I maintained the same drug-store version of that Clinique routine for years. I wore it religiously, not because I had any real passion for it, but because I thought it was a thing girls were supposed to do. An expert had even shown me. Who was I to stray?
Then in college, I studied abroad with a girl who didn’t wear makeup. She was kind and adventurous and knew how to be friends with everyone she met. One weekend, a group of us was getting ready for a night out. She asked to borrow someone’s mascara. I wondered aloud why she didn’t have any.
“I ran out a while ago and just never got around to buying more,” she said. Fascinating. To me, running out of mascara was like running out of an essential, like toothpaste or shampoo. To this cool, nice girl, it was an afterthought. I wanted to emulate her nonchalance.
After that, I started wearing makeup less. I went to class without mascara, stopped replacing eyeshadow palettes, and went on dates with little more than moisturizer on my face. I took pleasure in being the kind of girl who didn’t wear makeup. When I did put it on, to attend parties or go to internship interviews, I worried it looked like I was trying too hard.
It didn’t help that I was dating a guy who egged on this insecurity. He didn’t seem to care that I rarely wore makeup around him, but one night I was heading to a friend’s graduation party. He was in my room, hanging out while I got ready. I started swiping mascara on my lashes and putting powder on my face.
“Why do you wear makeup for other people but not me?” he asked.
I didn’t know what to say. I mumbled something about wanting to look nice for my friends. They’d all be dressed up.
“It feels like you want other guys to notice you or something.”
The thought hadn’t crossed my mind. I reassured him I wasn’t trying to attract other people. Looking back, I can see his comments were rooted in insecurities that my 20-year-old self was not equipped to handle. But in the moment, I let the words sink in. Maybe he was right. Maybe I was a vain person.
Another night, I was getting ready to see his band perform at a house party. I put makeup on, slipped into my favorite jean jacket, and examined myself in the mirror.
Why did I want to wear makeup tonight, I wondered. Was it too much? In a huff, I ran over to the sink and splashed water on my face. Dark water droplets fell toward the drain until the mascara and eyeliner were washed away. Then I felt even sillier, having spent so much time trying to appear chill and unbothered, two things I clearly was not.
After graduation, I started working my first grown-up job, and I was eager to dress the part. Makeup again became a thoughtless habit. I’d put on eyeshadow, eyeliner, mascara, and powder before going to the office and dutifully removed it all each night. My college relationship petered out, and, slowly, the self-conscious voice in my head did too.
When the pandemic hit a year later, I stopped going to the office and stopped putting on makeup altogether. My office became my kitchen. Meetings became Zoom calls. Work clothes became sweatpants and T-shirts.
As the months went on, the monotony and anxiety that filled daily life morphed into a low-level depression. I craved distraction. A dopamine hit. A place to rest my mind that wasn’t steeped in doom and gloom.
I don’t remember what came first: the desire to perfect myself or the videos that showed me how.
“I’m pretty sure I’m the person I see most now,” I joked to my friend one day. Living alone during the pandemic, I had endless time to stare at myself in the bathroom mirror, and no one around to make me self-conscious of my self-obsession.
Plus, on every Zoom call and every FaceTime happy hour with friends, there I was, my face in a box in the corner. I began to fixate on my skin. Was I getting dark circles? Had those lines on my forehead always been there?
For every problem I encountered, Instagram had a solution. I could try the moisturizer that Jeanne Damas used or watch a video of a stranger to learn how to apply concealer under my eyes. I started ordering skincare products online. Kiehl’s avocado eye cream and hyaluronic acid. Then, I moved on to makeup. Glossier skin tints and cream blushes. Rarely did I have anywhere to wear them. But the buying was entertainment enough.
It’s no wonder to me why the skincare industry boomed during the COVID years. It’s likely the same reason lipstick sales go up during recessions: When things get tough, we allow ourselves little indulgences to get through. Beauty brands milked that tendency, employing influencers to hawk shiny bottles on every corner of social media, the place we go to remove ourselves from the difficulties of the present.
These splurges became a way to connect to beauty in an increasingly ugly world. There was a part of me that craved these influencers’ lives. I wanted their world, as writer Sheila Heti says, “to be mine by putting it in a cart on the internet, and buying it, and having it arrive at my door, and unpacking it, and knowing it’s mine and no one else’s.”
Recently, we’ve seen tween girls bombarding Sephora, eager to add a new Drunk Elephant product to their skincare ritual or a Summer Friday lip gloss to their makeup collection. We gawk and watch in awe when their own GRWM videos break into our algorithms. But it makes sense to me. Young girls love to play dress-up, to cosplay the adult women they hope to one day be.
