Dressing up for myself: is it really just for me?

Is dressing up for myself a real thing, or self-deception?

Both sides of this argument are seriously held and neither has been settled. What psychology does have is a well-tested distinction between a reason a person owns and a reason they feel pushed into, and no experiment we found has compared grooming for yourself with grooming for other people.

The skeptical view deserves a hearing. A personal essay in The Virago argues that 'I only wear makeup for myself' is usually self-deception rather than a plain fact. We could read it only at the length a search result showed, so we report its argument rather than quote it, and nothing below refutes it.

What decides how it feels: the reason, or where the reason came from?

The reason, on this evidence. Self-determination theory, set out by Richard Ryan and Edward Deci in 2000 and restated across four decades since, separates autonomous motivation, doing something for a reason you genuinely endorse, from controlled motivation, doing it because of outside pressure, guilt or a need for someone's approval. It is that difference, not how motivated a person is, that this research links to how people feel.

Autonomy here does not mean acting alone. In a 2021 restatement, Ryan and colleagues describe autonomy as being able to endorse your own actions, including reasons that first came from outside you. On the theory's own account, a habit picked up from your mother, your school or an advertisement can become genuinely yours. A habit you would drop tomorrow if nobody noticed is a different thing, whoever it started with.

Is there a cost to grooming for other people's approval?

In the narrow settings that have been measured, yes. In a 2020 experiment published in Body Image, 120 women were asked either to take selfies or to photograph objects. The women who took selfies believing the pictures might be posted for others to see reported worse mood and lower self-esteem afterwards than those who photographed objects.

Two sets of studies by Chen and colleagues, in 2021 and 2022, are correlations in Western samples about pictures online, and they point the same way without showing cause. Self-objectification is viewing yourself as something to be looked at and rated rather than as the person doing the looking. Women who scored higher on it reported a stronger wish for other people's approval, and in one study were more willing to edit their own photographs beyond what they thought normal.

A 2023 questionnaire study of 2,165 adults in the UK, Italy, Poland, Romania and Iran found higher self-esteem went with less body shame in all five countries, and its authors said the question needs studying outside Western countries.

What do Indian women actually say about why they groom?

They say both things at once, often in the same breath. In public threads and signed essays, Indian women describe reasons that are plainly their own alongside reasons shaped by work, family and marriage, without treating the two as a contradiction. These are individual accounts found by ordinary search, texture rather than proportions.

One woman, in a discussion thread for Indian women, wrote: 'I love getting dressed up and looking presentable. Makes me feel confident. My makeup barely takes 10 mins.' On a professional community forum, another wrote, 'I choose to wear it because I think I look tired and rough without it,' adding that a little helped her look more professional.

The other version is as real. In a 2018 essay for Youth Ki Awaaz, Ankita Sharma described the weeks after her wedding: 'The concern right now isn't whether I am happy or content in a marriage but whether I look married.' That is not a woman describing a reason she owns.

Is 'log kya kahenge' the real reason behind a beauty routine?

Sometimes it is, and in India some of that pressure has been counted. Log kya kahenge is a common Indian phrase meaning what will people say. Colourism, treating lighter skin as more desirable than darker skin within the same group, is its sharpest local form: in a survey of 1,992 people aged 16 to 60 in Mumbai published in 2018, more than a third were currently using skin fairness products, and women were twice as likely as men to be using them.

This research concerns product preferences; it does not establish which skin-lightening products are safer or more effective. We read that as an accepted author manuscript in a university repository, with no publication year in our record.

Pressure also has a voice. In a 2017 essay for Feminism in India, Mudra Mukesh recorded what she was told in a parlour chair: 'Aapki kaafi tanning ho rakhi hai, kuch karvaate nahin ho', meaning you are very tanned, why don't you get something done.

So what does owning your own reason look like?

It looks like being able to say why, and meaning it. Kantar, a market research company, reported in 2024 that 52 percent of women in its survey of 36,000 people across 28 countries said their own confidence was what motivated them to look their best, while men more often named pleasing a spouse. India was grouped with five other countries placing above-average importance on appearance, with no figure of its own.

Whether it means doing your own hair on a Tuesday night or booking someone to come to your home, the question is the same and it is yours to answer. Our own suggestion, which no study here tested: ask whether you would still want it if nobody remarked on it. For the practical side, how a visit works is set out separately.

Where the evidence is thin

The largest gap is the obvious one: we found no study of grooming motives, self-directed or not, in an Indian sample. Self-determination theory is a general theory of motivation, not a theory about appearance, and the selfie experiment and the photo-editing studies are about pictures online in Western samples.

The Indian research that does exist is correlational and cross-sectional, so it shows that two things go together in a group of students, not that one moved the other. A 2025 study of 437 Indian university students aged 18 to 24 found that students with higher self-esteem reported less self-objectification and less appearance anxiety.

The quotes here are real and copied exactly, but they are individual examples found by ordinary search, not a representative sample. We also found no Indian woman making that skeptical argument in her own words.