I Still Don’t Know How to Makeup

Seriously, is the beauty industry just fucking with us?

My first foray into makeup was when I was thirteen, at orchestra summer camp. I was rooming with one of my friends and she introduced me to eyeliner for the first time. I was really terrible at it at first, to say the least. It took me several tries to get it in an actual line close to my eye, several cycles of removing it and reapplying it. (With spit and a tissue. Thirteen year olds are dumb.) I began using it routinely in eighth grade, because no one told me how dipshit awful gobs of black eyeliner pencil under your eye look. I finally moved up to a full face of makeup (foundation, concealer, bronzer, blush, eyes, lips) my freshman year of high school, when my mom bought me a starter kit so I could get my makeup done for free at Ulta for homecoming. From then on, I have used makeup rather consistently. When I started at fourteen, I assumed I would have most of it figured out by now, but the truth is, I still don’t understand what half of the products out there are for. I only fairly recently seem to have mastered the learning curve of liquid eyeliner and grasped the concept that eyeliner should go on your upper eyelid, not circled all around your eye like someone did it with a Sharpie.

What is BB cream? CC Cream? Aren’t they pretty much the same as tinted moisturizer? Highlighter? WHAT DOES THAT DO? Something about my cheekbones? I THOUGHT THAT’S WHAT BLUSH WAS FOR. I bought a tube of highlighter and I still am not sure what the hell it does. Contouring has me at a loss completely. It looks like facepainting but with skin colors instead of the colors you see at a carnival. I do not contour. I do not understand that cosmetic juju. Setting powder and finishing powder are apparently two different things, and both appear to be translucent, so I am not sure what exactly they do for my face. Apparently my eyebrows need to be waxed and tweezed into shape, but also covered in brow gel to build them back up, which is completely contradictory. Does primer do anything, or is it another thing the beauty industrial complex tells us we need? Why can’t use I face primer as eyelid primer, and how are they different? Why is there a primer for every part of my face? I cannot figure out if these things are all just made up and do not serve a purpose or if I am just really clueless about makeup. No one can even seem to agree with what order to put makeup on. This has to be a complete scam.