Makeup is the colour put on the face to change how it looks. Foundation, mascara, lipstick.
It is a mass noun, so you wear makeup and put makeup on, never a makeup. Theatre and film use it as a whole department, and stage makeup is heavier because it has to carry across a room. There is a quite separate sense meaning composition, as in the makeup of a committee or the genetic makeup of a plant. British English often writes both as two words or with a hyphen, as make-up.
1nounmakeupCosmetics applied to the face.~77%
“She was doing her makeup in the mirror.”
2nouncomposedThe way something is composed or put together.~23%
“The makeup of the panel has changed.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 14 sentences found in the wild and placed 13 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
The French name for it says the quiet part out loud: maquillage comes from maquiller, which means to fabricate quite as much as it means to make up.
French
maquillage
English, today
makeup
Built from
a deverbal from make up. French maquillage, from maquiller (“to make up, fabricate”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA