Sometimes I'd jazz it up by drawing a beauty mark on my cheek and hanging grandma's rhinestone earrings from my ears. A really racy night included bright blue eye shadow smeared on my lids and a scarf tied around my finger. I continued this madness until I entered junior high.
My first mistake was going to see "Bye Bye Birdie." I wore my hair in what is now recognized as Ann Margret's worst look. To try and achieve the correct color I would rinse it in a combination of lemon oil, vinegar, mayonnaise and hydrogen peroxide to render it copper. Instead, it was odd shades of orange. I smelled like a 121 item salad bar.
I left this phase when the Liverpool Look landed. Let me describe what I looked like in 1964 and what it took to get me there.
My long, straw like hair, rendered 17 different colors by every item in my mother's pantry, was washed and rolled on tomato soup cans. I dried it under a machine that looked like some futuristic gas mask and then ratted it into a tower that defied gravity, not dissimilar to the structure in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."
One can, yes, one CAN, of Just Wonderful hair spray was used to keep the edifice in place. Next, tubes of white lipstick and green eye shadow made their way to my face. Black eyeliner and mascara completed the look. Staring at the photo now, I am reminded of a Picasso print I once owned and gave away.
Makeup. My history has been long and sordid. It's a history born of a deep desire to have a face that looked like everyone else's -something that in my mind could only be accomplished through the miracle of cosmetics. And that's how I wound up at one of those makeover counters.
After too many years of fixing my face with the dexterity of a monkey with a paint by numbers set, I figured it was time to let a professional take over.
First she handed me nine different liquids and asked me to remove the caked pancake from my face. I wasn't wearing any pancake! Then I was told to remove my shadow, liner, mascara and under-eye concealer. The last time anyone saw me without shadow, liner, mascara, and Lord knows under-eye concealer was after the birth of my older daughter and at that time the only thing missing was the liner.
But I digress. I was shown how to "pinken" my sallow skin with toner. Then I had to tone down the pink with a yellow base. After that was a regimen that included powders, concealors, highlighters, blushers, shading and contouring. Next was the light eye shadow, the dark eye shadow, my upper lid, my lower lid, my upper lashes, my lower lashes and my brows. Finally came the lip liner, the lip cream, the lipstick and the lip gloss.
I had to put on all this stuff by myself so she could see my "technique". Of course, I kept doing things like missing my eye, not blending the base into my neck and stopping more than once to wonder if I tied a yellow sweater on my head these days would I resemble Marilyn Monroe?
Actually, I wanted to finish up looking like Michelle Pfeiffer in any one of her films. Unfortunately the only movie that comes to mind is "The Wizard of Oz" and the amount of paint Wardrobe needed for every single actor in the scene when the Wicked Witch melts.
Catching a glance at myself as I leave the counter, I realize that all of my makeup is in various shades of purple, similar to a grape gone bad. I am a nuclear accident. I go home, head for the shower and watch the makeup rinse off into the drain. As it spirals down I realize that there is no way I can look like everyone else. I can only look like me.
So now I'm back to my three minute makeup ritual and the only thing I have left to say about makeup is that somehow we need to maintain a delicate balance between too much and too little. Or, to quote a friend of mine after seeing someone wearing, shall we say, more than her share - "She has a lot of class. And all of it's low."
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Cheryl Kravitz, President of CRK Communications, is respected nationally for her expertise in community relations, motivational speaking, crisis communications, media relations, media training, feature writing, diversity training, fund development and issues management. You can contact her at:
http://www.crkcommunications.com or crk725@aol.com.
