Psst, ladies! Want to know the secret to snagging a man online? First, put some blush and lipstick on, for Pete’s sake. It looks like you haven’t left the house in days. Now swipe on some mascara, eye shadow, eye liner, and under-eye concealer for those bags under your eyes, because no one wants to marry a girl who looks like Droopy the Dog.
There. That’s better. Now, for the final step, take this baby wipe and wipe all that schmutz off your face, you brazen wench. Don’t you know that men prefer a more natural look?
This is basically the line of reasoning provided by the online dating website Zoosk, which just issued a press release, “How Do Men Really Feel About Women Wearing Makeup?” Because, as Betabeat’s Molly Mulshine points out, men are desperately in need of yet another platform to tell women how they feel about the way they look.
According to Zoosk’s data, which reads like it was co-authored by a PUA and that great-aunt who always loudly reminds you to freeze your eggs when you see her at family functions, women who wear eye makeup get 139 percent more messages than women who don’t. But make sure to wipe off all that gunk for your first date, slattern: 66 percent of men say they find women who wear dark makeup a “turnoff.” Same applies for women who wear lipstick in their profiles: While they get 119 percent more messages than women who opt for a bare-lipped look, 57 percent of men say they’re not attracted to women who wear red lipstick on a first date.
When it comes to women’s hairstyles, men appear to be just as confused about that as well. Although 86 percent of men say they prefer a “relaxed and natural” hairstyle, that apparently doesn’t apply to women with naturally straight hair, which only nine percent of men say they prefer. So get cracking with those curling irons, ladies! Hopefully you won’t singe all your hair off in the process, because Zoosk doesn’t have any data on how many men prefer the 2007-era, barefoot-in-Starbucks Britney Spears look.
So what can we glean from all this? Well, two things: 1) That, shockingly, Zoosk has somehow still managed to exist in a post-OKCupid, post-Tinder world (good for you, Zoosk!), and 2) That Zoosk has confirmed what 99 percent of women already know: When it comes to wearing makeup versus going au naturel, men can’t actually tell the difference between the two, so let’s stop giving a shit about what they think about our hair or eyes or lipstick, and start giving a shit about—revolutionary idea alert!—what we think about ourselves.
H/T Betabeat | Photo via Andrew Rennie/Flickr (CC BY SA 2.0)
