When I decided to focus on the topic of women and makeup at the beginning of the semester, I never would have guessed that I would end the semester photoshopping images of a lizard monster flipping a van on its side outside her office building. As I read through old essays on my laptop in search of an origin piece, I came across a poem I wrote in high school about the pressure to conform to societal beauty standards. I never liked how that assignment turned out. It’s far from my best work, so I quickly moved on to the next document. As I continued my search, I found myself revisiting the poem. At first, I thought I would want my origin piece to be my best work so far, the logic being that it could only get better from where I started. It occurred to me though that using writing I was already happy with through the experiment cycle would be more difficult for me than using writing I knew could be improved. 

 

I returned once again to the poem with its multitude of problems and decided to tackle them all head-on in the experiment cycle. For my first experiment, I thought that maybe my problem wasn’t the poetic language. Maybe the problem was that I had taken a broad, complex topic and oversimplified it by squishing it into a short vague poem. To remedy this, I thought a vignette collection would allow me to maintain the poetic style but give me the space to go into more depth with it. After writing my first blog post discussing the vignette genre, I was excited to prove my hypothesis right. More often than not though, experimentation means proving your hypothesis wrong. My sample didn’t go well at all, but I wouldn’t call experiment one a total failure because, by the end of it, I had learned two things that would ultimately guide my final project:

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1) My topic was way too broad. This was the same issue I had with the origin piece, and I approached it in experiment one by applying the same vague idea, “women and makeup and societal pressure,” to detailed, short scenes. I had made the same mistake again, just in a new genre. I could write the brief, detail-oriented scenes required of a vignette, but I hadn’t given enough thought about what I wanted the scenes to communicate. It’s always good to go into an experiment with a question, so going into experiment two, I had one question about my topic I had to answer before I could get anywhere: So what?

 

2) I really enjoyed writing the genre guide blog post. The style and conventions of the genre just clicked with me. This realization didn’t really inform the content of experiment two, but it did inform my decision to choose a genre for the experiment that allowed me to write similarly to the way I did in the blog.

 

Experiment two was the earliest draft “Makeup Free.” For my sample, I wrote what I expected to be the intro and conclusion of an article about a woman who attempts a “week without makeup” challenge and turns into a lizard monster. With this experiment, I had two genres to draw from.  I read up on the types of satire and satirical devices at my disposal, but I learned the most by reading other satires. I spent an entire weekend scrolling through The Reductress, which is full of hilarious and informative examples of good satire. It helped that The Reductress focuses specifically on women’s issues. The other genre I researched was the type of article that I see most often from Cosmopolitan, Buzzfeed, and company. It’s easy to identify what virtually every single article of this type has in common with the others by looking at a template for their titles:

 

 

I did [something I normally wouldn’t in my daily life] for a Week and [blatantly

click-baity thing happened]!

 

The topics that fill in the blanks range from “I Ate Only Millennial Pink Foods for a Week and Now Even My Insides Are Insta-Ready” to “I Dressed Up As ‘Star Wars’ Characters For A Week And It Got Weird.” There are countless independent blogs as well as articles from these magazines where women document their experiences going makeup-free for a week. This was the model for my project. A common trend in all of these is that the stakes of going makeup-free were highest for these women when they were at work. Yes, they were insecure about appearance in general, but they were particularly fearful of looking unprofessional at work. As someone who identifies with that feeling, especially as someone studying Computer Science, a statistically male-dominated professional field, I find that trend upsetting. There is a double standard in workplace culture that is apparent in all week-without-makeup posts whether the occupation is a pre-school teacher or fashion magazine correspondent. Women spend more time and money on appearance than their male counterparts to be taken seriously in professional environments (although still less seriously than their male counterparts, not to mention the pay gap).

 

The other half of my research involved finding sources related to what I already suspected was true (a list of sources that acted as jumping off points for my more in-depth research is linked below). Gathering these sources helped to sharpen the focus what exactly I was satirizing. I knew early on that I wanted there to be some ridiculously catastrophic consequence to a woman going without makeup for a week, but the way that happens sets the tone and frames the whole article. I wrote the lizard-monster plot with the goal of exaggerating the professional and personal impact a women experiences when she’s not treated as an equal in the workplace. This time, when I asked myself so what? I felt like I had an answer.

 

My third experiment was somewhat of an extension of the second. I wanted to continue gathering research, but I also wanted some experience with multi-media. Experiment three was a poster series pairing currents states on women, beauty, and the workplace paired with old advertisements of similar focus. My goal was to shed light on the idea that in a lot of ways we haven’t come as far as we allow ourselves to think we have in terms of workplace equality. I didn’t fully accomplish my goals for experiment three, but I the research I did for it informed my content for the final project. I have also become decently skilled at using Microsoft Word as a photo editor.

 

My three experiments were completely different from each other in style and genre, but each one brought me a step closure to developing my final project. I have grown as a writer in so many ways. I’m now a stronger researcher. I’m more willing to take risks in my writing choices and try styles and genres and topics I’ve never had experience with before. Starting the semester with a bad high school poem that I wanted nothing to do with and ending with a piece I’m proud of about a topic that’s important to me has been so rewarding. It will definitely give me a lot to think about when I go into the capstone course in my last semester of Senior year.