Should you wear makeup to the gym?

“I am in disguise.” That is how I explain myself when close ones, especially my children, look at me as if I need to re-introduce myself when I wear makeup. I think I look good in makeup, but I can hardly recognize myself, and judging by people’s reactions, I look like a different person.

I hardly ever wear makeup because I lack the patience and tenacity needed. I end up looking like an extra in a clown show. Besides being impatient, I do not possess the artist’s hand needed to draw proper lines or the eye to tell which colour goes well with another.

Makeup is art; let no one tell you otherwise, and I am of the school of thought that if you cannot do something properly, do not do it. For me, it’s all about professionals; the only problem is that I have to sit still for too long to let different brushes and layers of products go over my face, all the while imagining what the cotton wool I would later use to wash it off would look like.

My makeup routine, if you can call it that, involves face powder and a shaky attempt to lightly brush over the barely-there eyebrows, and it takes all of two minutes and five seconds to complete. Anything more is overkill.

It is often said that makeup should not change your look, but would that not defeat the purpose of it? Why spend so much time and money to look like yourself? It should be an industry joke that ‘natural makeup’ is way harder to do than the kind that changes your look. I do not understand the point because it feels like renovating a house and restoring the old look. If I am going to put so much work into something, I want visible results.

What will, however, forever confuse me is wearing full makeup in the gym. There was a girl in my previous gym who did this, but it turned out that she had bad acne, which would be visible by the end of her session, thanks to sweat. There is another one in my current gym. Because I drive to the gym, I see no point in carrying fresh clothes, and I only use the changing room to change into gym shoes.

The first time I found her in front of the mirror in the changing room, a full makeup kit spread out in front of her, I thought she was done with the gym, only for her to appear in the gym twenty minutes later, fully made-up. It took a lot of willpower not to stop what I was doing to stare at her.

Then it kept happening. In the middle of a sweaty workout, she will disappear for up to ten minutes and return looking all fresh, and everyone else in the gym will share a careful side-eye but say nothing. She does not seem bothered by it, either because she thinks she’s got all of us fooled, or because she has no intention of letting judgmental strangers get to her.

I have wondered about her a lot, but I have managed to keep my bubbling curiosity covered. However, I have concluded that it is a trauma response; that someone must have said something really nasty about her face, and it got to her. I could also be overthinking it – she could just be one of those people who really loves makeup all the time. I knew a woman whose husband of four years had never seen her without makeup because she would wake up early enough to apply it and remove it only after he went to bed. They would do their thing in the dark. To each their own, I say.

The gym is all about sweat. Wearing full makeup that will definitely run within minutes seems like a fool’s task. Wearing expensive perfume that will be masked by workout sweat seems foolhardy unless you are the one doing it.

The mirrors on every wall of the gym are telling; it is a vanity square. Every turn of the eye is someone checking out their biceps or butt or six-pack, and it is a strange oxymoron to frown upon makeup, itself a definition of vanity.