When I was a kid, I used to spend the weekday mornings watching my mom do her makeup before we left for school. She had the same exact routine every morning: foundation, the same blush she's been using for my entire life, some pink eyeshadow if she was feeling fancy, eye liner, and mascara. Her process was about ten minutes and then we'd be out the door.
When I was in middle school, I would go to my aunt's house after school and do my makeup while she was on the computer. She had exactly three shades of eyeshadow, two mascaras, two blushes and three lipsticks. In my mind, this was an advanced collection. Sometimes she would let me do her makeup, but most of the time I just left her house with an eye look that you could probably see from down the street.
Eighth grade was the first time that I wore makeup to school. I came out of my room with eyeliner and swore that my mom wouldn't notice. When she did (obviously), I acted surprised. My line was that I hadn't even realized that I'd put it on - it was just a natural instinct. Despite the fact that it was a load of bullshit, she let me wear my eyeliner that day and it has been a downward spiral ever since.
The real trouble began in my sophomore year of high school, when I transitioned from wearing black eyeliner every single day to wearing a sheet of black eye shadow ALL OVER MY EYELIDS. There is photographic proof of this somewhere on the internet, but I refuse to let it resurface. It's a safe bet that the eye shadow that I used was at least a decade old and I had absolutely no idea what primer was. By the end of the day, I was sporting a faint, greasy gray look with weird lines of black where my eyelids creased. Let me make this clear: this was not a good look.
Fast forward to my introduction to color and you get days of blocks of bright green eye shadow covering my eyelids and a weird obsession with colorful eyeliner. Surprisingly, my mom, with her single eyeshadow life, was no help in the department of making green eye shadow look good. When I look back on those days now, of course I can't help but to cringe at them. But playing around with makeup was fun and I can remember feeling confident when I went into school, so I wouldn't change those tragic days for anything.
Thankfully, those days were also the days when I discovered YouTube beauty gurus. It was too late to fix my old black and green days, but there was some very much needed hope for the future. After watching countless makeup collection videos and tutorials, I started to build my own collection and learned about blending and highlights and crease colors and contouring and every other intricacy that comes with makeup. I discovered Sephora and Ulta and spent an alarming amount of money on a lot of makeup that I hardly use. Now, I have a collection that has gone through two de-clutterings and is still more than enough for my lifetime if expiration dates weren't a thing. I have lists of makeup that I want to get and lists of things that I've realized look terrible on me and I'm still learning, but it's something that I enjoy.
I've got kind of a love/hate relationship with makeup at this point. If I want to do it "right," it takes me a lot longer than my mom's ten minute process. Most times, I just go without it because I don't have the time to dedicate to it. I'm going to safely say that I've completely done my makeup, primer to setting spray, twice this year. But I love the feeling of being inspired by something and sitting down in front of my vanity just to experiment, so it's worth it to me.
I've come a long way from my black eye shadow days. I finally threw it out a few months ago (obviously it was around just for the memories). The only problem is that now I've made room for more.
