about in the show is this desire that people have to go back to this, "Oh, my body is not decaying. My skin is not growing dull. It's not getting wrinkles. I'm not having to counter the effects of the sun on my skin."
When they are banished from the garden and the wages of sin are death, now they are in a world where that decay is happening and there is now this need for humans, this internal need or desire to say, "Oh, how can I go back to this state that I was once in, where I look youthful forever?" Or just again trying to combat the effects of the curse on our bodies.
Laura: Yes. We want to pop in a quick caveat before we get any deeper into the fall and kind of the effects, but the main thing is we want to say that we are not against cosmetics, we are not against beauty products or anything like that. We both wear makeup. Certainly don't think that there's no place for them at all, but we just want—as with all things that we do here at Risen Motherhood—to just challenge you, to think a little bit deeper behind maybe your heart attitudes or your motivations for why you wear makeup.
It may mean you change nothing to your routine. It may mean you change your routine entirely, but we're just hopeful that we can give you some food for thought as we clip through these.
Emily: Kind of jumping off of where I was going with that, the first thing we wanted to look at is, how does the fall impact our view of makeup or cosmetics? One is that we feel the need now to preserve our youth and our beauty. For modern moms, when I think about this, it's like it's not acceptable to look like you've had children. So that might be, you look more tired, you've got under-eye circles. Or, over the years you're getting more wrinkles in your skin.
Or, you're not able to take as good of care of your skin and so it looks a little bit more dull. Or you feel like, "I just don't look like I'm 21 anymore, and so I need to put on blush and I need to add color to my face so I look a little bit more alive." I think that there is this very real sense that we're not supposed to look like childbearing has taken a toll on us. We need to preserve our youth, preserve our beauty, and that's like a huge value of our culture.
Laura: Right, and I often think about how the signs of age or wrinkles—or this word “decay,” which is kind of an extreme word, but just this aging process that happens with our bodies—I think that it can be just such a good reminder of, "Hey, we're actually living in the now, but not yet the already." Which means that Christ has established salvation for us. Our souls are redeemed, salvation is secure but our bodies are not yet fully redeemed.
This is something where if we can flip the narrative too and think about how every time we see these signs of death on our bodies, we can see that, hey, this is actually because we're not made for this world. We are eternal beings that are living confined to this mortal body that will one day be fully redeemed. We know that because of Christ, this is why we get to spend eternity with him, because of his sacrifice. We can consider, how can we use these as signposts to point us to our eternal hope that Christ has secured for us?
Emily: Just that other fascinating point is that whenever we see people around us in the world, again, trying to preserve or look almost like this glorified version of themselves, isn't it interesting that all of our hearts are longing for this most beautiful, most perfect, most glowing version, and anything we can create just pales in comparison to what we could have in Christ.
I think in 1 Corinthians 15 it talks about how one day, if we are found in Christ, we’ll be changed in the twinkling of an eye and our mortal body would take on immortality. The Bible tells us we will become like him and we don't really know what that means. Like Laura was saying, as we're thinking about this idea of preservation, we know like our outer selves are wasting away now, but we can hope in the fact that we really will have this body that lives forever if we trust in Christ.
Laura: Well, how hard we do pursue looking beautiful right now? It's crazy the extreme extent people will go. Even sometimes the effort I know that I myself put into it, and I often think, "Man, this is as good as it gets. This stinks." “Your best life now, your best beauty now,” or whatever the magazines like to say. Thankfully as believers, like that is not our reality.
We are going to be so beautiful, shine like the sun, and that is something I love to look forward to. It doesn't mean that I negate taking care of myself now. But I think it does mean that like, thank goodness, my worth and hope doesn't have to be put in how I look today.
Emily: That transitions us to the next point about how the fall and sin impacts our use of cosmetics and makeup. One of those issues is the way that we use it to cover ourselves. I think we've already talked about a few of these examples like under-eye concealer. It covers—
Laura: [laughs] I don't want to look tired.
Emily: [laughs] It covers the fact that I haven't been sleeping. Or lipstick or putting on blush, again, it looks like you've got circulation. I'm awake here. I'm here. There's all these things that we feel like we wouldn't want to go out into public looking like our real selves. We want to cover our skin and give it a different look and a different appearance. I love that this just harkens immediately back to the fall and how Adam and Eve, their first thing that they did after they sinned and they hid from God was they tried to cover themselves. There was this instinct of like, "I don't want to be exposed."
I recently ran across this verse in Isaiah that I thought was disgusting and creepy, but also like, "What?" It talks about how there's this language about how people are trying to use cobwebs, like a spider's web, to cover themselves and they use it as clothing. The imagery there is, of course, it can't cover you. We think that sometimes, that there are things we can do to not only cover our skin, but cover our hearts.
Laura: I think as moms so often we feel like, "Well, I might be failing with dinner. I don't feel very proud about my chicken nuggets at dinnertime. But I can feel proud about looking put together when I go to the grocery store.” Or, “I don't feel like people want to ask me about all my parenting strategies because I'm just a failure of a mom, but they might ask me about my beautiful long lashes.”
I think that we can, in some ways, attempt to make up for areas that we feel deficient. As long as we look presentable, as long as we look beautiful on the outside, then maybe it will hide all these other things that I'm ashamed about deep down. At least I have one thing to be proud about.
Emily: Well, and I think it can be this outward picture. If you see a mom and she is all made up and she looks put together, what is it that you assume as somebody looking at her?
Laura: She’s got it all.
Emily: She's having time to do that. She's doing great.
Laura: She must be an awesome mom.
Emily: She must be awesome because she's so well put together.
Laura: It's so true.
Emily: She looks so beautiful. I think that that's our assumption, is we want to put on that thing. As we were even talking about, what does this look like in 2020? One of the interesting things is that cosmetics have gone digital. Now it's not just that we're putting on foundation and mascara and eyeliner, it's that we're putting a filter over our face digitally on social media, or we're getting an app that actually tunes our face or shapes it or makes it look like we've got certain enhanced features. We don't have time to do it in our morning routine, well, just pop on a filter.
Laura: “At least online I'll look good.” It's crazy. I think there again we find gospel hope where we know that we don't actually have to cover ourselves before God or anyone else because Christ did that for us. Ephesians 1:7 says, "In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of grace." Christ's blood, his shed blood for our sins is what covered us. He was the ultimate sacrifice.
I think this is a good reminder for us to know that there is no amount of makeup that can make us right before God. Only Christ did that. This can lead us to gratitude when we remember this piece, that our eternity does not hinge on our outward appearance, our outward works, our actions, but instead God looks on the heart and because of Christ, He can look at us and say, "Well done my good and faithful servant." That is just the greatest hope of all.
Emily: We wanted to just get a little bit more practical here and just ask, so what does this mean? There's a couple of truths there about just the fall and redemption. What does this mean for our cosmetic use as moms? One of the things we wanted to draw out is that adornment or beautifying ourselves is permissible. It really is, but it's not our ultimate hope and it's not the basis of our identity.
Laura: Yeah, something Emily and I were talking about prior to the recording was just how actually getting ready, including putting on makeup, does actually show a sign of respect to other people, particularly in the American culture and the time that we live in today. There is an element of combing your hair, brushing your teeth, getting dressed and even at times, putting on makeup can show someone that you value and you care about them.
Think about someone's wedding day. That's the day that we often do wear a lot of makeup. We wear the most expensive gown we've ever worn, and we take time on our appearance. Why? To show our groom that we are excited for the day, that we value this, that this is an important thing to us. There is this element that it can show other people actually a sign of respect in the culture that we're in today.
And not just showing respect to others, but I also think there's this element of showing respect to yourself. Everyone talks about the neurological impacts of getting dressed for the day and how it really prepares you to perform better if you dress up and get ready and you take care of your body. There's almost a stewardship issue there, I think with especially makeup, when we expand it to cosmetics and to lotions and anti-aging things and all the things we have available to us.
There is an element there of being able to say, "I want to take as good of care as I can of my body that God's given me because I don't know how long it's going to last. While I have it I want to steward it well, but not put my identity in it." Those are different things.
Emily: I think one thing practically that's helped me with this, as somebody who enjoys makeup—I've worn it a lot throughout my life. As I've gotten older, one thing I intentionally do sometimes is just go without makeup for several days each week and be willing to go in public without makeup on, or get on social media without makeup on or filter from time to time.
It's like sometimes a forced reminder to me because there's that part in my heart that's like, "I want to do something that makes me feel more beautiful or makes my eye circles not look so bad," but it's this act of faith of going out and saying, "No, my identity is found in Christ and so I can go to the store and not have makeup on and be fine, because that's not where my beauty comes from." I think for each of us, there could be these just tangible things we do to remind ourselves of an inward truth that we believe.
Laura: Another thought we just want to leave you with is thinking about those former things versus eternal things. What are we spending our time and energy on, and what are we truly cultivating as our beauty? Our true beauty isn't created by makeup, or whatever our natural outward appearance is, or by an Instagram filter. Our true beauty is simply because we are created by God and we are in his image.
He made us all different ways with different skin tones, freckles, hair, eye colors, lip and face shapes, all these different things. God made all of those things inherently beautiful because they are in his image. He chose those for us. The type of beauty that God loves even more than the outward appearance that we have is the inward beauty of the heart, cultivating that imperishable beauty.
I think about my daughter, she's four-years-old, and we were recently walking down a store aisle that was full of makeup and had these big posters where there was just some crazy blue and purple makeup. She looked at that and she just pointed out and said, "Mom, if I had that then I would finally be pretty." It was just one of those moments for me of thinking like, "What am I teaching my daughter about beauty?"
For me, as I shared, I don't wear a lot of makeup. Makeup isn't a big priority for me. I'm just remembering like, am I saying things like, “oh, I wear makeup because it makes me feel pretty or because it makes me beautiful"? Or am I saying, "Hey, makeup is a fun tool, but you don't have to have it to be beautiful"? Right there, it was just so in my face when I saw in my daughter who I really do protect what she sees and what she takes in and just how inherent that was, that desire to feel beautiful, to feel accepted by the world, to conform to the world's beauty. That's where we have to ask ourselves, "Okay, what are we investing in?" Even the way that we speak. Is it about what society says is beautiful? Or is it about what the Bible says is beautiful?
Emily: Yes. As we consider that not only for our children but for ourselves, I think we can take heart when we think about the most beautiful human that ever lived. We know that's Jesus. Fully God. Fully man. God made flesh. And yet in Isaiah 52:53 it says he had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
This is so interesting that then we have to ask the question, "Well, then if it wasn't his external appearance, what was it that made Jesus beautiful and supremely valuable?" It was God in him. It was God's character displayed physically. That should lead us to then ask the question, "Well, then what is it that makes us beautiful?" Because certainly if Jesus can come and not be beautiful or physically attractive in the way that the world would expect him to be, then we can be that way too.
We can not have the most perfect physical appearance— In fact, we find out in other verses of scripture, like Proverbs 31, "Charm is deceptive and beauty is fleeting, but a woman who fears the Lord will be praised." I think that's what was beautiful about Jesus, and that's what's beautiful in us. As much as we reflect Christ, as much as we reflect God's character—that is what makes us beautiful.
Laura: That was great, Emily, really good point. This week, just as we close here, we want to encourage you guys to just pause and really think, hear yourself. How do you speak? How do you think? What goes through your mind as you apply your makeup, as you prepare your makeup, as you take off your makeup? All those things. We want to just suggest that you tune-in to those things this week and evaluate it.
Do you depend on it for your identity and your value? Are you more concerned with your outward appearance than your inner appearance? Those are just some questions we want to leave you guys with because it is very individual. We don't think we can give any true hard and fast rules or guidelines that are going to answer this for you, but also get together with friends to discuss.
That's another thing, at Risen Motherhood we really desire to have, conversations that we can just start, that we can kick-off. We have no intention of finishing them on today's show. [laughter] We want you to get together with your friends and talk about this and have a real conversation and hopefully out of that heart change can come, maybe some actions can change. We just pray and hope that this show plants some seeds into your mind to evaluate what's really going on beneath the surface as you apply makeup.
If you'd like to learn more about us, head over to risenmotherhood.com or follow us on social media, @risenmotherhood on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Of course, as we talked about at the beginning of the show, we would love it if you would consider donating to us, supporting the work that we do here at Risen Motherhood so we can continue producing content just like this.
Emily: Thanks, guys.