Like many teenage girls, when I entered the seventh grade,junior high, I was allowed to wear makeup. Boy, did I wear it. Lots of it. My friends and I were striving to look like Kathy Ireland, Cindy Crawford, and all of the beauties whose images we saw gracing magazine covers and television screens. More than that, I wanted to be them. I wanted to be beautiful. I wanted boys to like me. I wanted to ensure I had a date to prom, even though that was five years away. It was never too early to start looking for a prom date, I reasoned in my thirteen year old mind.
I curled my hair and sprayed on shellac to keep it in place. I fixed my face everyday. I carefully applied powder, blush, eyeshadow, mascara, and lipstick. I could never quite master liquid foundation and chose to go without. A close friend slathered on the foundation so thick, it looked strange. She became known as "base face" to people at school. This didn't seem like an ideal way to get a prom date, so I avoided it.
By the ninth grade, my last year of junior high, applying makeup and doing my hair seemed more like a chore than something I wanted to do. I regularly burned my scalp with my hot iron. My face would break out from the makeup and I couldn't seem to stop having an itching feeling on my face while it was applied. I was sure the constant tugging on my face was going to give me premature wrinkles. And most importantly, I hadn't gotten a single date. I slowly started to ween myself from these beauty products. First it was the eye shadow. The blush soon followed. By the time I entered high school I was only wearing a little mascara and some lipgloss. I began wearing my hair long and straight.
Had I become an ogre not fit for public eyes? No. The first time I felt good about my decision to kick my makeup habit came while at a friends house. She and I had plans to see a movie. I arrived at her house and she was getting ready. I took my usual position sitting on the edge of the bathtub, while watching her primp. It took two full hours for her to do her hair and makeup. It had taken me about ten minutes. I felt like those two hours were such a waste of my time. But the lightening bolt hit when she, out of nowhere, said, "I'm envious of you." What!? Me I thought. Why on earth would anyone be envious of me? She was pretty, popular, and had a boyfriend. She continued, "You don't feel the need to do all of this and you are totally confident with yourself. You're beautiful." I had never felt so empowered. I realized suddenly that she was choosing to enslave herself to this ritual in order to become someone she really wasn't. I felt sad for her because she felt she wasn't good enough without it.
Eventually, I stopped wearing any makeup except for a little lipgloss or Chapstick. And, I even scored a date for the prom. Actually, I had scored a boyfriend, who was in the grade above me and very good looking. We dated for four years. Later, when I went off to college, not wearing makeup seemed to work in my favor. I often heard from guys that they liked my natural look, and how much they hated makeup. "What were women trying to hide under all of that stuff", they would ask.
One Christmas break, I got a job at JCPenney. During orientation, my boss informed me that they were going to place me in the cosmetics department. I politely asked if I would have to wear makeup for that position. She said, "Of course, you will need to use the products to sell them." I informed her that I didn't wear makeup. I still remember the confused look on her face. She then asked me why I didn't wear any. I thoughtfully answered, "Makeup is used to hide imperfections, wrinkles. It's meant for lips and cheeks that have lost their natural color. I'm nineteen years old and have plenty of color in my lips and cheeks and I don't have one wrinkle. Maybe when I'm older I'll find it appropriate." She couldn't argue and assigned me to the Young Men's department instead. I loved it. I got asked out on more than one date while working there.
As much as I'd like to have stayed nineteen forever, I did get older. Much older. That job at JCPenney was twenty one years ago. Do I wear makeup today? No. Yet somehow, I still managed to snag an eligible handsome man that would become my husband. I've learned that a person doesn't have to hide what they look like to find someone to love them. I look back over the many years that have passed and feel sorry for my friends who have wasted countless hours of their lives and spent countless dollars making themselves pretty with makeup, when they were always pretty without it. Like Julia Ormond said in Sabrina, "More isn't always better, it's just more."
Lisa Eller Jobe is a teacher and blogger in Fort Worth, Texas
No comments:
Post a Comment