So, I Think I Like Makeup Now?
Some thoughts on feeling glowy, after 30+ years of weaponized beauty.
I have never been a makeup person. I would love to credit this to my sturdy feminist upbringing. Neither my mother nor stepmother were ever into makeup, so it’s true that it wasn’t modeled or suggested to me at home. But I did spend most of my tween and teen years combing the cosmetics aisle at CVS, buying Bonne Bell Lip Smackers and stocking my Caboodle with an array of nail polish that always spilled and stunk up my room. I also studied the beauty section of every teen magazine that came to my house, which was all of them, and was on a first name referencing basis with all the major 90s Cover Girls.
So it’s not that I never cared about makeup. It’s that once makeup stopped being a fun experiment —something I played with to hone my Punky Brewster/Claudia Kishi aesthetic— I realized I had no idea how to use it correctly. How do you match a foundation to your skin tone? Where, exactly, on your eyelid do you put the eyeshadow? What is the point of wearing lipstick if it comes off within the hour? In college, while reading Judith Butler and (not yet crazy) Naomi Wolf, I began to stringently cultivate my “too evolved for makeup” position.
Of course, “person who does not wear makeup” is just as an active choice of self-representation as wearing makeup is—they are both responses to the way women’s bodies and faces are judged in every context of our lives. But it felt more aligned with my feminism to eschew makeup as “fake” or “shallow.”