Aisling on beauty: Girls who love make-up don’t read? Do me a favour

A spat broke out on YouTube and Twitter recently. Nothing new there: these platforms are notorious for hosting arguments and knee-jerk reactions.

This particular row concerned women and girls who read and review books on BookTube, a community of blook vloggers. Most of these women were wearing make-up in their videos. In an illogical leap, doubt was cast by a male book vlogger about whether they were actually reading the books they reviewed.

“I mean, do they strike you as readers?” the blogger bloke asked. “When you watch their well-lit, well-filmed videos, with them sitting there wearing blush in front of studio lights, can you honestly picture them hunkered down, reading a book, happily oblivious to everything else? I certainly can’t picture that.”

The hashtag #Fakereadergirls quickly began to trend on Twitter as women reacted in dismay to this opinion. They tweeted about their Ivy League degrees, the books they had read and even written and their impressive jobs.

Nobody should have to justify their interests in this way. I am so weary of this trend of women being constantly put down for loving cosmetics. Not just by men, but by other women too.

The idea that women who like make-up are a bit thick is getting very boring. Endless pages of magazines, papers and television programmes are devoted to food. Recipes, celebrity chefs and the never-ending stream of food photographs crowd personal pages on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. I couldn’t be less interested. But I know that others are and that’s fine. I don’t attack them or troll them because they are interested in something I am not.

Yes, there are more important things to be writing and reading about than cosmetics. Yes, there are wars and terrible things happening in the world. One of them is the starvation of millions of people around the globe, but the obsession about gourmet food is seen as perfectly fine. It’s a puzzling standard.

Loving make-up (or creating the perfect dessert) does not impact on any other interests or hobbies you may have. It’s not shallow and it’s certainly not something anyone should have to justify.

• amcdermott@irishtimes.com 
• Twitter @aismcdermott