The Day I Let Skin Makeup Sneak Back Into My Life
As an adolescent, I viewed my mother’s beauty routines almost as mystical rites. In mid-afternoon, when dinner preparations and my father’s arrival were still hours away, she’d be gingerly sipping tomato juice through a straw while her face--slathered in a gleaming, translucent mask--looked as though it had fallen victim to a particularly insidious indoor permafrost. Then came the bath-oiled soak in the tub, the battery of nail and brow care equipment and the blotting of lips carefully painted a ladylike red.
By the time cosmetic counters held any lure for me, however, it was the era of hasty swipes of white lipstick and raccoon-style eye makeup applied in the junior high school girl’s room. When I got to college, makeup was a dead issue, a laughable remnant of a scorned middle-class past.
Since then, cosmetics have sneaked back into my life in a slapdash way: wavering strokes of eyeliner to mark Social Occasions, lip gloss rolled on blind and lipstick applied while squinting at the rearview mirror.
But skin makeup always seemed ridiculously fake and yukky--a beige Formica veneer for your face. Cakes of blusher inevitably leaped out of their plastic containers and smashed themselves to death on tiled floors. And mascara left clumps of distracting blueness on my eyeglasses.
Walking past anxious-looking women tilting their faces toward heavily made up saleswomen at department store cosmetic counters, I’ve felt the scorn of the nonbeliever for anyone who invests blind faith in the miracles of pots and tubes. And yet, I’ve sneakily wondered what it would be like to wave those little metal wands and Q-tips and make them perform . . . well, small miracles--the sort that inspire compliments not directly related to the subject of makeup.
So the other day, in the spirit of research, I made an appointment at the Clinique counter at a department store. Afterward, I figured, I’d be racing for the ladies’s room, grabbing wads of paper towels to scrub off my “clown face.” I am not really a makeup user, I blurted out to Debbie, the perky-looking woman behind the counter. Her own war paint was visible only as blue eyeliner and lipstick, however--a hopeful sign.
“Makeup is 80% good skin care,” she told me, placing an upended bar of soap, a tall jar of Clarifying Lotion No. 2 and a shorter jar of Dramatically Different Moisturizing Lotion on the counter in an eye-catching row--just like the company’s magazine ads.
While I perched on my uncomfortable stool, she zipped down a list of questions about my eye and hair coloring, the fairness of my skin, pore size, blemish frequency and oily spots. I may be amazingly unique as a person, but my skin is just “average,” known in Clinique-speak as Skin Type II.
Debbie, who has been with the company for 13 years, rubbed 7-Day Scrub Cream into the skin on the back of my right hand and tissued it off. This stuff is supposed to “eliminate or at least reduce oil buildup,” she explained, inviting me to stroke both the test and control hands. Actually, what I really noticed was that the test hand looked weirdly paler than the other one. So much for the benefits of driving in Southern California.
Then--still working on my right hand--she applied the lotion (“use it two times a day, just like brushing your teeth”--a homily borrowed from those ubiquitous ads) and the moisturizer. A dusting of powder followed on both hands. Sure enough, the powder on the untreated hand looked as though someone had crumbled chalk on it, while the powder on the other hand blended in smoothly.
“If you have a block of wood and prepare the surface before you paint it, it’ll look and wear better,” Debbie said. Then she winced. A block of wood! Whoops, wrong metaphor. She worried aloud what the Clinique people might think. The slip endeared her to me, though; it made her seem real rather than a totally programmed corporate spokesperson.
Demonstration over, Debbie began to work on my face, on which I had used a competitor’s brand of cleanser a mere three hours earlier. Wouldn’t you know, the cotton ball swabbed with the lotion was not exactly spotless. “Dead skin is just gray,” Debbie said. “A dead film.” It was a sobering thought. Then came the moisturizer, but “only where you need it.”
So much for the skin care. Now it was time for the other 20% of the makeup ritual, the icing on the cake. “If you pick the right formula and the right color, you don’t have to wear it all over,” Debbie said, selecting Cream Chamois concealer and smoothing it under my eyes and around my nose.
Applying New Clover blusher on the cheeks involved a more complex geometry: no lower than the tip of my nose, no closer toward my nose than the far edge of my iris, and swept up on the side (“this gives you a lift and accentuates the eyes”). Debbie told me she was putting on more than I really needed because she’d be covering it with No. 2 Loose Powder.
Hey, why not just put on less and skip the powder? This sounded like a plot to get the hapless consumer to use more product. Debbie said the idea was to “soften the edges.” She invited me to compare the cheek treated with the blusher-powder combo with the other cheek, which just had a small amount of blusher on it. Well, maybe.
“By adding one more thing, it looks more natural,” Debbie said, employing a brand of logic unique to the world of cosmetics. “It’s a more finished look. You put on a blouse, a skirt and then you put a hankie in your pocket. It’s an accessory for your wardrobe.” I looked down at my unadorned stretch bodysuit, thought of the earrings still tucked away in my purse. Yeah, right.
“I’d like to create a little bit of depth in the eyelid,” Debbie said, scrutinizing my blue orbs. Be my guest. Could you add a sultry air of mystery while you’re about it? On the back of her hand, she mixed Canvas and Pink Lightning primer coats to produce a pink beige color she stroked on my eyelid.
“If you have two blue marbles and you put one against a neutral background and the other against a colored background, the one on the neutral background will stand out better,” Debbie said. It sounded like interior design class.
Next came Fawn Satin eye shadow, which I was encouraged to apply myself to one eye (“across the ball of the lid and up toward the tip of the brow”) after Debbie did the other one. A firm stroke of Blue-Violet liner received an equivocating smudge of the powdered shadow stored at the other end of the eyeliner stick.
The last step in my transformation was Perfect Neutral lip pencil--used to both line and fill in my lips--and a smashing shade (Crystal Violet) of “semi-lipstick,” applied with a long Q-tip for hygiene’s sake. On my own, I was to use a lipstick brush.
I looked in the mirror again and saw a slightly more vivid, precisely outlined view of myself. It wasn’t scary at all, actually. It was even a bit prim.
“I always go slow and then build,” Debbie explained. “I can do just a little tiny bit on someone who’s not used to it and it will seem like a lot. . . . My customers will tell me if they want more. If it’s too strong, they’ll say, ‘Ooh, I don’t know.’ There’s a hesitancy there.”
She filled in a little booklet--the cover bizarrely combines faux schoolbook-style marbling with the grimly unappetizing title “Daily De-Aging Workbook”--with the names and proper usage of the 13 products to which I had just been introduced. She even colored in the black-and-white eye illustration with shadow and liner. Then she told me to call her if I had questions.
The follow-up is important, she said, because “you can buy things and put them in a drawer and never use them and I’ll never see you again.”
That’s clearly a doomsday scenario for the cosmetic industry. On the other hand, Debbie has her regulars, women who come in before weddings or other big parties. “I did one woman’s eyes for a contest at a bar and she won $50. A lot of young girls come in for proms. . . . I like doing younger girls because they’re future customers.”
These women are all supposed to buy the products, right? When I made my free make-over appointment, another Clinique saleswoman told me I was expected to buy something, though she assured me there was no set dollar amount.
“There’s no commitment,” Debbie said. “You have to learn about the products. . . . Maybe it’s just before payday or the customer wants to try different lines. I think of it as an investment.”
By the way, did I want to buy anything? Yeah, well, I guess I did. For $19.40 I snared a tube of Crystal Violet and the lip liner, which Debbie fastened together with a rubber band so that I wouldn’t forget to use both (shades of mittens pinned on my coat as a kid).
I really couldn’t imagine using the eye shadow (however subtle it looked) and didn’t care much for the blusher. But maybe I’d experiment with some of the other stuff . . . some other time.
Nobody said anything when I got back to work, so I had to take the initiative. How do I look?, I asked three colleagues. “Oh it looks really natural, just emphasized,” a woman said. One man couldn’t see any difference; another man said it looked great.
I know this makes no sense whatsoever, but I had this perverse desire to return to the store--maybe to the counter of a more va-va-voom-y cosmetic brand--and equip myself with drop-dead parchment skin, vampire lips and knockout eyes that no one would think belonged to me from birth. Who knows, maybe next week my newly emboldened Cosmetics Persona will give that possibility a whirl.
