I figured out that if I put my makeup on while riding the number 64 bus into work, I could sleep an extra ten minutes every morning. After stabbing myself in the eyeball with mascara, I learned to wait for red lights. I started to exaggerate my snooze button usage and cut it closer and closer, to the point where I had fifteen minutes between crawling out of bed and sprinting to the bus stop five blocks away at an unassuming spot on the sidewalk in Central Square, Cambridge, between the India Pavilion and Falafel Palace restaurants. One morning I climbed onto the bus out of breath, owing to the fact that as I came down the sidewalk, I’d seen the number 64 sitting at the red light before my stop and bolted to intercept the bus so that I wouldn’t have to wait twenty minutes for the next one. I sank into a seat near the back, frustrated with my job and this rushed, ridiculous routine to get to my desk every day by 9 a.m. I pawed around in my purse, absentmindedly at first, then with growing franticness, and then took everything out slowly, one item at a time, knowing but not wanting to accept that I’d forgotten my makeup bag. I leaned my head back onto the collar of my coat and moaned.
I considered getting off at the next stop and walking back home, grabbing my makeup bag, and then catching the next number 64 that was due in seventeen minutes. But I was frazzled and already late. So I came up with a plan. I got off the bus at work, walked across the street to the CVS drugstore, and bought $50 worth of moisturizer, powder, concealer, blush, eyeliner, eye shadow, mascara, and lipstick. I hauled my goods over to work and went into a bathroom not on my floor, hoping to avoid having one of my colleagues see me unwrap this pile of brand-new makeup and apply it right there at the bathroom sink while I was supposed to be in my cubicle. I hadn’t considered going to work that day without makeup for even a moment.
Starting my freshman year of high school, I never went anywhere without makeup, because I harbored a deep-seated belief that something was wrong with the way I looked naturally. I thought my hair was either too oily or too dry or too full or too thin, and my skin was plagued with incidents, like old chicken pox scars, that I wanted to plaster over. At fourteen, I foresaw a lifetime of defects I’d have to fight against. It started with my acne and I figured that, soon enough, I’d need to combat wrinkles and gray hair. In my early twenties, I had an earnest conversation with my friend Alisha about whether we should start using antiwrinkle cream under our eyes as a prophylactic. I’m not sure where this self-loathing originated—whether from beauty industry ads targeting every part of my body and that seemed to prey on, and even create, insecurities in women, or the popular girls at school who had this body-morphing all figured out with their detailed makeup regimens and magazine-worthy hair, or my own adolescent insecurities. Whatever the case, I’d internalized the message that I needed to fix myself. To change myself. I also began to understand that women are expected to do everything: we must be consummate careerists, doting mothers, and above all else immaculately turned out, never mind the time, money, and confidence this drains from us.
Lucky for me, the problems I perceived I had—and plenty I hadn’t even thought of before, like a commercial that once induced me to go measure my eyelashes because maybe they weren’t long enough—could be solved with money. All the natural inclinations of my body, its odors, its tendency to grow hair in places other than the top of my head, should be fought against. Furthermore, I should be embarrassed if I didn’t. It wasn’t just the lip gloss ads in Seventeen magazine that fanned my adolescent self-doubt; it was other women too. I calibrated what I should do based on them and felt I had no voice, no agency to break away. Who was I to say that we women should abandon shoes that cause bunions, and reclaim hours of our lives spent straightening curly hair and curling straight hair? I signed up for this lifelong pursuit of an air-brushed, plasticized version of womanhood at fourteen and was a rapt consumer for the next sixteen years. I hated how I looked as a teenager, which was ironic considering that’s when I looked most like this idealized version. I’d stand in front of the mirror and outline my flaws, ticking down a mental list I nurtured. I fantasized about somehow perfecting myself, of deleting fat and acne, of adding curves. I performed this self-defeating ritual until, I’m embarrassed to say, I was thirty years old. Not coincidentally, it was right about the time Nate and I embarked on our journey of extreme frugality. Since frugality caused me to identify all the areas where I was spending money in ways that were unfulfilling, it also caused me to identify all the areas where I was spending my time and energy in ways that were unfulfilling. Shaming my body on a daily basis? Decidedly unfulfilling, not to mention a waste of time and, very often, a waste of money as I searched out products to help remedy my bodily crisis of the day. I’d internalized negative messages about my appearance from an early age, but that was an old, worn-out battle that I could give up. Just like Dunkin’ Donuts iced teas, I could eliminate this ugly obsession from my life. After this revelation, I never criticized my body again.
About six months after launching our new life as extreme frugality adherents, I noticed my concealer stick was running low. I scraped out the dregs of face-colored mud with my fingernail and smeared it as thinly as possible over my pimples. I’m plagued with lifelong acne, so at thirty, my face looked roughly the same as it had when I was sixteen, dotted with whiteheads and angry, red, mosquito-bite-size pimples. I raked through every drawer in my bathroom, hoping to find a sample concealer my mom had sent me from a Clinique gift set that she hadn’t wanted. No luck. I searched online to see if I could sign up for free samples from somewhere, anywhere. I haunted drugstores hoping they’d discount their makeup at some point (they didn’t).
Nate and I had obliterated all of our unnecessary expenses and were now spending under $1,000 a month on everything but our mortgage payment. I couldn’t justify wasting money on makeup when we’d given up buying signed first-edition books through our local bookstore’s first-edition club. I decided I wasn’t someone who would forgo an inscribed Margaret Atwood in favor of a Maybelline concealer stick. It smacked of vacuousness. I was prying the last of my eye shadow out with a toothpick one morning when the absurdity of what I was doing dawned on me: Why wasn’t I solving the root of this problem? Why didn’t I just stop wearing makeup? The simple answer is that I thought I didn’t look good without makeup. My self-worth was intertwined with my appearance. I was ashamed of my dependence on this stuff and of how difficult it was for me to even consider living without it.
Breaking away from traditional consumer norms as it related to my spending had opened my eyes to all the other ways in which I’d molded myself to fit cultural expectations. I didn’t ever particularly enjoy the process of wearing makeup, but I’d also never considered stopping before. It wasn’t until I had the experience of self-liberation from my previously mindless consumerism that I was able to reflect on my adherence to norms of other stripes. It was an entire process of me learning to let go of everything that wasn’t deeply important to me as a person. Not to me as a person trying to impress others, or conform to a standard, or fit a stereotype, but to me on my own as an individual. I had my own voice, I could make my own decisions, and for the first time I was going to.
Acknowledging the presence of my addiction cemented my resolve to stop. I figured I’d take the same approach I do at the beach where I inch into cold waves one rung of my body at a time so that when the water laps at my shoulders, I’m fully acclimated and don’t even realize I’m submerged. I’d eliminate one piece of makeup per week. First, I stopped painting my nails every Sunday afternoon. I felt like a peasant and spent the next Monday at work waiting for someone to comment on my bare, pedestrian nails. No one noticed. Next up, I didn’t wear blush. Then, I eliminated powder. The following week, concealer was gone. It took me an entire month to phase everything out. Last to go was supposed to be mascara, but I couldn’t do it. It stayed on as my security blanket against a naked, revealed face. But the concealer, the blush, the powder, the eye shadow, the eyeliner, the nail polish, and the lipstick? All gone. I thought I looked anemic and a touch Amish. I’d become more accustomed to my fake, made-up face than my actual, natural face. I’d embodied the prescribed societal standards of beauty to such an extent that I saw my makeup-less face as a failure. At the same time, I was invigorated the first day I went to work without makeup. I felt like I’d accomplished something, like I’d vanquished an old foe that’d dogged me for years, hanging over my shoulder whispering, “You’re not good enough” in my ear. I’d thrown off this tormenter and it made me feel powerful. If I could do this, what else could I achieve? This wasn’t the achievement of my old life, of my persistent, unhappy drive for external accolades; this was an achievement just for me. No one else would notice or care, but I would know. I would care. I would feel better.
Not wearing makeup didn’t change my relationships. I was no more or less liked and I was no more or less successful. All those years I’d wasted so much time stressing out over what people thought about my ability to apply eyeliner, when in reality they didn’t even notice. My feminist interior monologue, which’d been running since I was five years old and told my parents I didn’t want to go to church unless women could be priests, was now written as a declaration of independence on my face. I wasn’t going to do things that made me unhappy anymore, not with my money, not with my appearance, not with my life. I was gaining confidence in who I am at my core and what I look like without a veneer of self-imposed “shoulds” covering up my face and my actions.
Around this same time, I had a come-to-Jesus moment with my clothes because they were another ingredient in my lack of confidence. My conception of my self-worth started with my face and extended down to my shoes, and it ran only skin deep. I had way too much clothing. Way too much. After doing an inventory of my closet, I realized I could wear a different outfit every single day for two months straight. Wow. I bought clothes to treat myself, a habit my mother started me on when I was very young. We’d go shopping, always for sales, but without needing the stuff we came home with. I’d conflated the fact that a person needs to wear clothes with clothes being a “need.” I was a thrift-store, garage-sale, and Kohl’s clearance-rack hunter and I rarely spent more than $20 per item; even my red Banana Republic raincoat was just $18 from a high-end consignment shop in a ritzy suburb of Boston. I’d always thought I was so clever with these deals I found. But I’d missed the truism that every sale in the world won’t save you as much money as simply not buying anything. Buying clothes didn’t automatically make me more confident or more beautiful; it just automatically meant I had less money. Plus, clothing couldn’t mask the fact that I was unhappy with how my life was unfolding. They were a smokescreen that I employed in an effort to appear polished, poised, and happy when, in reality, I felt the opposite. I reasoned that doing away with this camouflage would allow me to instead draw out my interior self.
I love winning so I was exhilarated with success over the forklifts of money we were saving every month. Frugality had become a competition that pitted us against our erstwhile consumption. And we were rocking it. Wanting to win it even more, I decided to stop buying clothes. Back in grad school when I needed to lose weight, I didn’t pare down to, say, a few Cheetos per week; I banned them wholesale from my life. I needed this same rigor in order to stop buying clothes. If I’d laid out some wishy-washy ground rules like, “Oh, I’ll buy only necessities,” I would’ve come up with an excuse for why a black taffeta dress with a gold lace overlay (something I do, in fact, own) was a “necessity.” Instead, I imposed an all-out ban on buying clothes that included socks, underwear, shoes, and accessories. Clothes, like makeup, were emotional purchases for me. They filled a void in my self-worth, shopping for them was a hobby, and I let my outward appearance define me. Not buying clothes was a way to experience contentment with what I already owned instead of constantly wishing for something better or newer. I’d been letting my stuff control me; now, it was time to turn that the other way around. I didn’t know it then, but I wouldn’t buy a scrap of clothing for another three years.
Completing the womanly beauty trifecta, I needed to do something about my hair. For the entire first year of our extreme frugality, I debated my hair. Pre-frugality, I’d been spending $120 four times a year at that chic salon and, can I be honest here? My hair looked fabulous. Really fabulous. But spending more on hair than we were spending on household supplies and utilities in a month combined seemed ludicrous. Plus, I was sincere in my effort to sever the tether I’d woven between my self-worth and my appearance. If I’d been able to stop wearing makeup and stop buying clothes, I should be able to do something about my hair. So I stopped getting it cut. That was a fine solution for about a year, but I now had the same hairstyle I’d had in fifth grade: waist-length and straight, which was cute in 1995. Now? I looked like I’d joined a cult that forbids hair cutting.
I priced out Supercuts and was about to book myself in for what I was certain would be a disaster-with-shears for $25 when Nate asked if I wanted him to cut it. I’d been cutting his hair for years now, although granted, it was a buzz cut, which I think a six-year-old could manage. It’s sort of like mowing a lawn; you just go in straight lines with some curves around the ears and then you’re done. Nate and I had grown closer during this year of intense frugality because, in order to save money, we often had to do stuff together, like cut hair, as opposed to hiring someone. We’d learned to depend on each other to an extent that’s uncommon in our culture of wash-and-fold laundry pickup and meal delivery services. Given this, I wasn’t surprised he offered to cut it, but I wasn’t thrilled either. My desire to plunge further into frugality was strong because I had a reminder of why we were doing this every single weekday when I sat in my cubicle from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. And so, we did what we always do before tackling a project we’re nervous about the repercussions of (such as when we had to replumb our kitchen): we researched it on the Internet. I found a florid hairdresser on YouTube who had a sixty-minute-long (not exaggerating) video of how to cut long hair into layers. After fifteen minutes, I decided he was overcomplicating the situation and reasoned we could skip a few steps, which I hoped wasn’t like when we put our IKEA dresser together and had a pile of screws left over and then realized we’d installed the drawers backward and had to take the whole thing apart again at 10 p.m.
I wrote out bullet points for Nate to follow and we went into the bathroom. I micromanaged the whole process, which Nate tolerated moderately well, and after about thirty minutes (a lot less commentary and flourishes than our YouTube guy, but a lot more “Hold still and stop telling me what to do!”), we had a haircut. An actually quite good-looking haircut with layers that framed my makeup-free face. I was rather stunned because the whole time I was planning to go to the salon afterward and pay for a bob cut.
The haircut performed by Nate wasn’t quite the level of perfection of my $120 cut, but it was a darn nice facsimile that we’d gotten for free. I never went to a salon again. It brings a new level of intimacy to a marriage when your husband cuts your hair. Rather than this being a stressful, divisive experience, it gave us another opportunity to collaborate, to depend on each other, to weave our bond tighter, and to be partners in every sense. I grew up believing that cutting your own hair is something done only by 1) three-year-olds, 2) postbreakup women convinced they need bangs after consuming an entire bottle of Chablis, and 3) anyone in a cult (they really have PR issues around hair). I’d paid for haircuts every three months of my life without ever testing this theory for myself. We can brainwash ourselves into thinking we can’t solve anything on our own without expensive interventions. Yet I find over and over and over again that when I actually audit this conventional wisdom, I uncover a flimsy veneer that’s easily dismantled by a determined frugal person.
In the course of undoing my previously conventional, time-consuming, and expensive beauty routines, I came to realize that women are expected to look, dress, act, and even think a certain way. Despite being an avowed feminist married to a guy who took Advanced Theories in Feminist Thought with me our senior year of college, I’d hewed to mainstream expectations levied on women. I’d worn makeup and heels when I didn’t want to, bought clothes I didn’t need, and paid close to $500 a year for someone to clip my split ends. But that path never brought me fulfillment. All it did was enroll me in an endless carousel of consumerism that spun around and around, promising I’d reach perfection after the next turn, but instead pummelled me with prompts to buy more stuff. I’d internalized what society said was important, and made it important to me. I was learning that this pursuit of perfection I’d enslaved myself to from the age of fourteen was a hoax. It was designed to keep me buying things I didn’t need and working a job I didn’t care about, in order to slot myself into preconceived societal expectations. I was done with that.
I’d started out simply not wanting to spend money on makeup, clothes, and hair, and yes, I was now on track to save thousands every year in those categories. Much more profound, however, was the change this brought about in my thinking. I’d built confidence from the knowledge that I was OK on my own, bared as I was of makeup and stripped of new clothes and without expensive hair. I was still a valuable person. I was still smart and worthwhile. And I daresay, I now had more to say. All I did was stop doing things. I didn’t go on a pilgrimage or have a near-death experience or get a makeover, I just gave up unnecessary activities of consumption. In doing so, I transformed how I felt about myself. I was no longer preoccupied with my appearance; I was preoccupied with changing myself, with evolving and maturing. I’d thought my maturation was finished in high school when I stepped onto this consumer carousel, but I now saw there was a world I could live in on my own terms. I was born again. Letting go of caring what other people thought enabled me to figure out what I really wanted out of life, not what society wanted out of my life. I came to understand that, in the end, the only person who truly cares how you live your life is you.