Glennon Doyle goes makeup-free on 'Ellen': 'Everybody looked at my NAKED FACE and nobody died'

Author and activist Glennon Doyle is empowering others to be their best selves — without makeup.

This week, the Untamed author appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show without makeup, a decision she later detailed in a post on Instagram where she spoke about the thought process leading up to the moment.

“I’ve always wanted to go on tv without makeup,” she wrote before clarifying, “I don't think makeup is bad, but something about wearing a lot of it on TV makes me feel bad.”

“So many people watch TV,” she continued. “So we're just constantly taking in all these images of... enhanced faces. And then we look in the mirror and believe that OUR faces need enhancing. That WE are somehow all wrong or not good enough. It happens to me, and I don't want to do it to anybody else. But I always DO IT anyway. 'Cause I get to the TV thing, and I get scared, and they say: 'Are you ready for makeup?' And I say: 'YES PLEASE ALL OF IT.'”

The We Can Do Hard Things podcaster continued, “I use makeup like armor that maybe no one will see behind. But this week: I DID IT. Ellen was kind enough to invite me to her show to talk about [her new book] Get Untamed: The Journal... When the lovely TV people whisked me into hair and makeup I took a deep breath and said: 'No makeup please. I just want to go out there with my face as it is. You know, so my face just looks how faces look.'

“And then I went out there and everybody looked at my NAKED FACE and nobody died,” she added. “That is the end of my Love Story for today. I love all your patchy reddish wrinkly zitty greasy old young dry tired perfect faces. Every single one.”

The post welcomed an army of advocates, many of whom related to Doyle’s experience.

“You look gorgeous just as you,” wrote Jenna Hager Bush.

“GlennBoogie you did it!!” added #MeToo activist Tarana Burke, while actress Selma Blair chimed in, “You look amazing."

“I sooooo feel you,” wrote former CNN journalist Brooke Baldwin. “Makeup can be armor... There is something so profound about letting go… and living in the free face."

Doyle, one of the most influential self-help authors today, hasn’t been shy about sharing her thoughts on the pressures women face in society.

“This is what I try to tell women,” she said to W magazine last year. “Every group of marketers are a bunch of psychologists. That's why we feel like s*** all the time — because there’s a bunch of people who sit around tables whose entire job is to try to make us feel like s***. Women who feel less than, buy more.”

On the topic of becoming “untamed,” Doyle spoke about the importance for women to re-examine their desires by asking a significant question: “What do I want?”

“All of those things we’re supposed to be ashamed of, so that we stay small in every region of our life and don’t rock the boat,” she told W. “The reason we think that women can’t follow their desires is because they’re bad and we are trained in the patriarchy to believe that women are inherently bad. We just have to examine those desires until we get to the place where, as women, we think, what if my deepest desires are good?”