Makeup junkies rejoice. A newly released study has revealed that women who wear makeup can not only receive a confidence boost but wearing makeup also make them feel more intelligent.
Conducted by researchers from Harvard Medical School in the US and the University of Chieti at Italy, the team looked into the “lipstick effect” of 186 female undergraduate students.
The “lipstick effect” is a psychological phenomenon in which wearing makeup can make an individual feel more physically alluring, increasing feeling of self-esteem, personality, and attitude.
But a less well-known effect is that a boost in self-esteem can also influences our cognitive abilities in a positive way. As defined by Sharp Brain, cognitive abilities are brain-based skills we need to carry out any task from the simplest to the most complex.
The study, published in Cogent Psychology, the researchers devised a psychological experiment in which female undergraduates were split into three groups and they were all given a series of tests to complete.
Before taking the test, participants of one group were asked to apply makeup, another group listened to “a positive music excerpt”, while the third coloured a drawing of a human face.
Amongst the three groups, those with makeup were found to have delivered the best performance.
Although makeup wasn’t the only way of boosting test results, the findings do give new understanding into the way sin which boosting physical self-esteem through using makeup may interact with cognition.
In 2016, a previous study by Jaclyn Wong of the University of Chicago and Andrew Penner of the University of California at Irvine have fount out that women who wear makeup earn 20% more than their non-makeup wearing counterparts.
Read also: Here’s A Wearable Unicorn Makeup Tutorial You Can Try Out
