“With makeup gone I was undeniably warm and living, and I shook with the realization that perhaps we were not as beautiful as we were permanent.”
Figure 1: Make-Up Case
1.a. Lip Stain: Little Red Corvette
The girl buys this in the hopes of becoming the type of woman who can wear red lipstick casually. When she was younger, she had seen her friend’s mother wearing it and her friend’s mother is everything her mother is not: collected, disinterested, smooth in hair and dress and voice. That woman’s face comes back to her every time she puts on the lipstick. Later on, another friend of hers will tell her that she likes to wear red lipstick around boys because she thinks it scares them, that sometimes she will “accidentally” swipe her lipstick on their collar to mark them. The girl never does anything like that with her painted mouth. At a party one night, wearing the lip stain, she hears Prince singing the lipsticks’ namesake song. Baby you’re much too fast won’t stop playing on a loop in her head and she begins to wonder if the color makes her look like a whore and she goes into the bathroom and painstakingly wipes it off.
*Note that, first and foremost, the lip stain is bought in the hopes of being anything but herself. Apply this idea to every remaining item on this list. I will not say it again, but if it helps you to remember it, pause your reading and spend the next twenty years waking up and ingesting a poison that will not kill you but will make you deeply disconnected from yourself. The poison should come wrapped in the form of glossy photos and reminders to take care of yourself. When you have poisoned yourself so thoroughly you know you could not possibly read through the rest of the list forgetting that fact, return and continue reading.
1.b. Conceal It Stick: Macadamia
The first time she used it she was thirteen and didn’t have any zits but it felt like the right thing to do. Countless times after that, she has needed it, to cover up a red zit on her cheek or her jawline. This, she thinks to herself during junior year of high school when her friend Tim gets cystic acne, is the only thing that makes her like being a girl. She has something that can erase the imperfections. Freshman year of college she wears it and it feels like part of a ritual, putting it on together with her friends. They wear bras while they get ready and she can’t remember ever feeling this close to other women. Doing something as naked and embarrassing as helping each other cover over the red wounds of adolescence feels as intimate as anything ever has. It is armor, trickery, a secret she shares with every other woman in the haze and glow lights of the party they’ll go to that night. Rubbing a circle of it onto her friend’s cheek, the macadamia the right tone for her as well, she thinks of apes picking bugs out of each other’s fur and she feels like maybe this is as natural as that.
1.c. Blush Compact: Orgasm
Added to the case long before she ever has her first orgasm. Flecked with glitter, a little pink and a little coral, she still doesn’t know where exactly the name originates. It makes it sound as if coming made your face literally sparkle with gold. She’s seen her face after orgasm and sometimes her neck reddens depending on the angle at which she’s been having sex, sometimes she looks a little flush, but never has she looked like someone dusted gold pearl on her cheekbones the way this blush does. Makeup at its best, dear, should complement your natural beauty. Just make you look like a better version of yourself, a woman twice her age working at a department store beauty counter says to her when she asks her opinion on which color to buy. That was when she learned that there was always some better version of herself out there, if only she could reach her. The better version of her, the blush seemed to say, was the version of her who had just had sex.
1.d. Eyeshadow Palette: L.A. Colors
There is nothing definitively L.A. about the colors, the girl has always thought, except that they look bright. Fourteen rainbow squares of shimmery powder. Originally bought for a costume—the ice queen, Halloween in her mid-20s, blue and silver and navy all needed—it has since morphed into something she reaches for on nights when she wants to feel least herself, most like someone in a mask. Using colors not meant to mimic anything on a human body are good for that kind of thing. No orgasm or concealer or bitten lips. These are lime greens and deadly blacks and neon pinks. A roommate of hers in college used to be able to draw a colorful wingtip in a single, confident swipe and that year they lived together, the roommate would draw them on the girl, too. She slept with more men that year than any year before or after. The girl is not sure now, and wasn’t sure then, whether she became more confident because she looked nothing like herself or because she looked like a specific other person, her roommate.
1.e. Mascara: Volum-Eyes
More, more, more. When she was younger she wanted more and more and more of life. Her mother constantly told her to take less and less. Don’t eat that, don’t take up so much room on the couch, don’t touch this. After age twelve her body was meant to stop growing, but her eyelashes and her breasts and her ass could continue to get bigger, would even be artificially helped along. Once, when she was only sixteen she heard a group of boys say, look at the tits on that one, as she walked by them at the gas station and she knew she should feel indignant but she felt only pride. She carried that around in her chest, a little ball of light, for years. That was how she learned what she was good for, in between the aisles of the Exxon mini-mart, between rows of Chex Mix and energy drinks, the pungent smell of gasoline wafting in every time the door opened.
1.f. Lip Balm Tin: Valentine Roses
This year, the girl does not have a valentine. This balm is the only thing she consistently wears anymore, which is why, her mother tells her, she does not have a valentine. Try a little bit, honey, it wouldn’t kill you. See Cleopatra’s lead eye makeup poisoning her slowly, the bromine mannite in her seaweed lipstick that can lead to psychosis, seizures, death. Sometimes, when the girl thinks about the small bit of balm on the tip of her middle finger, she thinks about whale blubber that used to be in lipsticks, the slick fat that could impart a more “kissable” color to a woman’s lips, make her the better version of herself, make her look like she’d just been bitten, just been fucked, make her look like someone else desired her so you, too, man, would desire her. Think of the whale’s stomachs cut open, the knives removing layers of blubber from ridged white belly skin, think of all of it in service to a woman opening her mouth in a perfect O, leaving a smudge of red on a cigarette.
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