If you are a woman and you were pleased with your make-up in your dream, your unconscious may be signaling your waking confidence about your appearance. The opposite is true if you disliked your dream make-up. We wear make-up for many reasons to enhance our appearance, to disguise spots and to attract other people.
If you are applying make-up in your dream, what are you trying to hide from others or yourself? If you are painting yourself with body paint in your dream, this is more intimate than wearing a disguise and may relate to your most intimate feelings; the color you are using will be significant.
Your dream may also have focused on one aspect of your face—your lips, for instance.
If so, what are you trying to say in waking life? In Freudian terms, lipstick suggests passionate sexuality, particularly if the dream features a long stick of lipstick caressing lips that represent female genitalia. A woman dreaming of using lipstick signals a desire to attract the attention of a potential lover, but for a man to dream of using lipstick indicates that he might adopt a more feminine approach to a problem in his waking life, perhaps by trusting his instincts more.
If the lipstick appears to be smearing, this may suggest a fear of sexuality or sexual violence. Whether you are a man or woman, if the dream scenario portrayed you as anxiously trying to cover spots and blemishes, are you trying to present a different face to others in waking life?
If you have a suntan in your dream, or are applying suntan cream, your dream may be warning you that you are at risk of getting burned in waking life, or that you are paying too much attention to your appearance. Decorating your body with a tattoo has a similar meaning to body paint, but the important difference is whether or not the tattoo is permanent or temporary.
If the tattoo was temporary, do you need to pay more attention to your image? If the tattoo was a name or a symbol, the reference may not be to the image but to your desire to create a permanent memory in waking life.
If you are having a tattoo removed in your dream, you need to accept that some things in life are difficult and painful to move away from. And what motif is your tattoo in the dream and for which part of the body was it destined? The symbolism of both motif and body part will be significant.