Wearing Makeup Can Make You Feel Confident, Smarter And Happier, Says Study

Wearing Makeup Can Make You Feel Confident, Smarter And Happier, Says Study - If you’re feeling a little low, spare a little time putting on some makeup before you leave the house.

Wearing makeup can make a women feel more positive about herself, says scientists.

Researchers from Harvard Medical School, US, and the University of Chieti, Italy, looked into the “lipstick effect” among 186 female undergraduate students.

The lipstick effect

The “lipstick effect” is a known psychological phenomenon in which wearing makeup can give individuals a confidence boost by making them feel more physically attractive, increasing feelings of self-esteem, attitude, and personality.

However, a less well-known effect is that a boost in self-esteem can also boost cognitive abilities.

Previous research has shown that positive emotions can improve academic performance.

Positive emotions

This new study set out to see if the positive boost in self-esteem from wearing makeup could have the same effect.

The female undergraduates were placed into different groups and given a series of tests to complete.

The tests consisted of answering multiple choice questions about a chapter from a general psychology textbook.

Before taking the test, members of one group were asked to apply makeup, another group listened to “a positive music excerpt,” and a third coloured a drawing of a human face.

The team believed that those wearing makeup would experience the greatest boost in positive feelings, and therefore would perform better in the tests than the other two groups.

A little makeup goes a long way

The results showed that although there was a significant increase in cognitive performance from the group who listened to positive music, as predicted it was those in the makeup group who performed significantly better than females in the other two groups.

The team pointed out that makeup wasn’t the only way of boosting test results.

These findings do offer new understanding into the ways in which boosting physical self-esteem through using makeup may interact with cognition.

They now suggest further research to look into whether makeup has longer lasting effects on cognitive performance.

The findings can be found published online in the journal Cogent Psychology.