Musing

I have to say that thinking back, it is an absolute miracle that my mom asks my advice about makeup and hairstyles.

I mean, really. There was the summer I turned my hair orange with Sun-In on a camping trip with my friend Loretta. There is all the sparkly pink and purple makeup I used to wear - and since I have ruddy, Irish skin this was much better in theory than in practice.

There was my curling-iron-home-perm-and-aquanetextrasuperhold-addiction in high school.

There was the college phase I went through where my hair was so long it was three different colours and I wouldn't dye it - white-blond on the ends, dishwater blonde in the middle, and darker at the roots. (I have that dry, coarse, curly, always-turning-white surfer hair in real life that is always changing colors, except that thankfully now my hairdresser controls it for me). And I wore fuchsia lipstick (Ultima II) for most of that time. And I mean, it was "Here come Jennifer's lips!" pink.

Next I sold Mary Kay (Lord, what WAS I thinking) and wore as much makeup as I could at any given moment, and the little stash of tiny plastic Avon lipsticks I kept hidden in my bedroom in third grade. (I didn't care what colors looked good on me. I just thought about what I wanted to wear that day.)

Nobody in their right MIND ought to listen to me about makeup and hairstyles. But...you know. I learned. I managed to figure out what works and doesn't, and despite the fact that my mom saw every single one of my crazy experimentations, she now trusts me to help her with makeup. Although I never really committed *serious* makeup offenses like outlining my lips with dark liner and filling in the middle with light pink, I did pluck my eyebrows into tadpole shapes until I got to college and realized how old it made me look. Years of working with makeup artists and trying to figure out what works has actually made me pretty confident in my ability to choose a look for people. But it was pretty funny getting here.

My mom (in my defense, and also because it is funny) used to put Scotch tape on my bangs and cut along the bottom. Which worked great as long as she got the tape straight - but she never did. So I have about ten thousand pictures of me in grade school with crooked hair. Which again, wouldn't have been so bad - except I wore glasses, which DID sit straight, and provided a line by which to measure the crookedness of my hair. (Why she never just cut along my GLASSES I will never know. I should ask.)

And really, she is always asking my opinions about makeup. So this weekend when she swiped the concealer out of my makeup bag and tried it out, I didn't think twice. We went makeup shopping and she said the concealer was just what she was looking for. (Bobbi Brown, for those of you who wonder. It's a miracle elixir.) But on the drive home yesterday I started thinking about all my little experiments over the years and thinking about how funny it is that she asks me at all. By rights she ought to run the other way when the topic of makeup comes up.

But she doesn't - how cool is that?