Each time I’ve written a column for The Student’s Vanguard, I find myself spending a lot of time thinking about the title. For me, the process of creating a title is like baking cookies—an act that must be executed with grace and care. However, this once, I find myself discarding the entanglements of careful thought and delving right in. As opposed to my previous columns, this one is a direct reflection of my everyday life and encapsulates my life, existence and identity as a 21-year-old-woman who doesn’t wear makeup to college. It holds my imperfections on its adjective-infused sentences and balances my heavy-weighted confidence on the tender shoulders of its punctuation marks. It takes me by the hand and pulls me before my reader, ensuring that my curtain of narration does not blur the truth of my tale—a tale that begins in front of the extraordinarily large mirror that is plastered to the wall of my dorm, as I look over my clothes and decide what to wear for the day.
More often than not, the compass of choice spirals around before finally settling on my favorite outfit: a loose sweatshirt with some sort of literary quote plastered on it and a pair of baggy jeans. I’ve never pondered over the intricacies of whether my clothes match, or spent hours before the mirror seeing how they look on my body. I’ve always prioritized how I feel over how I look. If my attire enables me to embrace comfort and relaxation then I’m going to wear it, no matter how it looks. A month ago, these seemingly well-formed notions were challenged and I found myself questioning their foundation. If what I believed in was correct, then why isn’t the majority of the female population swaying to the breeze of this belief? Why do they pause to re-apply their lip gloss and adjust their mascara with measured enthusiasm, almost as though a major portion of their day depends on it?
Armed with a Columbian sense of curiosity, I set out in search of answers to these questions. My first location of experimentation was our local Walgreens, where I rummaged through the lipsticks on display and decided to buy one for myself. I was accompanied by my faithful friend, who concluded that the first lipstick purchase cannot be done in solitude, and must be accompanied by a concealer and an eyeliner. As I paid $28 for all these products and brought them back to my room, I spread them on the table and made eye contact with each of their absurdly colored bodies. I tried to put them in my pencil case, but they stuck out like a sore thumb amidst the chewed pen lids and navy blue ink stains. Then, I pushed them between my fingers and tried to wield them like a quill. However, they rolled out of my grasp and fell onto the ground, retiring to the darkest corner of my room like a pair of timid mice. “You’re supposed to wear makeup, not play with it,” interjected my friend, who had been watching me with exasperated eyes.
“How?” I questioned, as she unscrewed the cap of the lipstick and dabbed some onto my unexpecting lips. “This is how,” she responded, and told me to spread the color evenly across the surface area of my lip with my finger. As the natural pink shades of my lip succumbed to the overpowering red, she pulled out the concealer and told me to rub it across my dark circles and make sure that the color blends in. After this elaborate ritual, she instructs me to move to my eyes and start outlining my gaze with the dark eyeliner. I’ve always been very proud of my eyes, especially because they’ve been called expressive and assumed to have a voice and mind of their own on multiple occasions. The prospect of something enhancing their already significant potential excited me, and I sat on my bed with demonstrated patience, as my friend tried to help me sketch a perfect almond-shaped outline around my eyes. Ten minutes later, I concluded that I could not keep my eyes open for the eyeliner to settle and there was soon a messy—and teary—mess of black and brown on my eyelids. “It’s your first time using makeup. You’ll get used to it, eventually,” my friend assured me, as I responded with a feeble nod.
I looked at myself in the same mirror that had encouraged me to change and thought of those perfect women who were able to adorn their faces with artistic elegance. In front of them, I felt like an amateur—an accurate epitome of clumsiness in front of their perfect moves. However, my confused expression with blurry lips and smudged eyes taught me more than I could’ve ever imagined. There was a strong substance of sense in their senselessness, and as I ran a confused finger along my lips enabling the red color to rub off on my finger cushion, I pondered over the outcome of my experiment. The aim of this endeavor wasn’t to make myself look prettier. It was to initiate a quest for clarity—because that’s where, in my opinion, beauty truly lay. These tubes of glittery substance might be torches of clarity and illumination for some. Instead of building my confidence, they made me conscious of my appearance and the very structure of my face. It was almost as though they had blurred the smile of my lips and smudged the song on my eyelids
Feeling as though I was striding down the path of freedom, I walked to the washroom to wipe my face. I realized that above everything else, beauty lay in the acknowledgement of the fact that enhancement and struggle aren’t mutually exclusive. Enhancement for some might be a struggle for others, and struggle for some might be enhancement for others. As I wiped the pink glitter off my lips, it settled on the tissue paper reminding me of those early stars that emerged in the evening to examine the night sky before calling their comrades—comrades that differed in size, shape and texture but are united by the same shimmer.
