Bare faces...

So. We all know what this is going to be about, don’t we? Faces. Bare, naked faces. Women’s faces, everywhere.

For the benefit of those of you who have proper jobs that don’t allow a sneaky social media check or for those who actually do something meaningful on their commute home, like read a book or talk to those around you to find out about their lives, today saw Facebook become a literal book of faces as a shit-tonne of women uploaded a #nomakeupselfie or a #barefacedselfie, or whatever the hastily created Hashtag was, in a bid to raise awareness, and in some cases money, for Cancer Research.
Of course, as with any flurry of social media activity, there was a bit of a backlash and the selfie snappers became the butt of the repetitive, un-imaginative joke.

My attitude to the whole thing can be summed up in two carefully chosen, and I think you’ll agree, powerful words.

Allow it.

Seriously, just allow it yeah?

  I am quite a cynical person and am quite intolerant of the quirky personal habits that weave together in order to create the rich tapestry of life (applications to date me can be sent to @BuckinghamAlice), so that’s why, when it comes to charity, I generally try to assume that people are doing it with good intentions.
In fact, scrap that. I don’t care whether people are trying to do it with good intentions; if some charity gets done, then that’s fine with me. I’m on board.
  So that’s why I’m struggling to take any swipes at those who’ve uploaded a picture of their makeup-less face today; they’re trying to do something nice and good and can anyone really be annoyed about that? It’s like watching someone put their 3p change into the collection boxes at McDonalds and thinking “Dick.”
  I don’t care whether the person has rolled straight out of bed, complete with eye-goop, or whether they’ve spent three hours contouring in cheekbones. Awareness of the cause is not dependent on how little makeup the person is wearing. “I’ve just seen a picture of Sharon with no makeup on, I feel very aware of Cancer Research. Ooh, a picure of Jane…is she wearing mascara? I am now less aware of Cancer Research.”

Regardless of who did donate and didn’t donate, who is wearing makeup and who isn’t wearing makeup, the whole thing got everybody talking; so in that sense, it really did raise awareness.
Constant awareness.
Incessant awareness.
And this is the problem. Ish. Long gone are the days when one person in your town would sit in a bath full of beans and you’d find out in the paper the next day just how long they sat there for. To be honest, I’m not sure I was even born in ‘those days’, but I know that things like that happened, I’ve seen it in books.
Social media means that you can see the person getting into the bath of beans and receive constant updates to let you know that they’re still sitting there. In the beans. Still. For hours. All day. Constantly.
We only found the pink, hopeful faces of distant relatives and acquaintances so irritating today because social media collects them all together for us and interrupts our mindless scrolling with them.
If social media had a day off, and women had decided to go into work wearing no makeup two things would happen-
1) People would constantly tell them that they “look tired”.
2) No one would care. They could say that they were doing it to raise awareness for Cancer Research, but no one would know about it and no one would care.

So, if there’s one thing that we’ve learned today, it’s that the best way to raise awareness of something is to annoy the shit out of everyone.