Get that muck off your face.

GRWM

As I ease a little reluctantly into my dotage, I’m glad to say, the magical powers of makeup are becoming less of an obsession. This is just another liberating and strangely exhilarating development of mid-life. I sometimes even venture out in public these days with a completely natural face. I know, right? Zero artificial additives or flavour enhancers! To do so feels daring and I do sometimes wonder if this is what ‘letting yourself go’ looks like, and maybe not in a good way? But after a lifetime of dabbling in pigmented palettes and pots, brushing on pastes and powders, twiddling spoolies and slicking on glitters and glosses in order to transform my face in a sort of maquillage metamorphosis, from grub to butterfly, in order to meet social expectations, I think I might be nearly over it.

Rose said last week, as we were looking at old pictures, “Oh, I do miss your red lipstick days!” But I’m conscious now that a red lip only serves to make me look, at best, even more like my grandma, and at worst like Roz, the administrator in Monsters Inc.

“Your stunned silence is very reassuring…”

And I shudder to think of the calculator-crashing figure that might sum up the economic cost of a lifetime browsing the makeup counters of the world. How fortuitous it is then, that my waning passion for costly pots and preparations coincides with my new post-divorce breadline status.

But this little five minute ritual, using seven cosmetic products and a caffeinated face oil serum, still helps to create a magic protective force field of confidence on those days when my self esteem takes a slight wobble. I enjoy the process of enhancement, like tweaking the value scales in a digital photograph, just enough to brighten up and improve the features.

At last I see though, that as long as my skin is cleansed, polished, nourished and hydrated. (That, in itself, is sometimes a tall order), as long as I’ve actually had some proper sleep, and my stray chiskers are all accounted for and tweezed, I can believe in myself, redistribute the hefty weight of my fragile ego, and face the world without makeup.

Or at least maybe just a smidgen, for good luck!

Absolutely none of my followers have asked me to share my beauty routine with the world, and less than no one could give two hoots about wether or not I slap stuff on my face, but I was prompted to make this post after reading through one of the very first few blogs I wrote back in 2017. (Can I look in your makeup bag?)

With a new-found fevered enthusiasm for writing, whilst poolside on a holiday with Rose in Cape Verde, I had decided to record my pontifications on just about anything that was on my mind at the time, and broadcast them out into the void. Plus ça change.

Some of my early blog posts make my toes curl, and some still make me laugh out loud. I’d like to think that I’ve come a long way from those first faltering steps, tapping like a demented woodpecker at my iPhone screen in the blinding African sunshine. But as I attempt to make my way, and more importantly, my living, in the world of the written word, I recognise the need for me to be better at promoting my work. And in order to evaluate and hone my skills as a writer and to lay myself open to criticism, I ask you, dear reader, to please take a look back through the archives of my blog and choose an entry at random to read and review. You would be doing me a huge favour, I would be eternally grateful and if there’s anything you’d like me to write about, I will do it, just for YOU!