I want to start out by noting I am aware of and support the empowering qualities of makeup. The following is only my opinion based on my personal routine.
I can honestly say I feel better with a black line above my eye than I do without, but I don't appreciate the attention and media that surrounds the contouring beauty trend. Every day I see articles, memes, and photos that shove the idea of reconstructing my facial features down my throat. Most of the time I think the results are beautiful, yes. But I can't help questioning if other women consider my lack of makeup skills and desire to learn them strange, or lazy, given the trendiness of wearing a full face of makeup. I just don't feel the need to put such a large amount of my time, money, and effort into makeup and most of the time I'm comfortable with this decision.
My point is that recently, I feel the media has taken a sharp turn away from previous efforts to glorify natural features to generating constant contouring tutorials and "Only Makeup Lovers Will Understand..." articles. Forgive me for quoting an overexposed celebrity in an effort to support my claim, but this statement from Kourtney Kardashian has stuck with me since I first read it in an article on BuzzFeed in November 2015:
"I have to contour my nose and cheekbones every day or I won’t leave the house.”
While BuzzFeed pokes fun at this sentiment, and it's personal to Kourtney's own routine, it's still potentially influential to the millions of Kardashian followers as well as the 700,000+ people who came across the article on BuzzFeed like I did. Once again, everyone is entitled to their own opinion and routine, but mine is that the mindset and the attention around the power of contouring in particular is somewhat excessive - as if it's almost an essential for showing your face in public. I want to emphasize that I believe whichever method you choose to feel like your best self is absolutely the right one, but I can't help wanting to redirect some attention to the beauty of natural features in addition to the fun, viral makeup tutorials.
On that note, here are 15 things you'll probably understand if you've been agreeing with me so far:
1. Your makeup collection includes one shade each of concealer, eyeliner, mascara, lipstick, and sometimes bronzer. What is highlighter? How necessary is primer? Why is this tutorial for eye makeup 10 minutes long?
2. You primarily buy your makeup from stores like CVS, Target, and Walgreens.
3. If someone gives you a Sephora gift card, you're excited to spend it until you realize you can only buy one item with it.
4. You feel Sephora workers can sense your lack of makeup knowledge immediately upon entering the store. Probably because you're not wearing any makeup.
5. Your makeup routine is very inconsistent. Meaning, it's not very high up there in your morning routine and you give yourself a pat on the back if you get around to slapping concealer, eyeliner, and mascara around your eyes.
6. You're sometimes envious of people's contouring, winged eyeliner, and smoky eye skills but not enough to learn how to do it yourself.
7. If you're wearing lipstick you're feeling fancy.
8. If you're wearing eye shadow (most likely applied for you by a more skilled friend) you're feeling really fancy.
9. You don't understand why there's a such thing as eyebrow filler. Isn't that just eyeliner or mascara for your eyebrows?
10. Even if you own an eyelash curler, it's more of a dust collector because you either don't know how to use it, or you're too scared it will take off your eyelashes like those videos you've seen.
11. You wonder what your face would like contoured and think one day, for a very special occasion, you'll get around to finding out.
12. You have no clue how to distinguish between the functions of different brushes.
13. You recently learned that there are distinguishing features between different brushes.
14. Fake eyelashes sound like a disaster waiting to happen.
15. The feeling of rubbing your eyes knowing that there is nothing there to smudge or sting them is usually greater than the feeling of applying eyeliner well.
