My Face Card
I spent ten minutes in front of a camera showcasing my beauty routine--here's what I didn't get to say (+ all the products).
Eighth grade was the first time I sat at a beauty counter and was sold a regimen. It was my mother’s idea and the counter was that of Clinique. There were yellow-tinted serums and green accented bottles, bright white light. I remember being told to look up, and my eyes being lined with their khaki eye liner—to “bring out the gold and green” in my eyes, although my eyes are and will forever be brown. I remember there was a high black stool I sat in and a woman hovering too close to me with a musky scent hanging from her breasts. I remember there wasn’t a foundation tried, but a lip liner and a balm that made my lips perpetually wet. I wore it religiously after that day and thought nothing of it as a 14 year old. That is, what an orifice and wetness could mean.
This week, I had the pleasure of sharing out a GWRM with Radical Beauty Series. In the GRWM, I talk less about the male gaze and objectification, femininity and performing femininity, the commodification of self-care, capitalism, and consumption, and more about how getting ready is particularly charged for me. I mention Anne Boyer’s The Undying...twice.
So, yeah, it’s pretty heavy.
Every morning: a reminder that despite my pain, I continue. That, “despite the horrors,” I “persist”— like the much-memed hamster in the pink convertible, if the hamster had had three failed surgeries and intractable esophageal pain.
“The exhausted are always trying even when they don't want to, even when they are too exhausted to name trying as trying or to think about it like that. The trying of the exhausted is fuel for the machine that keeps running them over in the first place.”
- Anne Boyer
I was thinking more about getting ready this week while getting ready and realized then that I tend to do my “everything” shower, my “everything” face, when I’m at my sickest, have the fewest spoons to give. And I thought: why?
I think it has something to do with familiarity. Both in the size of my body—when I’m at my sickest, I am again the eighth-grade girl who ate a cup of strawberry yogurt with sprinkles and a handful of goldfish and called it “lunch,” the girl whose lips were perpetually wet—and in the mechanics: the lifting of the brush, the wrinkling of the eye to fit the lashes through the curler, the pinching of the lips to get the cheekbones just right. I also think there is something to feeling like I am “normal.” Normalcy a thing that left my body when my body became a body, that is when my perception of self and my flesh and bone—the skin you can pinch, the arms and legs that with the right mechanics can be moved, the internal organs with the wrong mechanics can cause pain—split.
There are also topics I wanted to share in my GRWM but didn’t. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I couldn’t fold them into ten minutes. Form forever dictating content. Things like why I dye my hair blonde. Or what features I am always trying to disguise. How motherhood has changed my view on beauty. Or, hasn’t.
So what of these topics?
On going/being blonde…
I dyed my hair entering my senior year at Dartmouth because Plath, a natural brunette, bleached hers. I believe she dyed her hair in 1954, after her suicide attempt and stay at McLean. Some claim she nicknamed this period her “platinum summer,” a startling makeover to mirror a new self. It was also, if I did my calculations right, just before her own senior year.
In 2007-2008, I was finishing my classes, but largely focusing on my thesis—a poetry manuscript, so Plath, who inspired me to apply to Smith in 2004, whose poem “Love Is A Parallax” I read in my high school salutatorian speech, whose Unabridged Journals sat on my desk, was top of mind.
Initially I resisted the idea of going lighter, knowing I was giving into a Western beauty ideal, but like many things I do, I did it for something nonsensical. For a long-dead poet, who wrote deeply coded verse about bees. And, boy, did I have a platinum “summer”… The hair didn't make me someone new but seemed to rearrange the year around me. I think back to that time and remember my then-crush picking me up dead-sober (an accomplishment at Dartmouth) in the middle of the between-class M/W/F rush at the base of the library stairs in Baker-Berry. It was raining and he spun me around in my baby doll dress and green wellies and blonde hair and the crowd parted and reformed around us and I believed then—in that moment—my life was truly out of a movie.
It’s safe to say the temporary change became permanent. I’ve kept up with the highlights ever since.
What I am teaching my daughter about beauty…
My good friend once told me she never tells her child (who is beautiful) that she is beautiful, because it might yoke her self-worth to superficiality and something beyond her control. When I would come to visit them in Boston—taking a Peter Pan bus from Northampton to stay the weekend, I’d listen to her say not beautiful girl! but big girl!, encouraging her daughter and her play. Since then, big, smart, creative, kind—anything but beautiful—has flooded my vocabulary and so, too, Aoife’s. She has a little friend here named E whose favorite English word as a non-Native speaker is beautiful, but Aoife has latched onto one word and one word only: brave. To her brave holds more weight, more power than all attributes combined. Woody is brave. And Lilo is brave. And Dorothy is brave. And she is (sometimes) brave.
And when it comes to makeup, I don’t hide that I use it, or make excuses for it, or disallow her from touching it. Instead, I encourage her—to swipe the horse hair brush across her cheeks and eyes and to sweep anyone in our vicinity with my pink powder. While using it, she tells me she wants to become un painter. It’s incredible to see makeup not as a thing of performance but as simply play.
The feature I hate the most that makes me sad…
I’m one-quarter Polish and inherited the deep scowl lines of my grandfather and his sister Nellie. When I see them furrow, I think of the two and how they developed dementia later in life. I associate those lines with anger, confusion, and frustration, but also a coolness that only other Slavic people might recognize. These lines appear most when I’m concentrating, puzzled, or inquisitive, and I get Botox three times a year to soften them. I hate that I do—that I’ve internalized the idea that an inherited part of my face needs correcting.
The feature I love that complicates…
For years, I thought blush was the only makeup product I truly needed, and I often wondered why. It makes you look lively and youthful, sure. But I think this notion comes from something deeper. I never used blush to plump the top of the apples, but more like contouring, hollowing out the cheeks, emphasizing the structure. I think this intent had/has something to do with my mother. And her sisters. And my grandmother. And my grandfather. And even my uncles, whose cheekbones are unmistakably Muscogee (Creek) and Cherokee. Somewhere along the way I absorbed the idea that cheeks by nature of being produced by the underlying bones were my best feature. Perhaps because they’re also one of the Native features mainstream beauty culture has long admired. Whether that happened consciously or through osmosis, it’s a belief that has long-stayed with me.
On looking at myself…
I dislike videos of myself and photos of myself and hate taking selfies. Thirst traps are for someone else. It used to be this way because I didn’t see myself as pretty—having been an awkward bookworm before I hit my seventh-grade growth spurt. Now, there’s a different reason. Where I wish I could see beauty, natural aging, a kind of resilience to pain, I only see skin going slack, a once-sharp jawline now loosening, a slightly crooked nose now more crooked. The sag—written across my body by my illness and the losing of weight and the regaining of weight and the losing of it again. My baby hairs, too, nearing but never quite reaching their destination, breaking off into micro bangs with each new nutrient deficiency.
What I like about my actual beauty routine is that I can do it in alone, in private, with just a mirror to behold. There I can permit myself my eye, permit myself the right cheekbone, permit myself the left. I can permit myself the lash line, the puckered lip, a brow. The whole coming in fragments, and the fragments feeling more acceptable than the whole.
As I write this now, I see that beauty for me is not so much self-expression but self-negotiation. Each morning, each product: a small decision. About performance. About inheritance. And, yes, continuance. Which parts of the people who made me do I preserve? What parts of the past and which world views of today does my daughter deserve? Which parts of me can I afford to keep up? Which parts of me can keep going—really? How many spoons do I have? Can I ever (ever) get back to that girl in the black dress and green wellies, being spun in the rain?
These questions live in the motions, as do their answers. In the washing and in the spritzing, in the curling and the puckering and the brushing and the dabbing and the blotting and the rubbing and the smoothing. And the being.
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Products Shown In My Very First GRWM
+ a huge thank you to Vanessa + Radical Beauty Series for giving writers and artists a platform to share beauty tutorials, rituals & critiques.
Sappo Hill Oatmeal Fragrance-Free Soap
I didn’t show myself “washing” my face, but I subscribe exclusively to bar soaps, and this is my favorite. I first picked it up while buying blackened tofu and a sling of vegetables from the Astoria Co+Op. It was such a treat to use in the raw of Oregon’s rainy season, and continues to be one today, smelling faintly of milk.
Chanel Allure
My friend E in college got me started on this scent on nights I went “out” in my mini dresses and black stockings and black, matte leather heels. Since then, I’ve graduated—and graduated from wearing high heels entirely, but still use a spritz a day. Someone online described it as sun-kissed skin—citrus, vanilla, warm sandalwood, with just a little bite. I’m a triple Capricorn like Zooey Deschanel so it feels like a perfect encapsulation of my essence: inviting, until she’s not.
Dr. Brenner’s Vitamin C
This is a more affordable dupe of SkinCeuticals C E Ferulic. When I first purchased it, many argued the ingredients were identical but that the formulation was not—the then Skinceuticals’ 20-year patent hadn’t yet expired. Now it has!
Kate Somerville +Retinol Firming Eye Cream
I use this on days when I’m seeing people—less for the retinol and more for its plumping qualities. It hydrates to smooth crow’s feet and firms tired eyes, which—with work and motherhood and illness—are a constant in my life.
Kiehl’s Ultra Facial Cream
I’ve been using this creamy jar of goodness since I worked for The Atlantic. At one book club meeting in Dupont Circle with my boss, who was also a fellow grad (hi, Dartmouth!), I got the recommendation, and have been happily applying for nearly 14 years.
Elta MD UV Clear Broad-Spectrum SPF 46
Living in the Keys and now Costa Rica, I’ve been close to the sun and been careful about my face, neck, and chest, but 20-year-old me would have laughed and run the length of Golden Gate Park without a smidge of sunscreen. I’ve been getting skin checks ever since.
Dermalogica Ultracalming Mist
I did a facial treatment at Dermalogica when I worked in Soho for an ed-tech startup (yes, this cat has 500 lives). I was dealing with bad acne breakouts working to midnight most weekdays and often through the weekend, surviving on takeaway sushi and the occasional solo date night to the small Italian spot Pisticci in Morningside Heights, where I lived at the time. I tried a few of Dermalogica’s products, but this one stuck, namely because I have rosacea, and it seems to calm my cheeks’ redness, all while feeling lightweight and smelling of botanicals.
My ancient, fuchsia Revlon lipstick
The lipstick that never dies—and is forever at the bottom of my bag. At first, a 2010s slouchy Rebecca Minkoff with its egregious hardware and all the dangling leather bits. Now: my economical Quince cross-body. It’s been so many places—too many places, all identifying markers have been rubbed away, and I guess that makes it amazing. Plus, I’ve read it gives the optical illusion of perfectly white teeth. (Smile.)
Clinique Chubby Stick Sculpting Contour
Chisel me into a fine Greek bust, baby! No, but really. I use this for any/all occasions, but especially for Zoom calls. Being a thick stick, it is a little more coarse than other contouring options, but it gets the job done.
Clinique Fig Blush
I have been under the belief since I was 14 that blush is all you really need, and frankly, my psychiatrist confirmed it. I wore this to see her, and she said she’d never seen me look so well. Read: well—not good. (P.S. this was the blush I was sold at age 14!)
Clinique (Roast Coffee)
Much to the lab coat-wearing Clinique esthetician’s disappointment, I’ve moved away from the khaki and green undertones to a color that really wakes up the eyes.
Maybelline Lash Discovery
Daylighting as a brand consultant and namer, I have always loved the story of Maybelline as a name. “Maybelline” coming from the founder Thomas Lyle Williams’ sister’s name Mabel and vaseline. Petroleum jelly being critical to her makeup routine. Personally, I hate eyelashes that feel like living spiders, and the long silver tube echoes the product’s results. Lengthened and defined lashes for days.
Scunci Claw/Jaw Clips
It’s hot here in San Jose, and I like to wear my hair off my shoulders. I buy these by the dozens and always put my hair up into a messy bun or French twist. And if I don’t have a clip nearby, I simply use a pen. I recently shared a photo of Aoife where her hair was in disarray, and several people wrote to say we looked just alike. And I’ll take that as the greatest compliment. Rachel McAdams as Amy Stone should be an inspiration to all.
Izipizi Glasses
Two weeks ago, I was in Atlanta getting medical testing. The medical staff—before and after—repeatedly direct you not to drive, drink, or sign any legal documents after anesthesia, but what they don’t tell you is: don’t shop. Two hours after being “under,” I went to the High Museum of Art’s gift shop on a whim. There, I spent a small fortune on goodies—butterfly glasses for Aoife and local children’s books and coffee mugs and postcards with Amy Sherald’s art and and and... These yellow-tinted glasses I somehow justified by saying a) I work and write a lot on a computer and b) I really loved what they did for Elizabeth Olsen when she stood trial for killing Betty Gore in Love & Death. Yes. Really.