Femininity is synonymous with sensitivity, sweetness, and nurturing. Although what it means to be feminine is open for interpretation, creating a more feminine expression of yourself can help to make you seem more approachable, look and feel more attractive, and create the sense that you represent the characteristics we described above.
Everyone has the potential to take on traits that western culture tends to see as more feminine. It’s vital to understand that the traits and ideals we will discuss here are not what all countries and cultures would consider feminine, since the definition varies around the world, but instead, what most western countries like the US and UK would consider feminine traits.
What Does it Mean to be Feminine?
Going with the dictionary definition of femininity will only tell you feminine traits are most often associated with women. To get a more accurate description of what it means to be feminine, we will have to dive into scholarly research.
The social sciences view femininity in a variety of ways and often explain that what is “feminine” is open for interpretation. It’s important to note that what we discuss here may not always seem overtly feminine to you, but that doesn’t mean that these traits or ideas aren’t culturally feminine to other races, religious groups, or areas of the country or world.
There are so many characteristics associated with femininity that it would be nearly impossible to cover them all here. However, some characteristics are more prominent in our culture than others, and those are the characteristics on which we will focus here. We will discuss things like obtaining a more feminine body image, being nurturing, and being passive.
To sum up, being feminine means aligning yourself with the characteristics of our society most associated with women. It also means enhancing your features in a feminine way through your dress and makeup. You can achieve femininity in a variety of ways, and we will give you a guide and overview of several of those paths here.
Achieving Femininity Through Dress
How we look says a lot about our femininity. Think about the most powerful female characters we’ve seen through the ages. People like Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Carrie Underwood, Beyonce, and J-Lo define femininity in ways that many of us wish we could achieve. One thing that all of these women have in common is their manner of dress.
Dressing as a woman means showing off your curves, wearing dresses and skirts with confidence, trying out traditionally feminine patterns, and wearing undergarments that make you feel sexy. You’d be surprised how much your womanhood roars alive when you put on a dress for the first time in a while, especially if you can pair it with a comfy pair of heels.
Even beyond basic dressing, you can focus on accessories to enlarge your feminine footprint. The following are good options for accessories to try out to bring out your femininity:
- Ribbons
- Chokers
- Large, dangling earrings
- Neckerchiefs
- Pearls
- A clutch
- Bracelets
- Pumps
How to Wear Ribbons
Although women traditionally wore ribbons in their hair, there are plenty of ways to incorporate them into your outfit. There are earrings that look like ribbons tied in a bow, necklaces that feature ribbons, and even patterns that mimic the tied ribbon look. Wearing any of these items or going the traditional route and tying up your hair adds a fun, feminine touch to any outfit.
What’s the Deal with Chokers?
90s babies will remember the age of the thin, plastic choker, but there are other ways to wear chokers that are far less “punk.” Find a close to the neck necklace that creates a bold statement. Lace chokers and pearl chokers, for instance, can create a more traditional and classy look while achieving the long, feminine neck that a choker provides.
Earrings are Always in Style
We all know that both men and women can wear earrings and look good, so how can you achieve a more feminine style with them? The simple answer is to go long. You’ll want to make a bold statement with your earrings by wearing longer styles or styles that have traditionally feminine elements like flowers or bright colors.
Wear Neckerchiefs for Class and Sass
When you wear a neckerchief, you tend to exude a high-class, feminine expression. You can wear them in fun patterns and almost any color, so finding one to match your outfit shouldn’t be tough. They look great for work functions, at yacht parties, and just hanging around town, plus they’re nearly effortless to wear.
Pearls are Always a Good Idea
Probably one of the most iconic feminine looks is a long string of pearls draped effortlessly over a simple black dress. Pearls have never really gone out of styles like gold and silver have a time or two. Owning a simple pearl necklace and wearing it to both casual and formal occasions is a great way to make a feminine statement.
Don’t worry; you don’t have to splurge for the real thing for it to count. Just buy a faux strand. Few people will care to check if they’re real.
Grab a Clutch
We tend to associate purses in general with femininity, but the larger the bag, the less delicate it appears, and therefore the less feminine. A small clutch, especially one that sparkles in the light, is a beautiful, feminine accessory. A clutch can hold only the essentials, making you look low-maintenance, which is yet another feminine trait.
Make Your Wrists Bling
Bracelets always add a fun, feminine touch. Women with plenty of simple bangles displayed on their wrists are popular across many cultures. You could try wearing bracelets like these, wear a tennis bracelet on a more formal outing, or go with a statement piece that features bold style and bright colors. All of these looks will add femininity to your outfit.
Pump it Up
Your shoes are one of the places you’re really able to express your femininity. While men’s shoes tend to be fairly boring and repetitive, women have all kinds of options for bright, bold, and fun shoes to match their feminine style. Although this is true of all kinds of shoes, pumps tend to scream feminine style.
Pumps come in so many colors, styles, and heights that you’re sure to find at least one pair that works for you. They even come in varieties with actual arch support and padding now, unlike the olden days when beauty was always and inevitably pain. Grab your favorite pumps, a new strand of pearls, and throw on a little black dress to start your journey to an ultra-feminine look.
Appearing Feminine Beyond Your Clothes
Whether or not you want to change the way you dress regularly, you can still add femininity to your style. How you wear your makeup, the way you smell, and your body language can all make you appear more feminine.
You’re Never Fully Dressed Without It
If you want to know how to be more feminine in the simplest possible way, you don’t have to look for complicated or expensive life changes. All you need to do to add femininity to your appearance is smile more. Smiling makes you appear more approachable. It helps others to react more positively to you as they reciprocate your smile with one of their own.
Smiling can also help you to feel happier, which can help to promote other feminine traits like nurturing and a sweet disposition. All you need to do is fake a smile, or place a pencil between your teeth to mimic the mouth shape of a smile, for 30 seconds to one minute at a time to feel the positive effects. It’s all psychology, and it can help your femininity to shine.
Use Olfactory Senses to Your Benefit
As a society, we tend to associate floral and fruity smells with women and musky or spicy scents with men. Because we associate certain scents with women, those scents also tend to make us appear more feminine to others.
Even if you don’t want to wear perfume, you can take advantage of the olfactory senses of those around you in other ways. Try keeping a diffuser going in your home with essential oils like lavender, eucalyptus, or lemon wafting through the air. Eventually, those scents will make their way onto your clothes and add a subtle hint of femininity to your appearance.
Wake-Up and Makeup
Makeup is so strongly associated with femininity that even rock icons who wear it regularly can’t escape the wondering glances of fans. If you’re trying to add femininity to your look, you could add subtle makeup. If you already wear makeup regularly, then try going for a more intense look. Bolder eyeliner, brighter colors, and lipsticks are great places to start.
Makeup also aids in creating a more feminine appearance because you can use it to accent your more feminine features and un-accentuate those that you think may make you appear more masculine. Making your eyes look larger, lips look fuller, and jaw appear more round can all help to convey a more stereotypically feminine appearance to those around you.
You’re Nailing It
Another way to make you appear more feminine is to paint your nails. Even just going in for a manicure regularly without any paint can help to keep your hands looking more delicate and feminine. We often associate rough, calloused hands with masculinity. It makes sense, then, that the opposite would be a feminine expression.
You can keep up with the look of the times by growing your nails out longer, shaping them almost to a sharp point, and painting them with bright, loud colors. Many fashion icons are doing their nails in this way to promote a feminist appearance and encourage a so-called middle ground between ultra-girly styles of the past and shorter, more masculine styles of recent years.
If you don’t have the time or money to pay for a salon manicure, there are still some ways to make your hands appear more feminine and soft. You can exfoliate them with a homemade sugar scrub, for instance. Keeping your hands moisturized after you wash is another great way to ensure your hands are soft and delicate.
Walk the Walk
One thing that we don’t often think about is the way we walk. There are certain elements of how we carry ourselves that reflect more masculine or feminine styles, and ensuring you accentuate the feminine aspects of your walk is an easy way to encourage others to see you as more feminine.
How do you walk like a woman, you ask? Think back to Princess Diaries for a moment. Slumping your shoulders down toward your chest, walking quickly, and having a heavy foot are all far from feminine. If you want a more ladylike gait, you’ll want to bring your shoulders back, push your chest up and out slightly, hold your head high, and walk delicately.
Some women practice this walk by placing a book on their heads that they can’t let slip off. Others walk in front of a mirror. No matter how you choose to practice your dainty stroll keeping it light and upward will certainly help to make you appear more feminine.
Keep Your Hair Long
Sure, long hair is a female cliche that we’ve all but moved past in recent decades, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t still a simple and bold assertion of femininity. Long hair is an almost universal symbol of womanhood, and it’s a simple, but time-consuming, way to make you appear more feminine.
If your hair tends to fizzle out as it grows, then you’ll want to take care to follow the advice of a good stylist to keep your locks strong as they grow out. The following are some good tips on how to get your hair to grow if that isn’t its natural tendency:
- Get trims regularly
- Don’t bleach
- Brush your hair every day, but not wet
- Eat right
- Avoid styling with heat
- Don’t shampoo every day
- Take a hair, skin and nails complex
Take a Second Look at Body Hair
The cultural norm in the western world is for women to remain utterly hairless while men get to parade around with ultra-hairy bodies wherever they go. However you may feel about the fairness of that norm, it still exists, so you can use it to your advantage. If you want a more feminine appearance, then you’ll probably need to shave.
It’s okay not to shave every orifice of your body. To appear more feminine you can simply shave the areas that other people will see. For instance, you can shave your legs to the knee so that dresses and skirts won’t show off the hair. If you choose to wear shirts with sleeves regularly, then you can even avoid shaving your armpits if you like.
Remember, with all of these tips; it’s the appearance that matters, not the reality.
What if Changing My Appearance Isn’t What I Want or Need?
Your appearance is certainly an easy place to start on the path to appear more feminine, but you don’t have to change up your looks entirely to seem more ladylike. You can also change your actions and your words. If you’re asking how to be more feminine, probably the easiest way to find your answer is to hang out with more women and start to act more like them.
Get in Touch with Your Emotions
Women tend to be more in touch with their emotions than men. Although that’s a stereotype, it’s one that holds up because of our cultural norms. We often give women more space to be emotionally intelligent than we do men, suggesting that even young boys “man up” and hide their emotions. If you’re looking to add femininity to your life, then emotional clarity is a must.
Some psychologists suggest centering yourself in a quiet place and asking your mind to reveal your emotions. Others suggest that you should practice emotional knowledge every day as you feel things by naming each emotion you feel. This technique is often a part of child-rearing as well to help teach kids how to handle their emotions and understand themselves better.
Seeking out support from friends, family, or a professional can also help you to get more in touch with your emotions. The more we talk about our feelings, the more we can understand why we are feeling a certain way and how to address it in the future properly.
Show Others You Care
Women are known as the more caring sex, and so caring is associated with femininity. To reflect femininity, then you’ll need to show others you care as often as possible.
There are several ways you can show others that you love them or care about their feelings. First, you could do something kind of them. If you notice a friend struggling to carry something, finish a project, or even process and emotion, just offer to help. They may say no, but at least they’ll see that you noticed and appreciate the gesture.
Don’t argue when you can avoid it, and apologize even when you’re not in the wrong. That’s not to say that you should become a doormat for all humanity to walk over. We just mean that you can apologize for your part in a fight like continuing it or reacting poorly to the argument. This will show your conversational partner that you are self-aware and willing to make amends.
Share with others. Share your pens at work or your dessert at home. Offer to give someone a ride when they walked to work or offer an umbrella to someone when it rains. Sharing is caring, they say, so showing others that you are willing to share your possessions or your time with them will help to show that you are a caring person overall.
Increase Your Sensitivity
It seems like society has begun to perceive sensitivity as a bad thing, but in reality, it can be beneficial. Sensitivity is synonymous with femininity, which means it’s especially essential if you’re trying to show off your feminine side.
Sensitivity will likely be one of the results of becoming more in touch with your emotions. You may start to notice other people’s emotions more readily as well. When you notice emotions, react to them. Reacting doesn’t mean you have to throw things when you’re angry or cry when you’re sad; it just means you can name the emotion and help others to understand it too.
Sensitive people are so conscientious that they often have above-average manners. If you want to appear more sensitive, and therefore more feminine, you should try to refine your manners as well. Doing so can help to show that you care for other people’s feelings and don’t want to make others uncomfortable.
Add Some Nurture to Your Nature
Nurturing is one of the most commonly used words to describe femininity. It makes sense, then, that to appear more feminine, you will want to increase your ability to nurture others. Letting your friends or family know that you love them no matter what and responding to their emotions with support will help them to see you like a nurturing, caring, and approachable person.
Spend time with people when they ask or when you want to show how much you care. Listen to their feelings and acknowledge that they are allowed to feel whatever emotions they want. You can even help them to monitor those emotions so that they can learn to feel them without acting out inappropriately. All of these things help others to see you like a nurturing individual.
Live Life Confidently
Confidence is the key to so many things in life, and femininity is no exception. If you’re confident in yourself and your feminine nature, then others will see that and believe it. To show that you’re confident, you’ll need to display a few different qualities regularly. We’ll discuss them each in-depth to ensure you understand exactly how to exude confidence in your femininity.
Step one in becoming more confident is admitting to yourself and others that you have flaws and make mistakes. We live in a world where people are constantly trying to blame others and cover up their mistakes to look good. One of the most confident moves you can make in a world like that is owning up to your mistakes and overcoming them or helping to fix them. No one is perfect.
To show your confidence, you’ll also need to learn to say no. So many people of all genders have a hard time saying no because we want to please others. Luckily, you don’t have to be rude or make someone feel bad with your no. Just be confident and don’t offer additional information unless you want to, and you’ll appear confident.
One last step in living confidently is letting go of guilt. Guilt isn’t supposed to stick around for long in our lives, but some of us let it hold onto us for weeks, months, or even years. Guilt is there to teach you something. Acknowledging your guilt and vowing to change your actions in the future to avoid it is all you need to do. After that, you should let the emotion go and move on.
Wrapping Up
When we look at how to be more feminine, there are a lot of aspects on which we can focus. Changing your style of dress, working in other feminine appearances, and acting in more nurturing and caring ways will all help to promote your femininity to others. Which path you choose to take on your journey to a more feminine appearance is up to you.
Remember, it’s not necessarily about the reality of who you are, but how you want others to see you that’s important here. Society sees femininity as a woman in a floral dress that shows off her perfectly shaven curves while she smiles at you with her full lips and large eyes.
You can use all the stereotypes we’ve discussed to accentuate your feminine qualities when you want to, but you don’t have to change who you are as a person unless you want to. We would probably all benefit from becoming more confident, from bringing out our nurturing and caring sides, and from thinking of others as well as ourselves, but it’s not a requirement.
Femininity is many things to many people. What we’ve discussed here will make you appear more feminine according to general western culture, but not to every person in every religion or of every race throughout the country or the world. Noticing and copying your cultural stereotypes of femininity will help you to achieve that most effectively.
So go out there and own your femininity. Rock your makeup if you want to, try on that brightly colored top and tight skirt, show your coworkers you care about them and get in touch with your emotions. You may just find being more feminine makes you a more confident and happier person in the end.