Old often means better (+PSA)

For instance, when oiling your hardwood floors, it is *much* better (and faster, actually) to just get down on your hands and knees and do it yourself by hand, rather than trying to use fancy “time and energy saving” products and machines. And mineral oil is still best. If you could change a woman’s hair from grey to brilliant shining blonde with natural streaks just by rubbing some mineral oil in there, the cosmetics industry would go bust.

Speaking of which, I have another Public Service Announcement.

Women, most of you who wear cosmetics DO NOT NEED THEM. Don’t waste your money. If there was ever  a bigger absolute swindle for non-essential products, I can’t think of one. Well, maybe the sale of razors to the gentlemen. (NB – It is not only women who wear makeup, and too much makeup at that. Let’s be fair.)

Let’s face it; many of you learned how to wear makeup from television and magazines, where the only way you can tell a woman has a nose is because the nostrils themselves are visible. Barely. I know some of you watched daytime television programmes that focussed on how to match your…um…cheeks crap to your eye crap, and how to blend all of it with some ridiculously expensive brush or lotion or interpretive dance.

Eyes, my friends, should not look like the hat in Matisse’s Woman With a Hat. If you *must* wear makeup (which, I reiterate, most of you do not need), it should look as though you are not wearing any. Check out Christy Turlington here, wearing NOTHING AT ALL. Her makeup (and I guarantee you, she’s probably wearing more than you do) looks nekkit too. Now, you probably don’t want to have to spend thousands of dollars to pay some flappy person to apply your makeup every day.  I know I have better things I’d like to spend thousands of dollars on (do you hear me, Johnny Depp!!??).

Want to know something else? Wearing makeup wrecks your skin. The more you wear it, the more you “need it” (which, again, is Bee Ess). I proved this to myself; I put some top-end, really-bloody-expensive cosmetics on one hand, and I put nothing on the other hand (technically, on the back of my hand). Yes, I moisturised both beforehand (heh). In less than an hour, my makeup hand was full of wrinkles and looked like the hand of someone twice my age. Bleah.

And, AND! Here’s the most important bit: It’s really sad that you’re afraid to look your age. Eighteen-year-old girls look like eighteen-year-old girls because…wait for it… THEY ARE EIGHTEEN. Forty-year-old women look like forty-year-old women because they’re FORTY! They’re beautiful FORTY YEAR OLD WOMEN. Women who, at twenty, or thirty, or sixty (I’m looking at you, Cher. Oh! And you, Madonna!) try to look like they’re 18 are lying to themselves, they’re lying to you, and they’re kind of making a mockery out of what it means to be a human. Not just a woman, but a human.

Look at the reason *why* you wear cosmetics. Are you trying to look older? Younger? Are you a performer? A circus freak? Think of all the money you could save if you just…stopped. You’re already beautiful (that word, remember, means ‘full of beauty’). Go ahead, when you’re stepping out and you want to do that smoky thing with your eyeliner, that’s cool. But a daily regimen? You’re doing it wrong.

For two weeks in grade 9, and then again for three days in grade 10, I attempted to wear makeup. It did not end well. In fact, I think the pink frosted lip gloss from grade 9 was still in the dresser drawer last time I was at my mum’s house (I threw it out). My mother always told me: “you’re lucky; you don’t NEED makeup.”

And that confused me, because neither did she.
Neither does my aunt, who is one of the coolest, smartest, most beautiful women I know. But she will not…WILL NOT leave the house (not even to get the paper) without it. Never has.
Another woman I know won’t even leave the bedroom without ‘putting on her face’. Do you know how frightening that EXPRESSION is, never mind the practice? Think about it for a while. Putting on your face.


It gives me THE SHIVERS. The idea that somewhere, in some girls’ dormitory somewhere, there is a special closet with row upon row of faces hanging on little hooks, and the girls all sleeping motionlessly, their beds lining a long, narrow room, the only light coming from tiny, dingy windows high up int he walls. And where there faces ought to be are pulsating, bloody landscapes, eyes darting this way and that, deep in REM sleep, but lidless, mouth muscles pulled back over teeth. The only sound a rhythmic breathing as the girls all exhale in unison, and a subtle drip, drip, dripping as blood drops on the floor beneath every girl’s head.

That’s why you shouldn’t wear makeup.