Tan, Cool, Neutral

Dressed in all black, she pops the cap off the little frosted glass vial. This one is NC45, she says. She dips in her brush. I offer up my cheek.

There are different names for what I am, and she calls them out as she gracefully places products onto a streaky glass counter.

Tan, cool, neutral, amande, toffee, caramel, cool chestnut, gold chestnut, warm natural, warm honey, butter pecan, bisque. Then don’t forget about the numbers: 170, 31, 230, 385. The alphanumeric: NC45, 420N, 4W4

My face is slick with a patchwork of colours all too stark, all so flawless almost surreal in their perfection. Wow, these are all great matches, she says. I turn my face this way and that in the mirror. She is anxious to move on to someone who will spend money. Someone less fussy.

I try to explain that there’s no match here.

There are more nuances in the pigment now; more tread marks.

There’s more blue around the eyes—remnants from hurricane nights when a tropical storm brewed in the pit of my chest and swelled and spilled out from wherever it could.

There’s redness where there used to be gold, because I’m getting old. I wear all of my embarrassments, all of my heartbreaks in that redness. I’ve since forgotten what it means to be sun-kissed. All of these long dreary winters in the north.

There are more shadows now, more demarcation. More lines that mark the borders of the countries on my face: the valleys between the cheeks and temples, the cracks around the eyes and the mouth from my refusal to be voiceless. Refusal to be expressionless.

Gravity's relentless tugging.

Tan cool neutral honey caramel mocha-

'Coffee with a lil bit of cream' my grandmama used to call me.

I’ve been called chocolate, one of the laziest euphemisms, an indelicate way to suggest that my colour is meant for consumption. And how many little brown girls, high yellow, redbone, deep, dark sable girls. How many black girls have been consumed? How many sacrificed to beauty?

Each name gets further away from the truth, I tell the saleslady.

She says makeup is just a canvas. One single pigment. One shade off more or less in either direction and what you do next is up to you.

How you put the nuances back – which blues, reds, golds you choose, it’s all up to you.

The canvas is no less human than the human beneath.