Her emerald eyebrows: How bright makeup changed my relationship with appearance
IMMEDIATELY DISCUSS THAT I AM NOT A VISITOR AND NOT EVEN A BEAUTY-BLOGER: My goal was not to create professional makeup. Rather, on the contrary - I’m the very girl who got used to “painting regularly in the morning” and to whom it has ceased to be enjoyable. I did not want to completely abandon make-up, I liked the ritual. I just stopped to like his goal.
About nine months ago, I decided that a coup should happen in my cosmetic bag. With all that is necessary for a decent coup - replacing the existing regime, violating the existing norms and applying color to seize the current control, that is, my face. In order to effectively isolate the existing power, I simply threw away all the cosmetics in the range from black to light brown.
For the first time I met with the capabilities of makeup at the age of thirteen. It was forbidden to fully make up, but I had difficult-to-handle skin, and one day I had powder in my hands. I do not know how many layers I put on, and it looked, probably, so-so, but - God, what a gift it was! It seems even my gait has changed. Over the course of my life, I have been convinced many times that the beauty industry helps to be more self-confident and creative in its appearance. For example, once I radically changed the hair color to the one I had always dreamed of: it was not only aesthetics, but also to make myself more “my own”, to win back.
It all started with what a lot of good things come to me at all - from the main British gay pride parade, - somehow I already told what he was. It was last August, and then I lived in Brighton, where the main forces of the LGBT movements in England are based since the XIX century. I did not begin to prepare in advance for the holiday, hoping that I would gather my outfit on campaigns across a huge number of vintage and antique shops. When I went shopping the day before, I found that I dared absolutely everything - not even glitter was left in any store.
There is nothing surprising - after all about three hundred thousand people visit the parade. In agony, trying to find something bright, I came across a stand with multi-colored cosmetics. Without thinking, I grabbed everything in an armful: in my arsenal there were turquoise mascara, mother-of-pearl-pink pencil, neon-pink lipstick and crayons for hair. And then - boom! - The color produced a strange therapeutic effect on me. The process of preparing the makeup, in which I did not try to “fix” my nose, smooth the oval of the face, lengthen the eyelashes and emphasize the eyebrow line, brought an unexpected pleasure. I decided to explore these sensations and began my experiment in "washing the routine," I called him "#washyourroutine". I decided to explore what I owe to my face, and what to society.
The bright palette turned out to be convenient in that it completely freed me from tiring manipulations - always correcting something, smoothing, minimizing, highlighting, emphasizing some parts and masking others. Now my biggest problem was the choice of color, but I no longer needed to bring my appearance closer to an artificial ideal. My work did not contradict the use of non-standard, partly carnival makeup, except for those days when I taught Russian language and literature in a private school in London. But even there I could easily afford, for example, blue arrows on my eyes instead of black ones. In general, I decided that I would be fine.
I also immediately decided that the whole process should not take me more than five to seven minutes. I used to at least impose a base, foundation, powder, primer, blush, two-three types of shadows, mostly dark shades, to visually enlarge the eyes, smooth asymmetry and make the mobile eyelid deeper, added concealer under the eyebrows to mask the scar, put shadows on the eyebrows themselves and after - fixing gel and mascara. I had a lot of complaints about my face, and with the advent of new cosmetic products, there were only more of them.
My main hit of color came on the eyebrows - probably because the noise around them annoyed the most. At that moment I, perhaps, was already ready to live without eyebrows in general, rather than again and again experiencing new turns of the eyebrow revolution. It seemed that it could end only if all the people on the planet were with the same eyebrows. Almost all the time of the experiment, I painted eyebrows with emerald mascara - it acted on the principle of red lipstick, to which nothing more is needed.
Before the start of the experiment, I was often told that painting as if you were "dropped from the moon" is an extreme. I came up with a “school fountain phenomenon” on this matter, when you hold the water jet for a long time, and then it hits you in the forehead with a pressure. It is refreshing. My multicolored solitary picket also happened when I was tired of suppressing my appearance instead of exploring it freely. It would seem that such a variety of cosmetic products should generate a riot of reincarnation, but no. The best illustration of this is the popular photos "before" and "after" - look, our makeup artists practically transplanted a new face to her!
The first time I was amused by the experiment and pleased. In addition to "washing", other metaphors came to my head: here I am using solid and confident hand movements to dislodge dust from the old carpet. I wore emerald eyebrows that began to be perceived as part of my image — during the New Year celebration, I even painted the eyebrows of all my friends. Often drew arrows - pink, blue, yellow, green, pink again. Something of relief came: I did my makeup exclusively for myself, sometimes even deliberately crooked and stupid. Rainbows jumped out of my makeup bag, and my face testified about walks with unicorns. Due to the fact that I eliminated dark mascara, and eyelashes were peeled off from color, I practically stopped using it. When you drop out of this endless competition, many questions are automatically removed from the agenda.
During my experiment, I traveled a lot around Russia, England, America, Mexico, Spain, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and collected various reactions of others to my appearance. The most unpredictable happened in Moscow. Jokes about war paint and various tribes are familiar to many who are interested in non-standard make-up. Most of all misunderstanding caused the very fact of the presence of color on my face - it seemed to others that in this way I would certainly give them some kind of signal. But I discovered that I like fans of Zhanna Aguzarova and cosplay fans. The latter belonged to the dentist, to whom I came to the reception. He looked at me very insightfully, and then he decided to have a confidential conversation about which character I associate myself with. One girl thought that the turquoise mascara on the eyebrows was some kind of mask for their miraculous growth. But in general, everything went rather positively.
In England and Europe, people either did not give any reaction, or scattered in compliments and asked how to do this makeup and where to buy everything you need for it. When they found out that this was an experiment, they expressed interest: for example, I presented a representative of one airline at the check-in counter with a pink pencil, which she promised to try. A familiar supermarket worker near the house supported the "washing of the routine" with golden glitter in his eyes.
The most controversial case occurred in America - do not believe it, in San Francisco. I rented a room in a big house where mother lived with her son. Son first complained that the city was flooded with gays - "and you are there too." I asked why I became a lesbian - although this is not true, and I did not start a conversation about it. Then he began to say that I was a beautiful girl and “spoil myself”, and such a defiant make-up might be misunderstood, and in general - why annoy others? When he began comparing me to the circus workers, a couple from Seattle arrived, who stopped in the next room and saved me from this conversation. With them we spent the rest of my trip to San Francisco - of course, a beautiful city.
Perhaps the reversal of my acquaintance with my own face anew was that I gradually began to paint no more than once a week, and sometimes less often. I started using makeup exclusively for self-expression — I didn’t have to fight anymore with my own appearance, although I had previously seemed to be undressed without makeup at home. I have ceased to focus on the standards of beauty - all the same, bright colors are not helpers here. Makeup remained a tool for special occasions.
This was for me the biggest revelation. At first, I diligently collected collections of unusual make-ups on Pinterest, worrying about where I would collect ideas for the next six months, and then I realized that I would not need all this at all. When you do something exclusively for yourself, it turns out that you need not so much. The joy of my infrequent bright rituals only increased, makeup became a personal intimate ritual, in which everything was just for me and for me.
Before the experiment, my relationship with makeup and my own face was almost unconscious, I walked along the beaten track and the beauty industry. As a diligent student who does not want to be worse than others, by inertia, every day I copied my face for someone else. Very often, I was embarrassed about how much everything lies in my cosmetic bag, and how much I need in order to be satisfied with my appearance.
When traveling with my friends in the morning, I quickly ran to the bathroom, not wanting to share the secret of my “imperfect” face with anyone. Often I went to bed without washing off the makeup so as not to "lose face". I was embarrassed not because I thought the make-up was a silly and frivolous task (although there was some truth in this), but because without it I did not seem attractive to myself. I thought that if no one sees me painted, then everyone will think that I “really” look that way. In the case of #washyourroutine, bright colors helped me admit that I was wearing makeup — with yellow arrows and emerald eyebrows — that was obvious — and that I was not ashamed. I was ashamed to hide my own face from makeup behind makeup. If now it seems to someone that I am exaggerating and I think up problems for myself (and I heard this), then this is just one more proof of how far you can go.
It is important to note that my experiment was coined largely due to living in Brighton and working in London. If I had not seen so many amazing women around me every day, free from thoughts about how they look, perhaps the desire to change my beauty routine would come to me much later. The story about #washyourroutine is a story about make-up, but not only about it. This is a story about our insecurity. At the beginning of the experiment, I took "smoothed" photos and did not blame myself for that. But then my "imperfect" skin began to seem completely normal to me, and I openly showed pictures where pigment spots, enlarged pores and other natural features of my skin were visible. Not to say that I celebrated it, but the more I did not hide them. I began to like myself more. My face has ceased to be a ghost. And for the first time she began to take compliments to her appearance precisely to her own account. I used to think: “Thank you, of course, it’s not for nothing that I spent so much time in front of a mirror.”
It usually seems that our complexes and fears have a fundamental nature and that everything needs to be changed from conditionally “important” foundations. In the meantime, the ability to take a fresh look at such seemingly unimportant trivia has an amazing effect. As, for example, having reconsidered a make-up, it is possible to unwind the whole ball of complexes. One of my friends, having learned that I was conducting an experiment, smiled haughtily: "Well, then how to paint and why is not such a big problem to savor it for so long. These are the problems of white people." Unfortunately, as a rule, "unimportant far-fetched problems" are the real problems of women. Why does society always have plans for my face, behavior, sexuality and my eggs? If this is such nonsense, then it is very important, hell, nonsense.
What has changed after six months of my experiment? First, I did not immediately understand when they had passed - there was no desire to put on makeup from the past and test myself for strength, to find out if I would resist a more “ideal” version of myself. I very absently realized that the formal #washyouroutine experiment was over. I continued for a few more months in the same vein, I didn’t wear it for weeks, and then I made a bright and unusual make-up by mood. Curiosity took over, and I went to the mall for a new makeup — I only had bright palettes, mascaras and pencils. All the dots above the “i” were placed when in the end I was at the checkout with a completely unusual set of shadows for me in the nude range - I had never thought that this could be enough. I was guided by the fearful feeling that I would break that outlined friendship with my face - the experiment completely changed my attitude to cosmetics. Now the face is either in "nude" mode, or it feels like "quirky". And the degree of carnival varies depending on the mood.
The main thing is that with a conscious relationship with my own face, it seems, a special chapter in my life has begun. I wanted to transfer the essence of the experiment to all other aspects of modern life. We consume by inertia, stretch for an image that goes through instagram format, but means nothing to ourselves, we want beautiful food and we eat it cold in restaurants, which all have become completely like photo zones, we buy clothes with an eye to how It will look on social networks, order photo shoots for family portraits in studios, because our own sofa in the living room is frayed and unfashionable, we are desperately trying to document our happiness, as if we are trying to believe in it, quickly buying and choosing we throw in - because for us it means nothing, we are not in it. And where we are - that's what I want to understand.
