Eyeliner Can Smell Your Fear

Photo by Jazmin Quaynor on Unsplash

I’m 65. For the first 60 years of life, I hardly touched makeup. As an unabashed old-school feminist, makeup just wasn’t in my wheel house except for a rare event like singing a concert or dancing on stage.

But about five years ago, I started playing in the toybox in which a lot of women become expert early in life. A much younger new friend was a cosmetologist, and as I got to know her, I could see that she found part of her power in the palettes of color and tiny brushes with which she created her art.

More precisely, I could see the freedom she felt in her constantly changing colors of face, hair, and skin (a fresh tattoo every month). For her, no political content spoiled the fun of turquoise or pink hair, of a pierced eyebrow over a gold eyelid, of a bloody chainsaw on her forearm.

So I dipped my toe — more precisely, my hair, into color. Starting with purple dye (still renewed with every cut), I started to make color as much of my own bodily life as it had long been in my gardens.

Soon, I started a makeup box subscription.

I hate waste. When those little black boxes of makeup started arriving, I’d immediately tear them open and figure out what I could possibly use. It didn’t take long to amass a small mountain of palettes…