Yes, I'm giving this blogging thing another shot. We'll see how long this lasts.
This is me rolling out of bed in the morning. Not so glamourous, eh?
I was mindlessly scrolling through one of those "with/without makeup" articles the other day, and the thought occurred to me: makeupless is the new nude.
We rarely see women (and, increasingly, men) without makeup these days. Oh, maybe walking around, picking up a few things at the store, sitting in traffic, we do. But more and more, whenever we see people, and especially women, online, in videos, in any professional capacity and many non-professional situations, they're wearing makeup.
How often do we see women in porn baring all they have... except the skin on their faces?
Maybe it's sour grapes on my part (since I never did figure out how to get makeup on properly), but I always thought the purpose of makeup was to... well... make up for something. Like the scars you got that time you tangled with a raccoon who was getting into the garbage. Or to help those at the very back of the theatre see your features clearly. Or to make up for the fact that you're no longer a dewy teenager.
I've tried. Tools like YouTube, from which I have gratefully learned the secrets to everything from making béchamel and crochet techniques, to how to fix my neighbour's car so the alarm doesn't keep spontaneously go off, have left me flummoxed in the face of liquid eyeliner. Sure, a few times, I've actually managed to get all the way through an instruction, but somehow, what looks chic and sophisticated on the YouTube artist demonstrating the technique, ends up looking ghastly on me.
It's disheartening! I've seen burly men transformed into alluring sirens, mostly through the power of makeup. I've seen old ladies magically stripped of decades. I just can't seem to get it to work on me.
Most of the time, I'm fine not even worrying about it. I spend a lot of my time reading, biking, skiing, puttering around the house, and no one cares that I haven't got a milligram of makeup on. But I always feel I need it for entertaining. I figure, less is more. One thing I don't like about makeup is that, up close, you can really see it.
And, I don't know about you, but it always makes me want to see what's underneath. Is makeupless the new intimacy?