The Tyranny of Getting Ready
What does getting ready cost us?
Pamela Anderson attended the British Fashion Awards last week and made headlines for not wearing makeup. A celebrity not wearing makeup at a highly photographed red-carpet event shouldn’t be a story, but it is because most women in the same position wouldn’t think of it. “I have no glam team or anything here,” Anderson told Vogue. “I was just like, ‘Why am I putting so much effort into this? Why am I in a makeup chair for three hours?’”
Anderson is right. Getting ready is time — time many of us would rather spend reading a book, watching Below Deck, hanging out with our friends or kids, or even taking packages to UPS that have been sitting by the door all week. For some women, the act of getting ready — picking out clothes, doing hair, applying makeup — is pleasurable and fun. But for many, it becomes another chore, one that feels like it’s distracting from all the other chores that are regarded as more urgent or important. No one questions why you would take the time to scrub the kitchen sink or brush your child’s hair, but take too long applying winged liquid eyeliner before you’re supposed to leave the house for a party and you become the reason you and your date are late.
I used to enjoy getting ready more than I do now. In my teens and twenties, it was a way to hang out with girlfriends — have a drink, pick out clothes together, listen to music, and just laugh. The joy of the anticipation of a night out sometimes exceeds that of the night out itself. As I got older and had two kids, I had a lot less time to do anything for myself. Getting ready became something to squeeze in around school drop-off and work obligations, and if I’m going to really get ready for a night out, I need to plan ahead to find that time for myself. This is fine — I chose to have kids, and I love being a parent — but often makes grooming feel like more of a chore or rushed activity than “me” time. I find the time because I like to look a certain way, and I like the way looking a certain way makes me feel.
Many Back Row readers said in the group chat this week that they enjoy getting ready, particularly with friends.
said, “Personally, I LOVE getting ready and it’s a big part of why I discovered early on in the pandemic that I am *not* a FT remote kinda gal. I like putting on and outfit and going into the office.” agreed, saying, “I love getting ready-always have!!! …I think there’s a pleasant process of how one chooses to face the world.“A lot of you said you enjoy some aspects of getting ready, but that doing hair can be particularly annoying. Stephany C. said she enjoys getting ready more now that she stopped straightening her hair, while Jennifer called washing, drying, and straightening her hair “the worst.” Catherine N. said, “I enjoy selecting outfits and jewelry, but I hate doing my hair and makeup.” And Sara (
), said, “I don’t love-love getting ready, but my morning ritual is the calm before the storm of the day for me and so I cherish it. I also got bangs three years ago and they require daily dedicated styling lol.” Others, including , echoed the point about cherished time: “I think about it very differently now that I’m a mom! It feels like such an indulgence any time I have more than a few minutes to throw something on.”The occasion also affects feelings about getting ready. Katy said she despises getting ready for work but adores doing it for anything past noon. And a lot of you pointed out that getting ready brings up various anxieties about things like body image and having to socialize.
Economists like to look at how much women would earn if they were compensated at minimum wage for unpaid domestic labor, like caring for family members, cleaning, and cooking. The value of that labor for women globally in 2019 was $10.9 trillion, including $1.5 trillion for American women. As with domestic labor, women spend on average more time getting ready — for both work and social engagements — than men. The value of time spent getting ready isn’t studied as much as time spent on domestic work. But according to one survey, women spend on average 27 minutes getting ready for work. According to another, women spend on average about three times as long as men getting ready for both work and social engagements.
Sometimes, it’s unclear from these surveys what “getting ready” includes. Does it mean time selecting clothes, taking a shower, applying makeup, and fixing hair? It frequently refers just to “grooming,” suggesting everything but selecting clothing. However, many women regularly have days when they have no idea what to wear and end up spending much longer than they had planned picking something out. So these estimates could be on the shorter end of how much time many actually spend.
If women were compensated for the time they spent on grooming, that would equate to $52,416, going by the New York state 2024 minimum wage of $16 an hour, for 3,276 hours spent doing this over the course of one’s life. But there’s also a mental burden associated with getting ready to which assigning a dollar figure is impossible. The burden of figuring out how to fit it in, the burden of feeling like you have to spend so much time on it, the burden of stressing about how you didn’t have as much time to get ready as you would have liked before you faced the world, the burden of the anxieties it brings up about our bodies and appearances in general.
The shift to flexible work schedules or working entirely from home has been a huge news story since the pandemic. Yet many articles about this focus on the act of commuting and ignore everything leading up to it. For a lot of women, the relief in WFH days is surely the amount of time they cut back on getting ready. While many who work from home still do hair and makeup and put on a work-appropriate top for video meetings, working from home frees women from hard pants and uncomfortable shoes. It spares women who commute in sneakers and then change into heels at the office from having to choose two pairs of shoes for the day and find a bag that can accommodate the spare pair of shoes, plus the laptop and whatever else needs to go to work. Those in service jobs who can’t ever work from home are never spared the task of getting ready.
Calculating the financial cost of getting ready is made more complicated by research showing that well-groomed women earn more money. Studies on how attractiveness helps women’s advancement at work produce mixed results. Attractiveness has been found to work against women in positions of power, but to help women seeking non-managerial roles.
According to a 2016 paper by sociologists Jaclyn Wong of the University of Chicago and Andrew Penner of the University of California at Irvine, grooming (defined in this case as selecting clothing and doing hair and makeup) is actually a bigger determinant of earning potential than attractiveness.
Ana Swanson wrote in the Washington Post:
Like past studies, the research showed that attractive people tended to earn higher salaries. But that wasn't all. Their research suggested that grooming — practices such as applying makeup and styling hair and clothing — was actually what accounted for nearly all of the salary differences for women of varying attractiveness. For men, grooming didn't make as much of a difference.
Swanson then quips, “The research doesn’t say how much of these extra earnings were then blown at Bluemercury or Sephora.”
That may have been written with a wink, but she points to an important point: Getting ready isn’t just a nuisance for many of us — it’s also big business. How many celebrities have we watched get ready on social media in order to sell us makeup or creams from their product lines? For these women, getting ready can be a windfall. Kim Kardashian has said she spends two hours doing her makeup every day. The products she is known for selling — Skims shapewear that goes under clothing; SKKN face wash, moisturizer, and the like — are for getting ready. It makes perfect sense for her and many other stars in the beauty and clothing business to talk up their getting-ready routines. And it makes perfect sense for Pamela Anderson, who has no such product lines, to fail to see the point in bothering.
As a longtime fashion journalist, I appreciate how important it is to many to look a certain way. If grooming and styling makes you feel like a million bucks when you leave the house, you should be able to take the time you need to achieve your most confident look without being seen as frivolous. People have all kinds of interests — football, classic cars, hiking — that are not readily dismissed as silly or disposable, like beauty and fashion.
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Yet we don’t seem to treat getting ready as frivolous in the celebrity realm, where it can be heavily monetized. For decades, reporters have lined red carpets to ask stars what they did to get ready for that moment. For someone like Anderson to dispel with not just the expected celebrity glam routine but also, the ability to turn it into a mountain of cash, may actually be more shocking than her facing the world without concealer.
I wish more people appreciated the daily pressure non-famous women experience to get ready each day for mundane jobs and situations. I wish more people understood that it was tied to their financial security and career advancement. And I wish more women could experience, as Pamela Anderson did last week, the freedom from an onerous routine when they just didn’t feel like doing it, or had too much else going on to bother. And I wish they could make that choice without being penalized — monetarily, emotionally, or otherwise.
Anderson was celebrated for saying no to the makeup chair. She should be, but we shouldn’t reserve this praise for stars. We should lavish it on every woman who doesn’t have the time or simply doesn’t want to bother.
Earlier in Back Row:
"I wish more people appreciated the daily pressure non-famous women experience to get ready each day for mundane jobs and situations. I wish more people understood that it was tied to their financial security and career advancement."
This made me cry because I just felt so understood. I work in a hospital, under unforgiving lights, and I'm definitely not famous... and damn it is just as demeaning to be laughed at for having a full face of makeup on as it is humiliating to be told I look like garbage when I don't. It is so hard.
I am thoroughly DELIGHTING in this dispatch. There are days when I suddenly peer into the mirror and realize I have not plucked my eyebrows in....months? I mean, I'm not totally feral or anything, but if it takes more than 10 minutes in the morning lately...I'm probably skipping it. As always thank you Amy for reminding us why Back Row is a salve from the insanity.