Hey, don't laugh. I only started wearing makeup when I started working, and only because my manager gave me samples that her mother sold through her work at a Japanese cosmetics company. Since then I've accumulated random makeup items, but mostly as gifts from other people. No joke, 90% of what I own, I never even paid for.
This wouldn't be a problem, except that that means I end up with a lot of things that just don't look right on my face. For example, of the seven lipsticks/lipglosses I own, exactly two are colors I actually feel comfortable wearing. That's 28.6%, which, the last time I checked, is an F.
But what can I do? I'm grateful that people give me all these things, and I'd feel bad not using them. And I'm not about to go spend $30 on new lipstick when I have various shades of rose and mauve scattered about my bathroom cabinet. Hence years of mixing colors and finding innovative ways to "use" makeup items.
Except that's just the donut side of thinking about makeup. The education reform side is that I can't quite come to terms with my own desires to wear makeup (except those days when I'm like, fuck it, all I need is sunblock), even with the understanding that "wearing makeup" is just another way for us to "fit other people's standards of beauty". Oh, come on—it's true. We can talk about all the ways makeup plays up our best features, makes us beautiful, helps us love ourselves...but please. What we really mean is, it makes us beautiful in the way Western (and thus most other) marketing has defined beauty, and it helps us love ourselves because we get that affirmation from others that makes us feel so good. (Sooo good.)
You want me to use lipgloss because it makes my lips look fuller (but not too full)? You want me to use shadow on the bridge of my nose so that it looks like I have a three-dimensional nose rather than the two-dimensional one with which I was born? You want me to change the shape of my eyebrows to suit this season's trend? Oh come on, now. I have books I have to be reading.
But still...if I want learn how to shade and highlight my face in such a way so as to make it look more like a white person's face...is that so bad? If I want to wear concealer so that my skin looks even, with no blemishes or pores (and thus biologically impossible), am I a sellout? It's so nice to look and feel pretty...and it's true, thinking that I look pretty makes me feel a whole lot better about myself than when I'm sitting there thinking, wow, what a mess. It's like a pair of good heels—height and longer legs, even if it's all an illusion. And if I'm paying my hard-earned money to get that illusion from multinational corporations, to learn how to do that in a way that suits my own face—is that so theoretically criminal?
I was thinking in a similar strain after so many people told me how attractive I looked at my sister's wedding--after I had a professional do my hair and makeup. I thought, seriously? Do I really look that much better? The twinge was that for perhaps the first time everI liked the makeup someone else put on me, and actually felt like myself when I looked in the mirror. This made me think about authenticity of appearance, my own sense of what I should look like, and aging. Though I am still quite young, my cheeks don't always have that rosy glow that they did in my 20s and the lines are starting to show around my eyes. That makeup brought back that 20-something fresh-facedness. This has led to some seriously ambivalent makeup desires.
ReplyDeleteYeah, it's tricky...because whenever I have makeup on and someone says, "You look nice today!", I can't help attributing it to the fact that it's because I don't look like my plain self. And the two occasions in which I had makeup done professionally, I also remember thinking, "Wow, I don't look half bad." So my question becomes: Is that how I look? Is that how I _really_ look? Is that how I _can_ look, my potential level of appearance? And if I wear makeup that way (e.g., the way the professional makeup artists did those couple of times) and go around looking like that all the time...would it one day become the way that I authentically look? ::sigh::
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