🪰 Why Are Men So Turned Off by Glammed-Up Chicks?

A college woman noticed something strange happening every time she got dressed up.

When she put real effort into the outfit, did her hair, added jewelry, and walked out of the house looking like she had her act together, women complimented her and men looked at her, but they didn’t come over and strike up a chat.

But when she’d run out the door in a T-shirt, shorts, sneakers, or whatever she could grab for an errand, suddenly the guys found their courage to say hello.

Which, for her, was a little irritating. Here she is spending an hour trying to look like a piece of museum art, and she gets nothing, nada, zilch. But when she rolls into Target looking like she just cleaned the garage with a toothbrush, suddenly, somebody wants her number.

So what the hell is going on?

On the surface, the easy answer is that men just prefer women who look natural. And sure, some do. But that doesn’t really explain why the dressed-up woman is getting stared at but also ignored.

The more interesting possibility here is that looking attractive and looking approachable are two completely different things. Men might be making a snap decision about this dolled-up gal, while women around her are reacting in a completely different way.

It turns out what sounds like a random “fashion debate” is actually something much more human.

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Maybe he likes what he sees. He just isn’t coming over.

Before anybody starts tossing their expensive mascara into the nearest gutter, there’s an important little gem buried in that video.

The men in this woman’s story weren’t necessarily less attracted to her when she was all gussied up. She says they were still looking… and we believe her.

They just weren’t engaging.

Research on cosmetics has found that makeup can increase the “perception” of attractiveness. Some studies have found positive effects on things like perceived “competence” as well. A put-together woman can absolutely send the message that she’s got her shit together. But exactly how much makeup men prefer depends on the look and the person. But the truth is, there’ not much hard data to support the idea that men see all makeup and think, eww, gross.

The problem may be that looking more polished can also make her seem harder to approach. A guy might still think she looks amazing while also deciding she’s out of his league, already taken, expensive to impress, or just not someone who’s going to be interested in him.

First impressions are basically tiny stories humans invent about strangers before the strangers have a chance to ruin the fantasy with actual information and facts.

And when the man is also the one expected to walk across the room and risk getting shot down, that imaginary story becomes really important.

He may think she looks great and still decide, Yeah, she’s not saying yes to me.

But honestly, in this scenario, that’s not the same thing as being totally turned off.

Women may be noticing something completely different

There’s another good point in the video that explains why these girls’ female friends might rave about the dressed-up version while men act differently.

Women understand all the hard work that went into the look, and they appreciate the effort.

Women dress for other women because they will notice the cut of the clothes, if the makeup’s good, how the hair falls, and all the little extra choices that a woman might’ve spent hours pulling together. A man can absolutely appreciate the finished product without having a bloody idea how it all happened.

Actually, there’s a male version of this that makes the whole thing easier to understand.

A guy can spend two years in the gym turning himself into a marble countertop because he thinks women will be blown away by the result. Then he finally achieves his dream physique and discovers that the people most desperate to discuss it are other men asking what he benches and how much protein he takes in a day.

And they appreciate it because they understand the work involved.

Women may simply register, “Yep, he’s very muscular,” and go back to whatever they were doing.

We’re all sending signals. The problem is, the person across the room is probably reading a completely different message.

We’ve been painting our faces forever

Makeup didn’t start with Sephora.

Women have been messing with their appearance for thousands of years. At some point in time, some woman glanced into a polished piece of metal and thought, I could use some rosy cheeks.

Ancient Egyptians were using kohl around the eyes way before Cleopatra even entered the chat. Actually, both men and women used cosmetics. Some of that eye paint wasn’t just decorative, either… certain formulations helped with glare and eye problems.

By the time Cleopatra came along, dramatic Egyptian eye makeup already had a pretty impressive resume.

A few centuries and many bad beauty decisions later, Queen Elizabeth I took her makeup routine in a much more alarming direction. Her famous pale complexion came from a mixture of white lead and vinegar, creating the so-called “Mask of Youth” look. Lead on your face sounds insane now because, well, it was, but beauty standards have never been famous for asking whether something is a good idea before the trend takes off.

Then Kim Kardashian taught everybody where their cheekbones were

Jump ahead to the 2010s, and suddenly the female face became a home improvement project.

“Let’s flip it!” 

Kim Kardashian and the makeup artists around her helped push contouring into the mainstream, with light and dark products used to sculpt cheekbones, slim noses, define jawlines, and reboot your bone structure.

One Kim K. contouring photo sent this technique exploding through social media, even though professional makeup artists had been using versions of this look for ages.

Then contouring went mainstream, and for a while makeup wasn’t just about enhancing your face. It was about aggressively redrawing the entire architecture of it in your bathroom.

And, of course, fashion eventually started getting bored with its own creation.

Kim’s longtime makeup artist Mario Dedivanovic later talked about moving toward softer sculpting as people began realizing that makeup designed to pop on social media didn’t always make sense as everyday makeup.

Yowza.

Humans are so typical. They invent a look, push it until everybody’s doing it, get tired of it, and rediscover the thing they were trying to change in the first place.

That’s sorta the history of beauty in a nutshell.

Men do this crap too

Women certainly don’t own the trademark on reinventing themselves every few years.

Men just spend their vanity budget in different ways.

The gym example from the video is perfect because male appearance trends can be as over-the-top and elaborate as women’s, while still being sold as effortless. A guy may carefully manage his beard, hair, body fat, clothes, and shoes while insisting he “doesn’t really care about that stuff,” which is adorable… of course he does.

And men follow fashion swings just like women do. The silhouette changes, grooming changes, muscles go in and out of fashion, facial hair disappears and comes back, and every generation eventually finds picture evidence that the thing it once considered unbelievably cool was cringey and hilarious.

People love to decorate themselves.

So has glam gone too far?

Yes, in some cases, it absolutely has.

There’s an interesting little tidbit that’s buried under all the jokes about makeup, contouring, fillers, lashes, Botox, and whatever trend TikTok has unleashed… at some point, enhancing the face can become replacing the face. It involves one study that looked at makeup and facial recognition and found that lightly made-up faces were remembered way more accurately than heavily made-up ones. That’s interesting because it gets much closer to what people may mean when they say they prefer somebody “natural.”

They might not mean “no makeup” whatsoever.

Half the time, men praising the “no makeup look” are staring directly at concealer, mascara, brow gel, blush, and $47 worth of products performing a helluva lot of covert operations they know nothing about.

What they may actually be responding to is a face that still feels easy to read and looks very approachable.

Because when styling gets super elaborate, outsiders might start reacting to the “presentation,” not the person.

Sure, looking like you just walked onto a Hollywood set can be gorgeous, artistic, and fun as hell… but it can also create this weird distance.

And that brings us back to the girl in sweatpants

What’s more interesting is that first impressions aren’t really beauty contests, are they? They’re really quick, snap judgments about everything that might come with the person you’re looking at. A very polished woman might look insanely good, but a man can also read the whole presentation as a clue about her lifestyle, her standards, or whether he’d fit into her world at all.

That’s the strange but incredible power of appearance: before either person says a word, both of them are already filling in the blanks that might or might not have anything to do with actual reality.

Which is probably why this little college experiment is deeper than “men like sweatpants.” The clothes didn’t change her appeal. They changed what strangers thought they already knew about her when they judged a book by its cover.

Maybe It Was Never About the Makeup

Beauty trends will keep changing because they always have, and people will keep misreading each other because we’ve apparently made very little progress there, as well.

The most interesting thing about the glammed-up woman getting fewer approaches is that the reaction she’s getting might tell us a lot more about the people looking at her than it does about her.