This is my face

I was 40 before I had the courage, finally, to show my face. All of it, as it is. It’s something I had to learn from my daughters, and it started with the simplest question: “mommy, why do you do that?” Why re-color my skin with foundation and my lids with eyeshadow, why draw circles around my eyes and clot my lashes with black goop? Why couldn’t I leave the house until my face was no longer my own?

I will never be beautiful. The tragedy is that I spent 15 minutes a day, 365 days a year for the last twenty-odd years (three full months of my life) laboring under the delusion that I was socially obligated to make the attempt to be so.

Bottom line: I didn’t have a good answer for my girls. Why do I do that? “Because I don’t think I’m pretty enough,” “Because society says so,” “Because we’re told that men want women who look like nubile kewpie dolls with big eyes, rosebud lips, and baby smooth skin.” All true, all disturbing, and none of which I wanted for my daughters.

So how did I answer? I gave it up. I reached for the courage I wanted them to have every time they came up against a senseless social standard. Question it, tear it down if you have to, re-write the book.

My rebellion was quiet as my cosmetics hit the trash can, but I want to shout it now: “Girls, ladies, be who you are (shout out Todd Parr)! You don’t need to change your face to be beautiful, and you don’t need to be beautiful to have worth.

I have the luxury, at 40, working from home, with husband and kids, not to have need of sex appeal and therefore not to care what I look like. But it shouldn’t be a luxury. Between facebook, insta, tiktok and the rest, I worry about the well-being of girls and women in the selfie era. I am not my face, facebook! My beauty, or lack of it, has nothing to do with anything, least of all my “likeability.”

If my face says anything about me, it is that I am who I am, no pretense. Beyond that, my crow’s feet, stretch marks, wrinkles, jowls, they say I’ve lived – with worry, sorrow, joy, laughter. To efface them is to efface the life that’s lived them.

I have nothing against those who use makeup as a form of personal expression, but I suspect that’s not most of us. If there’s one thing I can try to model for my daughters, I’d like it to be the courage to own who I am: wrinkles, pimples, mottled skin, thin lashes, and all, without shame or apology.

Bonuses to ditching makeup? That’s three months of my life back, several hundred bucks in my wallet, and that much smaller of an eco footprint.