A Beauty Product Fairy Tale
Once upon a time, there was a girl who had a lot of make-up.
She didn’t have the make-up because she bought it, or because she wore it. She had the make-up because an editor mistakenly believed she knew a lot about products, and assigned her to a bunch of beauty stories.
When she did these beauty stories, she received a lot of products to test. Anti-aging creams and nail strengtheners and 24-hour concealer, and lip pencils, and a straightening iron, and a spray-on body make-up kit…oh my.
Her boyfriend said, “You better get rid of this shit, it’s all over the house!”
The problem was that she didn’t have enough faces to test the hundreds of jewel toned eye shadows on—the look of Fall 2012!—or enough fingers to try out the myriad shades of metallic nail polish.
She didn’t even have any make-up brushes except for the Givenchy gift set her sister gave her when she used to do the gift bags for corporate events at Saks Fifth Avenue, and the Eco brushes she received after sitting next to Alicia Silverstone at a brunch. At that event, she also learned a lot about veganism, natural birth, and getting high off breast feeding.
She didn’t really want all of those products—in fact, she didn’t even know how to use most of them—but she also didn’t want to throw them out without giving them a try.
So when her boyfriend was in Asia, she invited over some of her closest girlfriends for a Toddlers and Tiaras themed make-up party.
“What’s a Toddlers and Tiaras themed make-up party?” they asked.
“Shhh,” the girl said. “Don’t worry about it.”
When the night came, the guests arrived in style, their faces bare, their bodies clothed in fashionable printed shorts, their interest piqued by enticements of pizza pies.
The girl served them Aperol spritzes, which is the easiest fancy cocktail to make in the entire world. All you need is ice cubes, prosecco, a spritz of Aperol—a bitter orange Italian liqueur—and a drop of seltzer, and you’re ready to rock out up to twenty different shades of eye shadow.
Those who were talented with make-up, and those who were not, were given equal reign over the spread.
As a result, some people ended up looking like fairies, others like old Hollywood vixens.
And others like crack whores who had just emerged from the back of an alley after having their faces smushed against a wall.
I did that one.
Even the men who attended didn’t escape without adornment, whether it was painted nails, or a spritz of diptyque perfume.
As the evening wore down, the crowd, all made-up, gathered around the television to watch the Olympics. At the stroke of midnight, hushed and itchy, they bade farewell, and disappeared into the warm, humid night, leaving behind all but the products on their faces.
“I’m back to where I started!” wailed the girl to her sister, who had fallen asleep on the couch.
In the interest of time, she dumped it all—the skin care products, and the lip glosses, and the acne treatments—into serving bowls, and stuffed them in the back of a kitchen cabinet, never to be found—she hopes—by her boyfriend.
