A friend recently asked me, in the midst of my morning routine, how I had the energy to do my hair and makeup every single day before I leave my room. I replied with, “I don’t know, I like to do it.” Being the overly-analytical person that I am, I thought about this brief conversation for a solid week. I’ve realized that I don’t actually like my morning routine. I simply complete it every day because I started a long time ago and I’ve grown to like it because it hides my flaws and makes me feel better about myself.
Each morning I spend an hour (minimum) in front of the mirror. I take off my makeup from the day before and I apply lotion. I’m terrified of ever looking any older than I am, so this is a must-do. I then put on primer and foundation because, after all, my skin is kind of uneven from all of the time that I spend in the sun. After foundation, I put on some bronzer and highlighter to accentuate the features that I do have and I do what I can to blend my makeup so that my skin looks airbrushed and smooth. I fill my eyebrows to make them more prominent. I put on eye shadow. I line my top eyelid in black gel eyeliner and then I brush my eyelashes with mascara and spend more time doing so than I probably should. Then, depending on the day, I straighten or curl my hair layer by layer. It’s an exhausting process and I go through it every day in exactly the same way that I did the day before, maybe only changing up the color of my eye shadow or the angle of the wing on my eyeliner.
While so many girls do the exact same thing, I’ve recently noticed that it’s kind of an issue. I don’t know when my self-esteem got so low to the point that I wouldn’t take my makeup off at night. I’ve literally found myself washing my face in the shower and thinking to myself, “don’t mess up your eye makeup in case the fire alarms go off.” I have this irrational fear that the fire alarms will go off in the middle of the night and I’ll be forced to show my natural face in the parking lot in front of my residence hall. Who even thinks about such things? I can’t leave my room without putting at least a little bit of foundation and mascara on. In that brief moment of having nothing on my face while I take yesterday’s makeup off, I can’t even look at my roommate. I have conversations with her while still looking into the mirror and I look down like a child who had just been scolded.
Maybe being so terrified is cowardly, but I genuinely believe that it’s because of positive reinforcement. Daily I am told that I’m beautiful, that my eyebrows are perfect or that they’re jealous of how long and thick my eyelashes are. What no one sees is that my eyelashes are a dull brown color and my eyebrows are light and hardly visible, so why wouldn’t I continue to do the things that earn me compliments? I don’t mean to sound conceited, but I do feel good when people compliment me. Who wouldn’t? My morning routine consists of “putting my face on,” and it makes me feel significantly better about myself.
My unfortunate reality is that I am utterly petrified to reveal my imperfections. I don’t want people to see me when I feel ugly and most vulnerable. I don’t want anyone else to see the scar above my eyebrow, the thin wrinkle on my forehead from raising my eyebrows too much, or the freckles sprinkled across my nose. I have paranoid thoughts that if someone sees me without makeup, they’ll remember it and think of me as ugly or fake, and I definitely prefer that the image that I uphold maintains where it is. So, in response to the girl who questioned my routine a few weeks ago, the process drags on day after day. I have the energy to do everything that I do because I see the flaws in my own face and I look at them with strong aversion and do what I can to cover them up. I have become a slave to my own insecurities and even when I could really use another 45 minutes of sleep, I still slide out of bed and relentlessly reach for the unobtainable perfection that I, like so many others, so deeply desire.
