The connection I feel between makeup and mental health started before I was old enough to use makeup outside of the home (be it cosmetics or mood swings). It first started with someone else’s irrational behavior: antisemitism in elementary school. This was exactly the age when I started thinking about my appearance. Club classic: “Aren’t you sorry you killed Jesus?” He was a regular. They called me the N-word because of my curly hair and olive skin; A young child must really miss using the N-word to say that to someone who is predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish. They included the three moles on my right cheek in this bullying. They said, “Look, this is evidence, these are the signs of the devil.” So you might think I was interested in things that would flatten and cover my moles, but I actually retaliated by using my mom’s eyeliner to draw them more clearly.
After a bad day in middle school—I had friends but was having trouble concentrating—I would lock myself in the bathroom to get my face into perfect focus. If I got it just a little bit wrong, I’d have to make it worse until I looked the way I felt inside – drawing lipstick circles and saying bad words with eyeliner. After examining the beast in the mirror, I washed it meticulously. I later realized it was a gateway drug to bulimia and self-harm.
My tools came from regular care packages I received from my mom’s friend Nancy, who lived in Manhattan and for whom she designed the Clinique packaging. It hasn’t gone unnoticed that what I’m using to express my dismay at impending femininity is an over-the-top brand of “career-woman-you-can-have-it-all.” Their unrivaled “Black Honey” lipgloss was as sticky and dark as my inner world.
The bullies at school focused on the three moles on my right cheek. ‘Look, this is evidence, these are the signs of the devil’
When I was born a 15-year-old working journalist, I was wearing the wrong foundation; I was in the service of a place where I shouldn’t be, with someone who was garish, crazy, the wrong color, and generally should have known better. Someone who should say: “This girl doesn’t know how to do makeup. This girl is just a child and shouldn’t be going out with adults.”
There was something legitimately “wrong” with me, and it became apparent when I moved to New York at age 21, as if the city were medieval leeches implanted on my skin. I would successfully reconstruct with medication, a great speech therapist, and regular physical exercise (all three I continue to this day, decades later, and have never had a bipolar episode in 15 years).
One of the first friends I made when I moved to New York was Bianca, a receptionist. Nylon Magazine inspecting her makeup closet full of samples and freebies. She also worked as a salesperson at Miu Miu, and if I was doing a photo shoot, we would sneak into the store’s dressing room to have her do my makeup.
When I attempted suicide at the age of 22, I ended up in St. Vincent Hospital in the West Village, and I remember Bianca leaning over me in the ward and touching my face with her bag full of different brushes. I don’t know if he was the one who cleared my chin of the black charcoal they used to make me vomit up the pills. But under the fluorescent lights, my cheeks were red because she had come to the emergency room attempting to commit suicide, and after she was rescued, she immediately asked the handsome attending doctor if she wanted to make love—what was there to say? ?
Just a few months later 9/11 happened and we ran to St Vincent’s to donate blood but they didn’t need to donate blood as there were no survivors. We sat on the porch of the Cherry Tavern bar all week long, wearing masks we were told to wear because of the toxic ash in the air.
I fell a lot when I was 25 for a Maori actor who met me at a rooftop party in the middle of summer and approached me thinking I was Latin. When he introduced me to his Maori friends he always said: “He’s not English, he’s Jewish.” He was proud of the side of me that the kids at school pushed away. I left traces of bronzer on her clothes, the terracotta Guerlain powder I bought at the airport during one of the many back and forths of these long-distance relationships, my demonic triangle of moles photographed at various points in the Polynesian triangle.
I applied the perfect red lipstick by Shu Uemura, who no longer wears make-up in winter. Discontinued makeup makes me sick in a way that’s a lot like the end of love: What makes you feel beautiful can’t always stay and you can only try to find a copy. Or, to put it more optimistically, none of us have just one soulmate and it’s okay to have a “type”.
I will no longer buy lipstick if I forget my glasses and can’t read the name; because the name is as much a call as the color; It is as sure as lining up your crystals to be fully charged. moon. I wrote my third novel in 2004 and called it: Cherry in the Snow, I was inspired by the job my mother did at Revlon, finding names for their products. The most famous ones, “Fire and Ice” and “Cherry in the Snow,” were not his, but he did invent “Flamingo.” The idea that I didn’t think I could fully realize in this book because I was still too young and unstable was: “Can you make things safe by naming them?”
I reached my 40s with the same signature makeup look: red bow-shaped lips. Ostensibly they mean: “Don’t kiss me, just watch me talk.” But the red mouth stems from a fundamental childhood memory: the opening credits sequence. Rocky Horror Picture Show where the lips are in tune with the music, until they reveal their teeth and turn into x-rays. What is presented as sexy covers up the underlying discomfort. I’ve been “in my right mind” for a long time, but that image still does something to me.
I got married while living and working in Hollywood. We had a child, I got divorced and moved back to London twenty years after our separation. When I recently started making makeup videos on Instagram on a whim, I realized as I said this: “There are celebrity makeup lines that I don’t want to put on my face, because your skin is the largest organ.” Your body is porous and porous. No matter how good her color serum is, I don’t want what I perceive personally, like Victoria Beckham, to touch me. I don’t want that to happen to me, even when I read about it in the newspapers. I want it taken off me.
Kylie Jenner’s billion-dollar cosmetics line, especially her permanent lip line, still alarms me. I’ve tried; It’s a hit because it works. But consider what first became associated with the name Kardashian in the public sphere: Robert Kardashian’s defense of OJ Simpson in his murder trial. I don’t want the Kardashian family’s “Out Damned Spot” on my lips.
When I first started experimenting with makeup, I had no idea that in my 40s I would spend so much money on skin care (laser, facial, microneedling) and never wear foundation. Maybe the teenage cutter in me would want to know the paid package version of my self-inflicted pain that is actually personal growth.
Even as I take note of the make-up columns in every newspaper, I still think of that 12-year-old girl, steady and domestic, defacing her face in the locked bathroom. I’m always waiting to see which fibers are recommended: microfiber? Sea sponge? What will make it all go away so you can start over? Double cleansing? Foaming oil? The expensive version of this routine is hotel rooms. A new start every day: the room has been cleaned for you. Every woman’s makeup and cleansing routine includes a hotel room that she can afford and is easy to travel to.
Nowadays, make-up can be so heavy on complex training that it can be alienating for a school dropout. I love doing makeup, but when I see the step-by-step guides, oral sex seems like just work. This is the self-inflicted nature of leaving school at 15: my deep resentment of all things educational, including make-up.
Makeup collaborations you can find in 2024 (like Hello Kitty for Pixi or puppets For Ciaté) I blur the line between child and adult woman more clearly than I do as a “working” child. I argue with my 11-year-old daughter that makeup is for play, not for wearing outside the house. How do I explain in a non-scary way that this is because there are bad people out there? So how can we make sense of the intersecting lines of Sanrio and Disney for him?
Where am I in life This: My child can’t wear her expert make-up in public, but I love it when I see flashy make-up on an older woman, especially under the harsh lights of public transport. Because I, who first used make-up to harm myself, now see it for pleasure, not to look older or younger. Lady Gaga’s range of products, Haus Labs, is particularly gamer-friendly.
But my biggest hate is Enthusiasm Makeup trend: Teen’s confusion and distress are reflected directly on the face with glittering tears. You could argue that this is a modern version of Pierrot, but Pierrot is elegant, and it’s an aesthetic that oozes from hardcore porn: a woman’s makeup needs to be smudged. That the defenseless must be visually devastated.
We used makeup as a cover-up when I was struggling with my mental health. Bianca, who did my make-up at the hospital, turned me on to Diorshow’s waterproof mascara; We were both counting on it because we were crying all the time and didn’t want anyone to know. For me, the girl in that locked bathroom, it was shocking to see that makeup was an indicator of the struggle going on inside. Neon star stickers worn in public for pimples are the right of a generation whose mental health condition is listed on their dating app profile. Everything has a name. Nothing is mixed. Nothing is camouflage.
TikTok beauty fans are asking you to take a test for your flattest makeup look: Are you fall, summer, spring or winter? Emotionally I am in autumn, as I am in my late 40s and feel grounded without being tied to the earth, the vigor of my leaves turning golden, so I hold my own breath in wonder. It can’t last long. Winter needs to come, but make-up will be done for this. I love Ruth Gordon Rosemary’s Baby as a makeup icon. I’d love to wear green eye powder while admiring your furniture, implying that I could impregnate you with the devil’s baby. Maybe this is the whole life cycle of children who say that moles are a sign of the antichrist.
Makeup artist Kay Montano asked me this Observer the portrait is what I want it to convey. My first response was: Please pass this on, I know what all my problems are even if I can’t solve them. Instead, I sent her a photo of me thinking I did my makeup well. “I do the kind of makeup you want,” she replied, “It works from day to night, throughout the night and the next day.” Yes! That’s what I was trying to say! The playful makeup of youth and old age is exhilarating, but in the fall — when so much is unpacked and nothing is buried alive — just do a makeup that says you see me for who I really am.
If you are affected by any of these issues, contact Samaritans on 116 123 or call Mind on 0300 123 3393.