Making Up

My 17 year old daughter went on the customary, almost mandatory pre-collegiate uber-feminist rant about how cosmetics, and by extension, the cosmetic industry, is a vast, right wing conspiracy. The goal, apparently, is to make us feel really bad about ourselves unless we sex ourselves up with gobs of whatever the company is selling. She feels very strongly about this. “Face it, Mom, just look at the magazines, with the skinny people and the perfect lips and eyes and stuff. It’s all a big conspiracy to make you feel ugly if you don’t buy their products. And use it just the way they want you to.” Massive eye-rolling. “Plus they photo-shop everything anyway. Nobody actually LOOKS like that.”

I sort of nod and go about my mascara’d life. I know what she means. I know that in my 20’s I wrote a mean-spirited piece mocking my mother for wearing make up.  I jeered at her for having a drawer full of bits of eye pencils and rouge, and lip sticks, exactly like the drawer I have now.

I called her shallow. I called her a fashion victim, I think, and said a wide variety of nasty things, convincing myself I was clever and witty and above all that. In my half-assed defense, I was living in central Maine, the part of Maine that mostly heated with wood stoves. This was not coastal, lobster eating Maine. This was the part of Maine where to have a teaching job meant I got up at 5:20 AM to be in the classroom, ready to teach at 7:10 AM. And the school was 45 minutes away.

So wearing eye liner was just not a priority.

I didn’t even have the excuse of being 17 and still figuring myself out. I was just being a really, really smug, all-natural fiber, Birkenstock-wanna-wear asshole. (Sorry, Mom.)

Now, at 50, I wear make up most days. It’s not that I need to, or feel bereft if I don’t. But I feel that when I line my eyes with a very thin marker, I don’t look tired. I don’t FEEL tired, so

why should I LOOK tired? The thin line of dark brown makes me look the way I

feel. The puff of white powder above my eyes makes me look more awake, too, and the smudge of dark brown at the edges of my eyes – ok, well, that just makes me look a bit thinner.

I tell myself that, anyway.

It’s the same effect as coloring my hair. People perceive me as young and energetic when I get rid of that skunk like white stripe on my head. How do I know? I hear comments about how great my hair looks soon after I get the color retouched, and usually people can’t quite put their finger on WHY it looks …different. Good. Young. It doesn’t look wild, or unnatural… just...younger than my age.

It wasn’t too long ago that 50 year old people were right there on the crumbling edge of retirement. I’m looking for a full time teaching job, and I plan to look like I could swing from the chandeliers. If I have to chase after some kid who’s at the top of the monkey bars, no problem.

I have my Taser right here.

So…make up. There are days of second guessing. What exactly is age appropriate for me? 

Do I HAVE to wear some dull pinkish thing? Or, God forbid, some puke-brown color that looks like the cockapoo pooped it back out?  It’s a quandary.

That evening Xena the 17 year old warrior plasters on the rouge, the eyeliner, and the truly scary orange lipstick, and charges forth.

That's a lot of conspiracy spread all over that 17 year old face.

Who am I to judge, though? I did the same thing, exactly, but more cruelly, to my mother, and here I stand, staring, and at my naked lips, and think....

Victim of the patriarchy, are we? Pitiful soul, buying the tawdry snake oil in Nude Beige in pale hopes of holding on to fleeting youth?

Wellll, that'd be a nope.

Um, and nope again.

Make up, I think, is possibly the only truly victimless crime.

I'm more of a Medium Beige, really, folks.So just shut up, and hand over the Killer Crimson lipstick and nobody gets hurt. I need a job, one that helps to pay for two, yes, two college educations. I shall sally forth, equipped with my blood-red lips.  

Amy 1, Patriarchy 0.