Every summer, there comes a point in time when my face is far tanner (or more sunburned) than my neck, the humidity makes being a functional human nearly impossible and the thought of putting on a full face of makeup to go to work makes me cringe. I have officially reached that point.

I remember reading a BuzzFeed/HuffPost type of article a couple months back about not wearing makeup in the work place. It was a week-long "experiment" to see how customers and coworkers would react to the sudden change in beauty routine, and it had pretty drastic results: the author was asked multiple times if she was getting sick, people assumed she was hungover from the night before and in general, she just wasn't taken seriously.

With this in mind, I was hesitant to stop wearing makeup altogether. But when I returned from two weeks of no makeup after being on vacation, I finally decided to give it a go.

The results shocked me. It's been a week without makeup so far, and the only comment even remotely relating to my face has been, "Have you always had a nose ring?"

Maybe I'm just lucky and I work in a great place with great customers and coworkers, or maybe it really doesn't matter at all. Throughout this process, the only person who really thought wearing makeup even mattered was me. I can't help wonder why I cared so much. Wearing a full face to work every day always made me feel more professional, as if the more blush and highlight I applied directly correlated to how many people would take me seriously that day or would distract customers from realizing I'm only a teenager doing a grown-up's job.

While makeup is there for when we feel we need it, we shouldn't rely on it. And we definitely shouldn't feel subconsciously pressured to wear it by society and by the people with whom we surround ourselves in order to be taken seriously.