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My Life with Makeup

At Least Cleopatra Didn't Set Her Eyelashes on Fire

By M. MichaelPublished 3 years ago 3 min read
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I’m from the Dippity Doo generation. Yes I glopped that clear gooey stuff through the strands of my ‘determined to be straight' hair trying to force it into some kind of poofiness worthy of the 1960’s. And, yes, I admit to ratting. Makeup, too, has been a daily part of my morning ritual since those days. Though a little conflicting at the time, the practice even survived my radical Feminist days in the 1970’s.

I’ve smoothed on gallons of foundation in the Rose Beige spectrum, (with much mumbling about how they regularly change the name of foundations and lipsticks just to get on our nerves trying to replace the one we’ve been using). I’ve dusted my cheek bones with mountains of blush, or ran that brush across wherever those modelesque cheek bones were supposed to be. There was powder blush, cream blush and in a pinch, lipstick that seemed to blend just as well. If I’d been smart, I’d just have gone ahead using lipstick and saved money on blush.

Though I was cool enough never to use turquoise, I’ve used thousands of those little plastic cases of eye shadow. Make up companies were smart, having figured out a greedy way to increase their bottom line while merely adding color to landfills. Admit it, when you buy a container of several colors of eyeshadow there is always one or two colors completely unused. What a racket, they knew they were sticking a completely absurd color in with the ones we gals really used. And, it’s still happening! Someone should call the environmental police on them or find a use for the unused eye shadow powder. (And of course it’s never in a shade that could be used as blush.) I’d like to meet the gal who used up every color in one of those little tri color cases.

Yes, I went through the Cleopatra days with eyeliner, and, it’s happening again, they are still falling for it. I saw a gal waking down the street the other day with an eyeliner design that, I’m sure, would have turned on King Tut. It brought instantly revived memories of hours spent in front of the mirror getting that point just right. I thought of warning her that it’s been tried before and however much we attempt to convince ourselves, it really requires a gold throne to pull it off, but maybe it’s an inevitable part of going through some kind of makeup puberty or some such.

I’ve had such an intimate connection to makeup; I even did a serious stint as a Mary Kay Beauty Consultant. I mean, if you’ve practiced something every morning for every day of most of your life, why not make some money at the skill? That era was a story in itself leading to a private cocktail party one evening attended by Mary Kay herself, but, alas, it didn’t turn out to be my career path. The makeup slathering, though, continues to this day.

I thought I’d seen, and probably tried, everything until this morning the Internet offered up a ‘heated eyelash curler”. I chortled; I sent an “in disbelief” email to my girlfriend. She’d never seen one either. Now, I’ve become quite deft over the years with the eyelash curler but those of us in the know still have to admit to numerous imperfect curling adventures ending in pain. I’m afraid the first image in my mind of this contraption was of smoke billowing out of my eye sockets and singed and stubby eyelashes.

My girlfriend suggested that it might curl our eyelashes into something akin to the coil on a three ring binder. I was still imagining smoke.

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About the Creator

M. Michael

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