MakeUp

Sorry ladies but I don’t think much about ‘makeup’. All those powders and creams you place on your face have always seem some kind magical ritual passed down through the years as a method of distinguishing yourself as different from the competition.

I appreciate the effort to use all the products the gal magazines recommend and in the early years applied with a palette knife or a toothbrush. I remember when the girls in my class faces started to change. Like an application for a horror movie makeup did cover the ever-present zits and sort of emphasized the eyes but us boys were confused about hair spurting out of our faces to understand.

All us teens went through hairstyles and clothing and shoes but only the girls did the makeup thing. All the concoctions of crèmes and lotions and powder and tweezers and pencils painting up the face like some tribal aborigine marking their family like a facial flag. A wonderful pharmaceutical industry persuaded each of you that you were not pretty enough without apply time and effort into painting your face. Don’t worry about whatever chemical compound was in the product or how many animals died in testing the science of beauty.

I can only give one point of view for us guys would get razors to slice our faces and put on toilet paper as a right of passage. Electric razors were still in the infancy so all they did was pull out the hair like a bad waxing job. Yet we had manly products like ‘Ole Spice’ that showed sailors coming home from months of whaling and splashing some of these stinky stuff on your face and all the girls came running.

Now I know you girls also had hairy issues but us lads didn’t notice under the stockings. You ladies had to go through a fundamental boot camp to acquire what us boys would suddenly be attracted to. Throw in some fragrance and you got the lad’s attention.

My reference to this point is I don’t notice makeup. I probably do but one person looks like another person at the Tummy Temple. Maybe everyone puts on makeup before they choose their tomatoes but I just don’t notice. I do notice a waft of scent that is refreshing and occasionally notice someone who stands out from the crowd and mean to tell her she is attractive.

What got me on this brainwave was I saw a video of some musicians playing a song. The song was good and there was energy and the people were pleasant to the camera’s eye. I looked a little deeper at some other videos and the same players were producing the same sound but without makeup. The term as I remember was ‘plain Jane’.

I know for the visual audience performers require makeup. The Beatles did it. Richard Nixon did it. Putting on makeup is a part of the game like wearing the latest fashion and mugging for the paparazzi.

My wife was a connoisseur of makeup and had all the utensils to transform from the day-to-day face I knew to some movie star image.

I certainly understand that ‘dressing up’ in your finery does give your personality a different “je ne sais quoi” but at the end of the night the mask has to wash off and you have to face the mirror.

So I guess the makeup is as important as deodorant and a bath now and then and when the face in the mirror looks like the Wolfman, maybe it is time to pull out the razor and trim the hedges.