As long as I can remember my mom was wearing mascara. When things were bad it would pool under her eyes. As she got older and the skin around her eyes became looser and drier, she had some difficulty wearing the same eye shadow system that she had developed over several decades, but mascara never caused any problems so it remained part of a daily and weekly beauty regiment. Her eye shadow routine is more complicated than I could understand at its most refined and practiced point, but the application involved layers of dark shadows deepening creases blended with layers of light, bright, iridescent, and undetectable hues to advance important bones and shapes. When she felt she had gained weight and her face shape became rounder and the contours less defined, it became all the more important to feature her eyes with plenty of strategically placed color. As I grew older these types of small adjustments in routine and aesthetic seemed commonplace, and I adopted these systems, though I never refined the processes the way my mother had mastered them.
The weird thing is that my mom developed these operational aesthetic systems by herself. My grandma didn't ever wear makeup, and even bragged to me as a teenager that she never even considered it an option, and her skin was nicer than my young and vibrant mother's ever was because of it. My mom had two brothers and lived amongst farm fields where tornadoes, tupperware, horses, and Catholicism ruled, so her expertise was self taught.
Just because you have nothing doesn't mean you have to look that way.
I guess I thought that the mascara was a requirement for existence. When I was in Finland, isolated from humanity, I was to be found walking across frozen lakes, mascara running down my cheeks when the wind made my eyes tear up. When I was avenged by Montezuma in the Yucatan and hadn't managed to eat for 8 days, I did apply a little mascara before I visited the doctor. It didn't feel like a choice. I also didn't take it for granted.
Every day it feels like a luxury to apply some black muck to my long eye lashes. A little magic trick. I know it changes my whole profile. I worry that I might actually look like a completely different person, maybe not even a female person if I don't have this little accent to my face. Yesterday was day two of no mascara. That makes today day three with no black magic eyes.
Everyone has treated me the same so far. Less gunk is in my eyes when I wake up. No black spots on my pillow revealing the position of my face for 6 hours.
Is this the end of something? I will keep you up to date.
2 comments:
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wanna hear a mascara horror story? a few weeks ago, i used this old mascara because i couldn't find the kind that i usually use and i was in a hurry. so i put it on and later that night, my eyelashes were all clumpy and stuff. you know how when you can pull the clumps out? yeah, well i did that and ALL of the lashes from my top left eyelid came off. ALL of them. like, i have no lashes on my left eye anymore! it's safe to say i'm sworn of mascara forever now!
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