All Grown Up
I don’t know about you, dear listener, but one of the major parts of my shift from childhood to adulthood was makeup. As a little kid, I loathed face paint with the fire of a thousand suns. It dried tight and itchy on my skin, which I could not bear. I was the only child at the Christmas concert who happily wore the little paper antlers but rejected the red thumbprint of face paint on my nose to complete my Rudolph costume for our performance of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” I maintain that the show was not drastically altered by my bare, paint-free face, and really, there is only one Rudolph - a whole chorus of tiny four-year-old Rudolphs would have made for quite a different song.
This approach to makeup changed as the products improved and I got older. As a ten-year-old, I had one strawberry and one root beer scented lip balm, with little keychains attached to the lids so I could dangle them from my knapsack every day at school. The strawberry one added no colour at all to a person’s face, but the root beer one was dark, and very slightly tinted your mouth. The result was probably more “I just ate a popsicle” than “sophisticated wash of lip colour”, but my ten-year-old self was satisfied by the product at the time. I’m not sure they actually did anything to address dry lips, but they smelled so good, and all the other little girls in my grade had one, too. It felt nice to be included and compare notes about our favourite scents, and admit to one another that we were often tempted to eat them because of their delicious and startlingly realistic scents.
I was in dance classes as a kid, too, and that was where I had my first introduction to actual makeup - although, of course, stage makeup is quite different (thank goodness) to the sort of stuff you’d wear on a normal day. This look comprised thick, pancake foundation, quite a bit too orange for my skin, paired with ferocious red lipstick, slashes of vibrant rouge, extending into my hairline, and worst of all, black eyeline and mascara - which, because I was young, was usually applied by someone’s mother, who held my forehead in a vice grip and normally stabbed me in the eye with the kohl. Not a pleasant experience. Even more difficult was getting all the gunk off after the fact. Stage makeup is like concrete - thick, flamboyant concrete. I miss dancing, but I do not miss the makeup.
I dabbled in a more manageable look as a teenager, but never really developed a consistent habit of wearing it. For school dances, I started wearing sparkly eyeshadow, frosted lip gloss, and aggressively applied winged eyeliner (the early 2000s were a challenging time). I read magazines with my friends, poring over pictures and how-to guides in those heady, distant days before the internet and video platforms filled with cheerful makeup tutorials, demanding that girls use about sixty products to achieve an acceptable face (each one accompanied by a heart-stopping price tag, too). I did not have dozens of makeup brushes or loads of products. Instead, I got my glittery eyeshadow from the drugstore and applied it with my fingers or one of those horribly useless little triangles of foam glued to a plastic stick, which came along with the makeup. The results were awkward and amateur, but then again, just about everyone I knew was working with the same tools, so we all looked roughly the same level of bizarre. There were some strange products and trends, typical of their time, which I am delighted to have left behind: putting foundation or concealer on your lips, for instance, which resulted in a sort of ‘kissed by correction fluid’ look, or the insistence that any inch of visible skin be covered in shimmer.
I will say that my heart aches a little for girls today. I would have dissolved, I’m sure, in the face of the pressure to live up to social media models and YouTube tutorials, demanding that young teens do their best to look airbrushed and colour-corrected and flawless all the time. My makeup was bad, but maybe that was good? Maybe it was okay that, as a literal child, I hadn’t perfected the accoutrements of adulthood? I’m sure the generation before me probably had similar thoughts about new products and changes to making up when I was a teenager. I’m sort of both grateful that mousse-textured foundation and eyeliner pencils you lit with a lighter to melt the wax are behind us. On the other hand, that time of life was exciting: we were in a big hurry to grow up and thrive, and makeup seemed like one of the ways to do that. But you know what they say, nostalgia’s not what it used to be. And, thankfully, neither is the makeup.
Jennifer