On Make Up
The relationships women have with makeup can take multiple turns in a lifetime, ranging from obsession to blissful ignorance. The ladder used to be my side of the trenches. It was extremely complicated to understand the time, energy, and money investment it goes into crafting the perception of self that comes along with doing your makeup. I believe my experience was also drastically shaped by the binary forces from narratives around beauty, either for or against it. It was clear to me that the path of beauty led to a very dangerous flirtation with power that, historically, had rendered women around me to tragic endings. Therefore, it became important to relegate the prioritization of beauty in any form (wardrobe, make-up, hairstyles, etc) to any other merit-based pursuit.
The cruelty from it comes from way too many angles at a time.
I remember running into narratives depleting any makeup-wearing individual to less than an intellectual inferior, from whom could come out nothing but vain pointless remarks about superfluous matters. It was the treatment of others that imprinted the interpretations of subjects, and not subjects themselves. And it was brutal.
I deeply feared falling prey to such condemnations and having that first impression invalidate any sort of contribution I had to make. Therefore, the most pragmatic strategy seemed to be avoiding it altogether.
My tomboy aesthetic didn’t really feel affected by it. It fit perfectly, actually. For most of my life, chapstick was the most makeup I ever did.
As U.S. marketing started crawling into my life, I started realizing just how pervasive their messaging could be. Yet my interest in color, self-expression, nurturing, and the exquisite feeling of flaunting brushes up your face never left. They even started to make sense into my tomboy aesthetic: darker shadows, flashier hard cut eye tones, baggier hyperbolic dressing, chicha colors, and glitter contrasted with rough edges. The experimenting desire grew and grew.
My relationship with makeup transformed.
I did not feel like spending time on my self-expression was worth of being equated with nonintellectual aspirations, vainness, or simply caricaturesque understandings of feminity. As I explore my newfound relationship, my heart is bound in grief — and yes, I would call it uniquely immigrant grief — from experimenting with this episode of my life, as a foreigner. I am granted lenses from my previous life and will say the United States of America’s beauty industry is brutal.
There is a relentless silent monster telling individuals and femme-identifying folks, in particular, that the utmost attention to detail is necessary when dissecting one's features. And yes, it is a form of dissection. Every other celebrity has made their fortune by creating beauty products for a reason. The obsessiveness with self-image, which is largely a cry of the most profound insecurities, is a widespread practice that permeates every aspect of American life; and as such people’s ability to profit from it.
The most ‘natural of looks’ is a makeup-based creation. A custom of purity. One that women in the New England region love to wear as a credential for their resonance with professionalism. Yet it carries such bland puritanical submissiveness that is hard to digest.
Even the language around it. Imperfections or troublesome spots as code for that which you desperately want to hide is particularly dangerous. There is a default baseline from which people depart assuming there are all these things imperfect about the skin on their face, and that can be modified to reassemble perfection. The goal seems to be zealotry more than anything else. Cultivating a for-profit fan base.
As an immigrant, it is hard to watch how people from the U.S. are made to feel about themselves. I have not been immune to those standards myself, yet having communities with cultural nuances around their relationships to beauty helps me navigate this with compassion and cautioness. So I often ask myself, am I falling prey to the built necessity to consume ‘more polished’ looks, or am I actually enjoying this?
As an immigrant, this is a time for grieving. After the many social catastrophes happening domestically and internationally, it is of utmost relevance to find the brief moments and actions that sustain the colors of our personalities. To find time within that grief and not forget to reserve a time slot to be who we are. The flamboyance afforded by my relationship with makeup these days has been nurtured with a radiance coming from my inner devotion to color. It is the beauty of self-expression and a personal aesthetic, a statement.
