Hypothetically, If no one notices about the dressing sense/presentability of women, would they still care for exact matching clothing, nail paints, waxing and all related things?

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This is not a question with prejudices, nor is this asked for judging anyone. It is out of curiosity that I ask, if no one judges them on the matter of clothing and beauty, would it matter to girls/women how impeccably presentable they look.

I have heard the arguments from girls that they dress up. and love looking the way they look and it is not for anyone else but them. It is a personal matter how they present themselves. It is not for catching attention, nor is it to prove anything to anyone. Its just a personal choice. Considering that, I fail to understand why one would be so hell bent on torturing themselves with high heel shoes, waxing procedures etc. What is the motivation for that?

Even further, if all that the girls wear and do to themselves is for their own personal happiness, how come the clothing industry came up with and still continues to sell, any and everything that accentuates a woman's body rather than considering what is comfortable. Are women inclined towards that sort of clothes intrinsically?

There are different types of clothing; casual, comfortable and rather taxing apparels which need to be taken extremely good care of, while wearing or storing.

I am a guy, I probably can never understand, but for me, comfort really counts very high. I'd prefer a casual loose jeans and a plain white / solid coloured T-shirt to go almost anywhere around the world, and that is the reason it always perplexes me when my girl friends are very particular about repeating the clothes, have matching nail paints and what not. Can anyone please try to explain?

Again, to reiterate, I am not gender biased, I am not judging, I just want to understand the psyche behind it all.

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Women always say that they dress up diligently to please themselves, but not to impress any man, but considering that the women that do, get more attention from men, the authenticity of that statement is questionable at best. How can they say it's not to please men, if they like the attention that it brings (minus sexual harassment)? To understand whether women are being duplicitous when they do and say this, you have to look at social constructs and pressures from the perspective of a woman.

In our modern society, a woman's body is her asset, and the more men she sleeps with, the more her value goes down. Women are sex objects, unfortunately or not. Women don't want to be called a slut, and they make every effort to not be called or thought of as that. Not only aren't women allowed to be sluts, they also aren't allowed to approach men fully. If you observe men, you'll see they're allowed to ask for ten girl's numbers in the space of a week. If a woman did that, she would be called loose, thirsty or a beg. Women aren't allowed to approach men they like or be upfront with their desires like men are. There are repercussions with it. A good example of this, is traffic light parties. You wear red if you're not up for sex, amber if you're maybe up for it, and green if you're fully ready for sex. What you will find, is that most of the men wear green, and most of the women were amber. Women are not allowed in the 21st century to own, show, or have sexual desires and pursue them. Any woman that goes to a traffic light party dressed in green will stand out, be seen as a slut and be reprimanded for it.

Also look at the workplace. When was the last time a woman was praised for using her looks to get hired or get ahead in the workplace? When people ask if Marissa Mayer only got ahead in technology due to her looks, do they mean it in a positive empowering way or a demeaning way, as if that's all women are worth and valued for? Exactly. Although men see using looks and objectification as a privilege (as they aren't sex objects), women in society aren't allowed to use their looks to get ahead in life, as it is looked down upon. Women being given the right to work has liberated women's sexuality as they don't need to pair up with a man for money, but a woman's sexuality is not fully liberated. There are aspects of life where women are sexually repressed, strangely, believe it or not.

Now we understand that that women aren't allowed to want sex or pursue men without being seen as sluts, easy, begs, loose, etc, we can then start to see things from a woman's perspective and mindset.

There are four reasons basically, why people care, maintain, or enhance their looks.

Because they'll be talked about negatively if they look scruffy and not maintained.
Because they want a boost of confidence and an extra spring in their step.
Because they want attention from the opposite sex.
Because everyone else is doing it, so they want to compete with other girls.

For the first one, 99.9% of people do that, as nobody wants to look like a homeless person who smells and has bad breath. For the second one, it is somewhat true, but also misleading. I'll get into that later on. For the third one, that is definitely true for some people. For the forth one, it is true only in some white collar jobs.

I'll now examine the reason of "it makes me more confident when I dress up" reason. A person's self esteem ultimately comes from how other people treat them. (This is why teenagers have teenage angst, because they are examining and coming to terms with how they are in comparison to other people.) A black person in a racist area will have a low self esteem when driving, if they are routinely stopped and searched, because they'll internalise the racism due to negative feedback. Someone who is extroverted, who draws attention to themselves in group conversations and dominates and leads the conversation places, will have a high self esteem in group situations, because they'll be regarded at utmost importance in social situations and will have positive feedback off others.

A person's self esteem comes from how others perceive and treat them, whether they get positive or negative feedback or not. This is why popular kids in school have a high self esteem and bullied people have low self esteem.

The next time a woman tells you that she dresses up for her self confidence and to make herself feel good, you should ask her where the heightened confidence comes from, and she'll be dumbstruck, not being able to answer you sufficiently.

For example, take two good looking men, one who gets women's numbers often, and another who does not, despite them both being good looking. Which one is going to have the high self esteem, and which one is not? The idea that women know they look good purely of their own intervention and not because others tell them so, is laughable at best, because a woman who thinks she looks good who cannot attract a mate, is going to have a lessened self esteem due to the cognitive dissonance. Here is an example of an attractive woman who doesn't feel she's attractive due to herself not being her boyfriend's type. Katya Makinen's answer to What does it feel like to be unattractive and desired by none?

As you can see, how others perceive and treat us, affects our self esteem. It is not enough to just know you're attractive without someone telling you so, because you can be attractive and not be treat as attractive. Do people who are skilled at something, still think they're skilled at it, if no one tells them so?

In my honest opinion, women who wear make up outside of work or a nightclub, do it to attract the attention of men. If you look at the beauty treatments that women have, it is all catered to making women look feminine so men find that attractive.

Make up was designed primarily for the benefit of men, as it is designed to emulate how women look like when they orgasm. That's why lipstick is red, because women who orgasm have redder lips and flushed faces. That's why women wear eyeliner, because men love staring at women. That's why women wear foundation, as foundation makes the complexion radiant and clean which makes them look younger, because men value youth when determining which women is beautiful. (Women do not value youth as much as men do.) Also radiant and flushed faces emulate a woman's orgasm face. Shaving legs is designed primarily for the benefit of men, as body hair is masculine, so women who naturally don't have hairy legs, are seen as feminine, which men find attractive. Women get hair extensions and weave, because it has been scientifically proven that the longer a woman's hair, the more healthy and youthful she is, as old women can't have that, and because long hair is feminine and a woman's beauty comes from her hair. Women dye their hair because uncommon colours like blonde and red are attractive as they're a rarity, which is feminine because there are more natural blondes and redheads as women than there are for men.

Now for nail polish. Nail polish isn't naturally feminine as no women are born with coloured nails. Men could wear it and still look male. Women wear nail polish to look more feminine, but it isn't feminine in the natural sense? Why is this? Just like white people is the standard mode, and acting black is an accentuated culture, looking male is the standard mode, and looking feminine is the accentuated look. This is why it's much harder for a man to look like a woman, than it is for a woman to look like a man.

norah vincent 1

If a woman is torturing herself with high heel shoes, threaded eyebrows and waxing, natural looking make up, on a regular basis, you have to be asking what she gets out of it. According to game theory, every taxing thing someone does, has a perceived reward out of it. I would even suggest that beauty treatments give women dopamine in their daily lives. If it is giving women more confidence, where is the confidence coming from? Confidence is not a solitary trait, it comes from other people.

It is no secret that attractive people get thought of as more positive traits. This is called the Halo Effect.

Beautiful people get all of the breaks. For one thing, they’re beautiful. Also, other people think their personalities are better, too. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that people not only see beautiful people more positively, but they also see the beautiful people’s unique selves. That is, people see personality more accurately in pretty people than in people with average or not-so-good looks.

Psychological scientists spent a lot of time about a half-century ago trying to figure out who is the best judge of personality. You can see how this would be a useful skill for, say, a therapist or someone who conducts job interviews. But that research ground to a halt when they realized this was actually a much more complicated question than anyone thought, says Jeremy Biesanz, who cowrote the new study with Genevieve L. Lorenzo and Lauren J. Human, all from the University of British Columbia.

Biesanz and his colleagues decided to look at this old question from the other side. Rather than trying to work out who’s better at perceiving personality, they wondered whether there are some people whose personality is better perceived. In this study, they considered whether attractiveness changes other people’s ability to get a sense of your personality.

For the study, volunteers met in groups of five to 11 people. The group carried out something a little like a cocktail party, without the alcohol; every person chatted with every other person, in three-minute conversations. After each chat, each participant filled out a questionnaire on the person they’d just been talking with, rating their physical attractiveness and what psychologists call the “big five” personality traits—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Each person also rated their own personality.

As expected, people saw attractive conversation partners more positively. But they also saw their personalities more accurately. This seems a little counterintuitive—how could they have a positive bias and also be more accurate? But it’s true. For example, if Jane is beautiful, organized, and somewhat generous, she’ll be viewed as more organized and generous than she actually is, but she’ll also be seen correctly as more organized than generous.

Biesanz suspects this is because we’re more motivated to pay attention to physically attractive individuals. “You do judge a book by its cover, but a beautiful book leads you to read it more closely,” he says. Interestingly, this wasn’t only true for people who everybody agreed were attractive. If someone talked to a person who they found particularly attractive, they’d perceive their personality more accurately. Biesanz notes that this is about first impressions of personality, in a setting like a cocktail party; the same might not be true for people who have known each other for longer.

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/attractive-people-attract-more-attention-to-their-unique-personality-traits.html

More information here. What Is the Halo Effect?

So there you have it. Women undergo gruelling beauty treatments in order to get male attention because they want men to boost their self esteem and confidence, solely down to how they look. It is ironic that women get beauty treatments for this reason, but don't like it when they are approached solely based on their looks. That contradicts itself. It is not in the best interests of a woman to admit that she does beauty routines for male attention, as she'll be thought of as slutty and a beg for it.

You might be wondering, why do women undergo beauty routines, solely for men, and not women's attention. That's because men don't understand women, and women understand women and they hate each other. Women are bitches. They get jealous, aggressive and condemning of women who dress slutty. Don't believe me, check this out!

One day in Ontario, 86 straight women were paired off into groups of two—either with a friend or a stranger—and taken to a lab at McMaster University. There, a researcher told them they were about to take part in a study about female friendships. But they were soon interrupted by one of two women.
“You're going to say, ‘I don't want my guy next to a girl with a short skirt.’ But that's not because, evolutionarily speaking, your guy is more likely to cheat on you with the short-skirt girl.”

Half the participants were interrupted by a thin, blond, attractive woman with her hair in a bun, dressed in a plain blue t-shirt and khaki pants, whom the researchers called “the conservative confederate."
The other half found themselves in the company of the “sexy confederate,” the same woman, instead wearing a low-cut blouse, a short black skirt, boots, and her hair sexily un-bunned.

Tracy Vaillancourt, a psychology professor at the University of Ottawa, and a PhD student, Aanchal Sharma, then gauged the women’s reactions as the confederates, both sexy and not, left the room. The metric they used? A “bitchiness" scale, of course.
“Why bitchiness?” I asked Vaillancourt, wondering why she chose to use such a loaded word.
“Bitchiness is the term that people use,” she explained. “If I ask someone to describe what this is, they'd say it’s ‘bitchy.’”

"Conservative" and sexy models (Aggressive Behavior)

The women doing the rating were roughly the same age as the participants, 20 to 25, and watched for signs like eye-rolling, looking the confederate up or down, or laughing sarcastically. In one case, a participant said the sexy confederate was dressed to have sex with the professor. One didn’t wait for the sexy woman to leave the room before exclaiming, “What the fuck is that?!”
“That was a 10 out of 10 as far as bitchiness,” Vaillancourt told me.
What Vaillancourt and Sharma found, according to a study published recently in the journal Aggressive Behavior, was, essentially, that the sexy confederate was not going to be making sorority friends anytime soon. The women were far more likely to be bitchy to the sexy confederate, with the large effect size of 2, and their bitchy reactions were more pronounced when the participants were with friends, rather than strangers.

(Aggressive Behavior)

Vaillancourt had always been interested in bullying and popularity, but to her, this showed that women tend to haze each other simply for looking promiscuous.
The clinical term for the womens’ bitchiness is “indirect aggression"— essentially, aggression we don’t want to get caught for.
“You tend to do it such that you won't be detected,” she explained. “Or you make an excuse for your behavior, like, ‘I was only joking.’ Direct aggression is just what it is: physical or verbal aggression.”

There you have it. Women get scantily clad to attract men and not women, as women don't approve it. One thing you have to understand about women, is a woman's mindset. Women undergo beauty regimes to attract men, but due to social pressures, they don't want to admit to it, as it's not in their best interest to admit to it.

One time when I was in a female environment, a girl told one of her female friends for 15 minutes, that she should take more pride in her appearance. And this woman had nothing wrong with her appearance, just that she didn't choose particularly fashionable attire, so she was an unblossomed flower. She knew that I was listening to her, as I was in her group, so she routinely said "don't do it for anyone else, do it for yourself. It'll make you feel more confident. Look what you're dressed in? What is that?" The next day, you can be sure that she made a much bigger effort with her appearance. There was no way she would be allowed to roll in her group, if she didn't. I was told by the same woman speaking at work experience, that she gets more attention from males on the street when she wears black and covers up, compared to when she showed her arms and legs. She asked me why and I responded "You look better covered up than when you just wear casual clothes or show some skin, because if you look THAT good covered up, imagine how good you look when you don't do that!" And this woman did show some skin intentionally because she knows men like to look at it. However I took her words at face value and didn't consider that she might be lying when she told me she doesn't like the male attention on the street and that she looks down at the ground when it happens. One time I was on the bus and some girls were talking behind me on the phone to some boys, flirting and trying to impress them, and when I looked behind me, it was that exact same group of friends who say they don't dress up for men, and they were more dressed up talking to boys on the phone, than they were in class or at work experience in the absence of boys.

The way female groups of friends work, they are a herd. Females place huge importance of being friends with attractive females, so they can attract males from association without having to initiate (which women aren't allowed to do), so they use attractive women they're friends with, to get men their way. Another thing about female groups, is that one of them is always a slut or behaves like one by how they speak to boys. Whichever girl says they're not a slut, is always the slut. Going back to that group of friends in the example, one of them was pole dancing in the park to get boys to look at her. Because that girl acts like a slut, boys will think the whole group is kinda slutty and easy, so by having a slut in the group, it helps to attract men.

In short, women spend so much time doing beauty routines outside of work or nightclubs, in order to attract men, because they want to benefit from the halo effect and because they like the idea of their self esteem rising due to other people's perception and treatment of them. In fact, women are not even aware of this, because say they prefer not to be primarily valued for their looks, so it wouldn't cross their minds that they willingly want to in some aspects of their life.

If you have never been sexually attracted to women, you will never quite understand the monumental power of female sexuality, except by proxy or in theory, nor will you quite know the immense advantage it gives us over men.

~Norah Vincent, a woman who disguised herself as a man for 18 months
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/mar/18/gender.bookextracts

If there were no men on the planet, would women still wear make up and heels? The answer is no, because there would be no woman to appreciate that. We all know that sexy women are treat MUCH better than ugly women, and all woman want to be treat as sexy, whether they admit to it or not. A woman's beauty to a man is alluring, but to a woman it's a threat, unless she's friends with that attractive woman.