Love/Hate I

I am considering doing a weekly love/hate series to expand my nonfiction challenges and extremes in my life. Here is the first post. Damn I am on a writing roll lately:

HATE:

My Reliance on Make Up to Feel Beautiful

I would say 90% of the day I am awake I am wearing makeup. Thirty minutes each and every day is used to cover my face. My routine:

Wash face in shower

Moisturize

Facial Primer

Foundation 1

Foundation 2

Concealer 1

Concealer 2

Matte

Blush

Eye Primer

Eyeshadow

Liquid Eyeliner

Solid Eyeliner

Lash Primer

Mascara

After all this I still see flaws. My new primer does not hide my redness enough so my blush cannot contour. A Shaky hand guides an uneven brown line around my eye. Sometimes I run out of one concealer so I use more matte.

Five years ago I never wore makeup. I was too busy and too focused on school to really care what others thought. My last year was when I was bare faced all the time while my female peers sported glitter eyelashes. Makeup was this thing that seemed so distant to me.

So when I first entered college I came in with my father’s advice of becoming a whole different person.  ‘Become someone else, nobody will know’ sort of logic. Going into makeup with no guidance I relied on stolen powder from my mother to hide my redness. At this point I had never had a zit or acne problem in my life so thankfully I did not have to deal with that extra challenge.

My first experiment with makeup was buying inexpensive Sephora eyeshadows. Proudly I would go to my middle school with sludged on bright blue or green eyeshadow. By the end of the day I wiped my eyes so much that I would only have one eye worth of eyeshadow left. Somehow all the other girls knew how to put on makeup except me. Their mothers probably taught them along with the sex talk.

Never have I been serious about makeup. I would use it to enhance hide my redness, wear red lipstick to big events and liked eyeliner for the way it enhanced my eyes. Rarely did I go out without make up on until over a year ago.

I was walking out of a shoe store with a friend. These three teenage boys and a girl were sitting in a car. They were pointing and laughing at me which I did not care about. At the time I was wearing simple jeans, sweater and converse. No makeup and no fuss about my currently long hair. Unfortunately my car was right next to theirs. So I walked up to my car, which they must have taken as a sign of me charging them and backed out of the space. We were in the biggest shopping center in my town on a busy day when they yelled:

“Fuck you, you fat ugly pig.”

My friend and I were mortified. This was not the first time someone called me those things, but I felt so violated. Right afterwards I went and got my monthly waxing. From that day on I have not left my house without makeup and nice clothes on. Its an annoying habit but I at least if someone insults me in public again they cannot say “ugly.”

After that point I also followed blogs and picked up any fashion tips I could. At that point my makeup was usually eyeliner, concealer, and matte. After that my whole look became denser with makeup. I kept a strict schedule of haircuts and kept my hair short, easier to groom. My makeup and hair routine went from 10 minutes to nearly an hour with the hair.

This is an hour I could read a book. This is an hour I could be talking with friends.

I have faced in the past and made it my own. My hair is currently fabulous and I love it short. My makeup has become my new artistic expression in absence of my usual painters easel and oils.

LOVE:

Not myself, but the person I have molded myself into. Myself is still too hard to grasp.