#64: The Lipstick
On choosing to wear make-up.
This lipstick is like paint. I unscrew the lid, load the brush with liquid, and glide it across my lips. My other favourite is like a crayon. I twist up the tip and colour myself in. I wonder why my favourite make-up is the make-up that looks more like art materials.
Perhaps it is because applying make-up is a creative skill, one that you can practise and hone, watching ‘Beauty Gurus’ online and buying specialist tools. Perhaps it is because it is an expressive medium, transforming my face into a canvas, which I can then use to speak to the world: today my lips are a powerful red, tomorrow they are a delicate pink. Perhaps it is to make me feel less ashamed about the consumerism I am buying into, the fads I am following, the gunky products I am pasting across my skin. Perhaps it is all of these.
My relationship with make-up is as complicated and varied as the myriad of beauty counters in a department store: it is hard to know where to start. For years, I did not wear make-up. For years, I held onto the belief that the only thing making me less pretty than other girls was that I did not wear make-up and they did. It was a protective belief; the belief that one day when I was old enough, or confident enough, I would apply this magical substance and a transformation would take place. I would be beautiful like them. We would be the same.
Needless to say this metamorphosis never happened.
Make-up made no real difference. It still invites comparison. Her contouring is so on point. How does she do her eyebrows? I wonder what colour lipstick that is? I wish I could do eye-shadow like her.
And yet, I still love make-up. I love the powerful feeling of taking control of your face, of making yourself into who you want to be. One night, you can be a smoky-eyed red-lipped diva, the next a sparkling snow queen. I love working on a 3D canvas, pressing powder into the crease above my eyelid, brushing blusher across the roundness of my cheek. I love the methodical, rhythmic application, spending precious minutes purely on myself, knowing I have gifted myself time and attention. I love knowing I am presenting my best face to the world, knowing I will not be lost, a pale comparison to other make-up wearing human beings.
But I don’t often wear make-up nowadays. Caught up in an intense run of essay deadlines, I just did not have the time. I was up and out of the house on the way to the library like a rocket, barely having time to sprinkle myself with flakes of muesli and a splash of milk. The library may have been full, but the only people I was talking to were those who had seen my face in every state: as society wishes it were and as nature created it.
Without make-up I feel a little on the back-foot, a little less mature, not quite as ready to be judged by new faces, more vulnerable, but also freer, less tied-down by how I want to look and more accustomed to how I do.
I still wear make-up. I only bought this lipstick last week. I like choosing the colours and trying new products. I like ‘making an effort’ for special occasions. I like ‘making an effort’ when the mood just happens to take me, when I have time, when I know this shirt says more with this lipstick than without it. But I also like being able to leave the house with a naked face and not feel naked.
I like make-up, but I like liking it not needing it.
