Why I Chose to Start With Makeup

My foray into the feminine world begins with cosmetics. There are a lot of girls out there who use it. Some of them only touch up their eyes and lips and nothing else. Others wear full faces of makeup and go all-out. Some of them do both but which one at a given time depends on the time of day or the occasion.

My own curiosity began by browsing a photographer friend’s website: http://www.sheribaldwinphotography.com/.

While each of those girls looks amazing in their own rights, I couldn’t help but notice the makeup some of them were wearing… and you knew they were wearing some, at least. Some of it was dramatic, some of it was subtle, maybe a teensy bit of it was edited, but it was all beautiful in a weird, artistic sense.

And while my cynicism led me to wonder what these girls would look like without makeup like that, I think in the end one small part of my brain managed to ask, in a tiny, tiny voice: “What would I look like with makeup like that?”

It’s a really big question.

I’ve never particularly liked how I look. I know I’m reasonably attractive, enough so that I get attention even without a full face of makeup, but I chalk a lot of that up to me being an approachable, bubbly sort of person with a strong personality, a loud voice and a shockingly small amount of shame. Also my boobs. But by and large, I’m not a knockout. And that was okay with me, because “I wasn’t wearing makeup.” Of course I wouldn’t look as good as her, because she’s wearing makeup and I wasn’t! So there was always that underlying assumption that the playing fields weren’t level, so I couldn’t be compared to someone gorgeous who was wearing makeup.

Like, I’ll look at a photo of a friend looking great and go “wow, she does look amazing.” Pause. “She’s wearing a lot of makeup, though (…and if I wore that much I’d look that good, too).”

For a very long time, this was fine by me. It was a self-esteem safety net, if you would. And while I always felt that weird pang of guilt when I thought like that, I brushed it off by telling myself it was because makeup just wasn’t for me. Sure, there may be plenty of people who are disappointed to hear that I’ve gotten into it because “I don’t need it” but that whole “what’s she complaining about, she’s gorgeous!” shtick is a whole other issue that I don’t really want to go into right this second.

(Bottom line on that is: you may think she’s hot and she may very well be, but she’s seeing every flaw on her face and body every time she looks in a mirror.)

So I strive to seek an answer to these questions: What would I look like with makeup on? How would it feel? How would I feel?

However, it’s important to qualify my newfound curiosity with a simple disclaimer: looks are not everything. Everyone who is literate enough to read this post knows that. But I go into this experiment knowing that I am a person who is generally happy with who I am, just not with how I look, and that is not a terrible place to be.