“I’ve always cringed at the thought of a slavish devotion to makeup. But I just turned 35, and I rarely go out anymore without it.”
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
Three months after giving birth, handfuls of hair shook loose from my scalp whenever I ran my fingers through it. I cut the shoulder-length hair down to three inches, and the few silver strands that had been hidden before seemed to triple.
My first year postpartum was the frumpiest of my life. But I was trying hard not to let on that I noticed. Selfies every week. Formfitting dresses to show off the slow shrinking of my distended uterus. And makeup. There was no mistaking it then: I officially needed it. Dark crescents had settled under my eyes like sinister little grins.
Now my daughter is 4, and the makeup — concealer, pressed powder, liner pencils, tricolor eyeshadow — is in a faded plastic Macy's bag I keep either under the front passenger seat of my car or at the bottom of my oversized handbag. I am willfully disorganized about my cosmetics; it helps me believe they're less important than they've become. They're to be applied at red lights or hastily slapped on without the continuous aid of a mirror. I don't look too closely at myself: a glance here to make sure the eyeliner isn't askew, a quick look at the outline of my lips to confirm I haven't colored outside them, the briefest final appraisal. There. It's on. No big deal.
But each year, my nonchalance is more of an act. Every birthday, the ruse shows more wear. I look longer and with an increasingly skeptical gaze. It's a little embarrassing to care, to find myself becoming someone who's trying to "freshen" her natural face, to regain elasticity where I'd never even noticed I'd had it before, to notice the new creases at the corner of my eyes and mouth. I've always cringed at the thought of a slavish devotion to makeup. But I just turned 35, and I rarely go out anymore without it.
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
In my early twenties, there was no bag. There was a lone tube of Cover Girl tinted lip gloss and a brown Wet 'n Wild liner. It was enough.
"Play down your day-to-day makeup," my mother advised when I was 15. "That way, when you're really done up, it's special."
The first time I attended someone's prom, I was a sophomore. I sat on the lid of the toilet seat an hour before my date arrived, feeling gossamer brushes dust my eyelids and cheeks with iridescent color. I felt mom's mascara wand gently tug my eyelashes out to their full length. When my eyes flew open, I understood. Makeup transmogrified. It could make wiggle room between your workaday self and whomever the mineral-powdered person was staring back at you. In that space, you were a changeling.
Were you coy, seductive, brazen? You could test it anywhere — at a new Starbucks, maybe, where the baristas have never seen you in a hoodie, eyes still crusted with remnants of sleep. Or in the produce section of a grocery store, batting violet-rimmed eyes at handsome strangers.
Makeup was fun, perfect for creating an air of mystery. But I didn't need it then. I didn't need it when I met my first boyfriend, who regularly kissed off the only thing I wore at 18: tinted gloss. I didn't need it at 21, when I met the man I'd date for eight years, the father of my daughter; we would separate when I found out I was pregnant. I didn't wear much of it when I was expecting, either. I was alone. Who would've noticed?
New motherhood was exhausting, but I didn't expect it to age me. I come from deep brown women, a grandmother routinely mistaken for 10 or more years younger than her age and a mother more often assumed to be my sister than my parent. They each gave birth to one girl, but they were much younger than I was when they did so. At 17 and 19, respectively, their sexiest years were ahead of them. Even now, in their seventies and fifties, they shore up the veracity of the saying, "Black don't crack."
Not only did I inherit too little of their melanin, I also got pregnant a few weeks before turning 30. I had no precedent for the hastened aging to come. When my mother turned 30, I was 10. It was the year she would marry for the first time. She wore a conservative suit, made of cream brocaded fabric, and exchanged her vows behind a folding partition at our church between the 7 a.m. and 10 a.m. Sunday services. If anything made her look her age, it was the suit, meant more for a mother of the bride than the bride herself. But her face was as smooth as finished oak, her eyes as wide as an adolescent's, brightened by marital hope. When she and her new husband left me with friends at the church that day, she almost looked like a college girl, waving to her family after drop-off at her dorm.
Until I got pregnant, I'd been used to being mistaken for a student on the college campuses where I taught. On occasion, I was still carded when ordering wine. It's easy to take an ageless appearance for granted, especially when you come from a family where no one can guess anyone else's age by their wrinkles or gray.
