Bag O' Wrinkles

Anyone need four free tubes of Maybelline Great Lash Mascara?

Last week, and the week before that, Brian made the trek down to Little Rock, Arkansas for a business trip. While I think even the good people of LR would admit that while the place is nice, it is no booming cultural metropolis, yet in the business world is it known for being the home of none other than Maybelline, drug store cosmetic giant extraordinaire. And it just so happens that Brian's company has some relationship with Maybelline.

So one night last week Brian found himself at dinner with a bunch of Maybelline executives and their wives (my first question was about how much makeup they wore -- B said plenty....). After the dinner he was presented with a pink and black tote bag full of Maybelline products to bring home to the little woman.

Now obviously I say that with some dripping sarcasm, being a person credentialed to teach college students in Women's Studies classes everywhere about the chains that are cosmetics. But I will be the first to admit that I have a love/hate relationship with makeup. After all, I grew up in a place where being female meant that you wore makeup. I also have a mother who takes a solid hour to get ready in the morning, who still owns various sizes of curling iron, and who puts cuticle oil on every night. So I *know* what to do with the makeup if it reaches my little, cuticle-raggedy hands.

Having said that, however, I am a person of minimal makeup married to another person who doesn't like makeup and who finds it fakey and inessential. I admire this about Brian -- and also the fact that he taught me how to blow my nose while hiking by simply turning the head, pressing the other nostril in, and blowing as hard as you can.....

But lest I digress, the essence of my problem with makeup is that I don't mind looking like me -- after all, that's who I am -- but I do mind looking tired. And gray haired. And like children have beaten the life out of me. All of which are somewhat true. And I sense that makeup can help me out of that conundrum. For instance, I was somewhat bothered the other day when, having risen early enough to actually shower before dropping the kids off at preschool, Annemarie's teacher remarked that I looked pretty that day. The only difference was that I was actually wearing makeup.

I took my dissonance to the car with me. Annemarie adores makeup -- she'd put it on all day long if you'd let her, and I try to figure out how to strike a middle ground on that; I don't want to squash her style (meant in the most generic sense, of course), but at the same time, I certainly don't want her overly concerned with her looks or with the sense that she is inadequate. Enough people comment on how pretty she is now that we have a hard time redirecting her thinking back to how being kind, loving, smart, and helpful are really much more admirable traits. And so I told myself that, all while checking out whether the lines around my eyes, and THOSE DARK CIRCLES were as bad as I thought they were.

This IS the "natural look", I told myself. Even as a child I remember reading ads in the newspaper for makeup that talked about getting the "natural look", and I wondered why you had to manufacture something natural. And of course, the entire problem is that women have been told that their "natural" state is something not even naturally theirs. For all of the Women's Studies talk about the cultural constraints that women have faced being depicted as "nature" against the male "culture", here we have an example of women being even insufficiently natural.

Remind me to write on this someday, willya?

But back to the pink and black tote bag. It returned home from the Little Rock trek with contents unharmed. I dumped them out on the bed to find literally hundreds of dollars of skin care products before me -- the bag was not filled with makeup, but with lotions, wrinkle creams, eye creams (OH, THE EYE CREAMS!). Oh yeah, and several tubes of mascara. But mostly the face-erasing lotions.

As I sorted through the stuff, a certain irony struck me. Here Brian had gone to dinner with people he didn't know, who in an act of cultural gift-giving -- meant as ultimately polite -- he had been given a rather expensive assortment of cosmetics, a gift that only had meaning in as much as my face is inadequate as it is. And this is my current 33 year old face, which is certainly not that old and really isn't all that wrinkly, either. So really, it was like these guys were saying, "Brian, here's a big honking pink tote bag. Inside is the stuff to fix your wife's face. Because we all know that she doesn't look right."

Now those of you outside of the Women's Studies world are likely groaning and slapping your heads right now, telling me to get off my high horse.

I CERTAINLY WILL NOT! My super wrinkle-serumed, eye-creamed self WILL NOT!