Yesterday morning, Monday, I massaged in face oil and slathered on SPF. I brushed three different concealers under my eyes, then worked foundation into my complexion to lend a “bouncy” plumpness. I hid “imperfections” (a freckle, a red bump). Next, I blended a greige crayon about my jawline and a sheer blue shade along each cheekbone, before accentuating said cheeks first with lavender, then berry blush; applying highlighter in a crescent alongside each eye and on the tip of my middle-aged nose.
I filled in the gaps in my eyebrows, then slicked them into shape with gel. I primed my eyelids with one product, colouring them lilac with another, added a dark purple line along the upper lid and a milky cream one inside the lower, before wanding on jet mascara (separating out my lashes with a comb before it dried). I ringed round my lips with a fat crayon, filling in the middle with sheer and matte hues. Then I set this face – my supplementary face that is also somehow me - with powder so that the mask might remain in place.
I’m not a model, or an actor. I wasn’t being photographed, nor even anticipating leaving the house. This is just what I do when I get up, and have done every morning since the age of 11, give or take the odd, era-dependent trend. Slap is how my day starts. It’s automatic, rather more automatic than brushing my teeth, which I sometimes forget until later. This isn’t my work or party face. It’s merely what I do to “look like a normal woman,” as Tina Fey once said of spending six weeks hungry and eight hours in the make-up chair ahead of hosting the Golden Globes.
My official line is that make-up is a fascination, a joy and carnivalesque form of creativity that I partake in as a form of delight. And this is true. Our desire for self-ornamentation - self-modification even - is as ancient as humanity itself; indeed, it is pre-human, Neanderthals also indulging. And, yet, not only is there a consumer bill attached to such ritual (every element of the above bearing an average £25-ish price), there is a cost in terms of time, and – potentially - psychological debt accruing.
After all, I’m not merely making myself socially acceptable here, but somehow acceptable to myself. Something has been internalised to the extent that this created self feels more me than me. How much of this is playful enjoyment and how much being bitch-slapped by beauty behemoths? How much is self-expression and how much bowing to social norms regarding what it is to “look like a normal woman;” not least when the popular construct of what a normal woman looks like has become so homogenised?
I ask all this because I did, in fact, leave the house yesterday. A friend called to say that her friend Lauren was at Waterloo Station doing something exciting and I should go and check it out. The Lauren in question was photographer and Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker Lauren Greenfield, referred to by the New York Times as “America’s foremost visual chronicler of the plutocracy”. Greenfield is acclaimed for her chronicling of youth culture, in particular (I’m quoting her Robert Koch gallery blurb here): “the exhibitionistic, hyper-sexualized, and peer-pressured culture within which contemporary women must negotiate their feelings of self-worth”.
