I was ready to go to bed dressed in my favorite fuzzy sweatshirt and gray sweatpants, sporting unbrushed hair — my signature look. Having taken my sleeping gummies 30 minutes prior, I was slowly dozing off. That’s when the text rolled in.
“Guys, WPA is in less than two months!”
I felt angry. Irritated. But more than both of those, l felt stressed. Stressed because I knew instead of staring at quizlet, I would be spending several hours scrolling through the 243 pages of dresses on Revolve and Free People to find the “perfect” dress. Stressed because I would have to schedule yet another hair appointment. Stressed because I knew I would have to ask another one of my friends to do my makeup for me (yeah, no matter how many YouTube tutorials I watch, I still can’t bronze my face without looking like a clown).
But most importantly, I was stressed because my friends were going to drag me to another time-consuming, pointless, dreadful school dance.
School dances are something that I dread every year because it involves one thing I can’t stand: dressing up. As a five year old, I threw a temper tantrum everytime my mom tried to put me in a dress and screamed whenever I saw anything that looked like a bow. I’m an oversized sweatshirt kind of person. So while everyone is breaking out their tightest dresses and four-inch heels, I’ll be struggling to curl my hair and walk in one and a half inch heels — my personal record height.
Just because I hate putting in hours of effort only to look nice for four hours doesn’t mean I’m any less “girly.” I shouldn’t have to deal with confusion from my mom when I ask her to help me find a dress or the awkward questioning when I tell people I don’t want to go to WPA. I shouldn’t have to deal with judgemental looks when people find out I’ve never done my own makeup or the ceaseless questions asking why I wouldn’t like to.
“Sydney, how can you hate finding dresses?” “You have to wear mascara!” “Sometimes I swear you’re more of a guy then a girl.” “Did you even brush your hair today?”
These are all things I hear on the daily.
Sydney Newton | The Harbinger Online Dances should be about having fun with your best friends and making amazing memories. Instead, it’s almost a competition over who looks the best and who has the prettiest dress. Girls spend tons of money and time to look their best, fixing their flaws in order to impress people — something that is considered “ladylike.”
In my opinion, being a girl should be about being yourself. It should be about being able to act and dress how you want. It’s perfectly fine to love hair and makeup, but it shouldn’t be defined by how many hours you spend doing it the day of a dance. And as a matter of fact, I find that I’m perfectly happy spending five minutes on makeup and having someone else do my hair — and that doesn’t make me any less “girly.”
I’d much rather catch up on “Love Island” in my basement wearing a hoodie than sit in a too-tight dress at a fancy dinner, trying not to smudge my lip gloss on my dinner roll. Why would I spend hundreds of dollars on an outfit just to go to a dance in the same place that I eat lunch? The same place that I spend all of my week trying to get away from?
I know that these problems aren’t crisis-inducing, but it’s unnecessary and annoying to add this drama onto nights when I should be focused on Chem labs and vocab quizzes.
Dressing up has become something that a lot of girls feel like they are expected to do, part of which is because we started wearing makeup before we hit middle school. In a survey conducted by PR News, 58% of girls responded saying they wear makeup. Out of those girls, 65% stated that they started between the ages of 8-13.
And that’s the problem.
Since so many girls start wearing makeup so young, they feel obligated to wear it during high school — especially at dances. It’s turned into an expectation at this point, one that even I feel compelled to comply with — the exact reason why I’ve worn mascara three times and three times only.
Now, I’m not saying that dances are pointless for everyone — I just think that they aren’t my thing, and that they don’t have to be. For me, wearing makeup feels like hiding a part of who I am. Wearing a dress feels like dressing up like someone who isn’t me. The planning before the dance causes nothing but drama, and actually getting asked by your date induces personal stress that shouldn’t need to be there.
And yes, I can get past the primping to have fun with my friends — but I should be allowed to do that in my own way. High school girl culture shouldn’t be pushed to make everyone feel like they have to love dressing up. I don’t think I’m ever going to truly like dances, but I’m going to go and make the best out of them — and at the end of the day, I’ve decided that’s my goal.