Cynthia Atchoukeu has kept the same morning routine since she was a teenager. She wakes up, showers, picks an outfit, brushes her hair, does her makeup, eats breakfast and then faces her day.

Atchoukeu, like many other women, has decided to break the routine.

“On the days I don’t wear makeup, I feel good because I don’t need it,” she said. Atchoukeu, an audiology senior, has chosen to consciously understand her cosmetology choices.

“I use makeup in a more personal aspect now,” she said. “My confidence doesn’t change if I wear makeup or not.”

Started in November, the 30-day no makeup campaign encourages women to face themselves and grow in self-love. In five months, the campaign has received recognition in 27 countries.

“Thirty days no makeup is about creating intentional space for internal change and taking the action to grow in intimacy with oneself,” said Sarah Jaggard, co-founder and director of communication for the campaign. “It’s just a tool and an opportunity that has nothing to do with makeup but everything to do with loving oneself and accepting oneself at a deeper level.”

The objective of the campaign is for women to get to the core of whom they are.

“I feel that this campaign is motivating and will push women to get to know themselves and love themselves in the skin they are in,” Atchoukeu said. “[It] motivates women to accept their flaws and learn that it is OK to be imperfect, because nobody is perfect.”

The idea came to Jaggard on a particularly long, sleepless night.

“What would it be like for women to choose to do a month with no makeup, and what would happen for them?,” she said. “And that really scared me, and that’s why I wanted to do it.”

Armanda Gonzales, a junior mass communication and journalism major, said she found the campaign insightful, because the people behind it want to empower young women to embrace both their inner and outer beauty.

“But at the same time, they aren’t against makeup. They just want us to feel good naturally, and that’s always a good thing, because lots of young girls are insecure,” Gonzales said. “For me, the impact was that I should feel confident with the way I look, and if anyone didn’t like the way I looked, it shouldn’t matter to me. It honestly felt good to have a bare face.”

Jessica Adams, coordinator for the Women’s Resource Center, urges women and men alike to evaluate why they use makeup and what the meaning behind it is.

“Although makeup is used as a tool of self-expression, it also has the potential to mask the unwanted truth,” Adams said.

Makeup can be used as a cloaking device for many imperfections, like scars, bruises and acne. For example, Atchoukeu used to conceal her acne with foundation before she left her home.

“I made it into a habit, and it grew out of caring about what society thinks,” Atchoukeu said.

Quitting makeup for one day, or even a week, Jaggard said, may make a statement, but compared to really sitting with the feeling of vulnerability over an extended period of time would bring up a lot more internal matters.

“Experiential learning is, by far, the most profound and the most memorable, because it’s not just delivering information to someone. It’s someone deciding to take that information and then embody it and experience it for themselves, and that’s where validity comes from,” Jaggard said.

Britany Sosa, a mass communication and journalism senior, approves of this campaign, because it shows that there are other women in the world trying to make a difference for each other.

“It’s empowering to women to step outside without their faces all done up and say, ‘Hey world, this is me. This is what I really look like, and I don’t care what you think,” Sosa said. “That’s why I decided to participate in the 30 days no makeup challenge. I want my friends to know they can be beautiful without all the expensive products and show women that they can be beautiful with natural beauty.”

Each woman will get out of the experience what she puts in, Adams said.

“It is promising that there will be things that come up for you that you get to choose to look at or not,” Laggard said. “The results for every participant are vastly different, and it ranges from women saying, ‘I’m glad I did that,’ to others who say, ‘This changed me so profoundly.’”