It’s All Made Up

Don’t hate me, but a week or two ago, I was doing some early Christmas shopping.

I went into Sephora, the cosmetics store, to see if I could find a “stocking stuffer” or two for my daughter, age 22.

She doesn’t usually wear make-up but she likes perfumes. (An industrial-design major, she collects perfume bottles.) And she’s not adverse to fun things and silly things, sparkly things and colorful things. Make-up’s fun, I said to myself, though I wear little to none myself.

But it’s not, really.

Yes, it’s exotic and colorful and super-duper expensive. A small pressed disc of colored powder $40, make-up brush extra. What a racket.

But I couldn’t find the fun.

It was all about how you aren’t good enough the way you are. You need to hide all your shameful “flaws.” The make-up I perused was supposed to make your skin look clearer or your eyes look bigger. Those false eyelashes, which you glue to your eyelids, are supposed to replace your own sparse and unsatisfactory ones. You’re supposed to use blush, contour AND highlighter powders to create the illusion you have high cheekbones, the lipstick and other lip “products” to make your lips somehow “better.” A salesperson told me that $30 brush was to use with your foundation. Otherwise, people might see fingerprints on your face. Maybe on her face, on which she had applied about a quarter of an inch of “foundation.”

The sales pitch was: Your face isn’t fit to be seen as it really is.

And that’s sad.