TEENAGE MAKEUP WOES

October 6, 2007

This article will be the first in a series about skin care and spending wisely with a particular focus on recognizing products that perform. This is quite possibly my preferred topic. I’m going to tell you two stories and this is the first.

I discover The World Of Beauty (to my mother’s distress)…

It begins when I was 14. I loved makeup then just as I love it now. In the back of a magazine, I spotted an advertisement for The World Of Beauty. What a deal this was! For $9.95, a new makeup collection would arrive at my door every month!! I couldn’t possibly pass this up. The ad said it would be all brand name makeup in colors selected by a team of experts.
Indeed, to my mother’s bewilderment, the boxes began arriving and they always arrived while I was at school. I have a Hungarian mother who is not steeped in North American tradition, so the appearance of these boxes and the demand for payment was very disturbing for her. My mother has very well-developed social skills and cannot behave in any way which might be considered impolite, so it was beyond her to simply refuse the boxes.

… and I look spectacular! (but my liberty is violated)

It got worse. I now began wearing the makeup and sincerely believing that I looked surprisingly good in it. I would come into the kitchen for breakfast with purple eyelids, quite pleased with how well I had blended the color, only to be told to remove it. Today, girls are wearing makeup in Grade 7 or sooner, but back then it was Bonne Bell LipSmackers and 10.0.6 cleanser. Since I spent most of my teenage years in a sullen, brooding fury, being told to remove the makeup was just another offense against me and my rights.
My revenge was to bring the compact of makeup with me and reapply it in the reflection of the car windows in the driveway, just outside the kitchen window, where my mother could see me, and then run to school. I sat quite proudly in Mr. Boyer’s Grade 8 science class knowing that I looked quite magnificent.

How does it end?

The boxes just kept coming. I don’t know when or how it stopped. Eventually I had quite a collection of makeup and I somehow notified the company that I wished to terminate my subscription. It made no difference. It was as though these boxes were being dropped from space, destined to end up at our door. Finally my mother actually refused to pay anymore, and this is saying something. I can’t imagine how stressful this must have been for her.
Still, the boxes kept coming. They were like apparitions that the whole family took for granted, sitting there on the doorstep. I think that the deliveries stopped sometime after the 12 month point. My mother didn’t care anymore.

Posted by Christine Scaman | Filed Under Makeup, Skin Care

Comments

One Response to “TEENAGE MAKEUP WOES”

gina on October 28th, 2007 10:48 pm

omg I so remember all the girls in grade 8 applying black eyeliner to inside of the bottom lid in the girls bathroom before the first bell in the morning. One blck pencil was passed reverently from hand to hand followed by a shimmery pink lipstick. Bonding at its finest hour. Then the wash up before we headed home to arrive at 4 off the bus as fresh faced as when we left. Of course this was 1972 and life a bit less complicated. Today I watch the girls who come through the door quite skilled at application by grade 5. There are some who wear little but they are the exception rather than the rule.