Some
mornings, when I'm drawing in my eyebrows, my nose seems to take up
most of my face. It is those times when I take the time to cover it
up and look and imagine what I might be with a different one. I know
that I'm too fickle with my own appearance to actually change it, nor
would I be able to justify the money. I'm stuck with it, but that
doesn't mean I'm happy with it.
I
was told that the nose determines the facial attractiveness of a
person.
But
that's okay, because I don't always hate it. Some days I wake up and
the line of my jaw looks particularly pleasing in the yellowish light
of my dorm room and the faint white sunlight peeking over the hills
in the distance and held off by a pane of glass and blinds. I tilt my
head a few times on those days and smile at myself before going about
with my morning routine.
Being
a woman, and being a woman who sometimes bothers with makeup, but
only after 9 AM, I spend a lot of time staring at my face. And
sometimes only a few inches from the mirror as I try to make an
arbitrary line on my eyelid as straight as I possibly can, and then
match on both eyes.
Makeup
can be dangerous. As it turns out, there are rules. And there are
things you need to keep buying every six months, lest you end up with
an eye infection. When I first started wearing makeup, just a little
bit of mascara, in high school, I ended up with pink eye because no
one had told me about that rule. I remembered lying down on a pile of
blankets in the living room, taking pain medication that would put me
to sleep because although it wasn't oozing puss, my eye did feel like
someone was scooping it out from the inside.
I
didn't know what caused it until much later, so I didn't put the
blame anywhere, although whether it would be me for not knowing what
to do with old mascara or the media for telling me that I needed it
in the first place.
But
I don't know if it was something wrong with me, or some failure for
advertisers to get on my brainwaves, but I never thought that I
absolutely needed makeup. I believe that I have proven often enough
that I don't feel it necessary to put on before leaving, particularly
if I know I'm just going to get up, shove myself into some clothes
like an overstuffed sausage, and head off to class without much time
to contemplate whether that zit needs covered up or not.
My
face is ever changing enough that I feel as though no one would
notice a day without mascara, although that's likely not true. To
other people, my face probably stays the same. They don't devote the
same amount of time watching the expressions that it makes in the
mirror, looking at all flaws from just half a foot away.
Looking
so close at your own flaws has got to have adverse effects on your
self esteem. Three percent of women would never let their significant
other see them without makeup on, and that figure apparently means
just...forever. It isn't as though makeup hides who you are as a
person. Your face still looks the same underneath, but to the 33% of
women who have gotten up before the person they are dating to put on
makeup secretly, perhaps the line isn't as fine.
Hell,
I do bother to color in my blonde eyebrows most morning, and yes, I
do feel naked without them colored in, to an extent, but I still like
my face the way it is. Even if it never looks the same from day to
day.
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