It started with my fingernails. I’ve always kept my nails short, clean, and completely unvarnished because I pick and peel at them whenever they’re polished. When it was time to do press for On Our Best Behavior last spring, though, I wanted a manicure, particularly because I talk with my hands—but I didn’t want to deal with its chipped aftermath. It was at this moment that I found myself deeply influenced by comedians/actors June Diane Raphael and Jessica Sinclair on The Deep Dive—who spent a series of episodes touching on gel manicures and how they’re a portal to becoming “women of significance.” (I promise, it was riveting listening.)
I texted their guy Bao (as mentioned, deeply influenced) and got my first gel manicure: Short, pale pink, glossy, indestructible. Once you start getting gel manicures it’s hard to stop (you have to grow out the damage), but I didn’t want to stop: I’ve become addicted to the toxic hard shell, both the way it looks and how it feels to type with these thicky, glossy nails. Clickety-clack. After the second round with Bao I switched shades.
“Do you have red nails?” This was a text from my college best friend Regina, who had seen my hands flying on an Instagram video and noted the change. Regina was born in Guadalajara and spent her formative years in Texas. My inability to put on makeup and refusal to wear it has always been a thorn in her side and she would take any opportunity I’d occasionally give her to put a smoky eye or a red lip on me when we would go to clubs in her early ‘20s. She loves makeup so much that she quit her job as a lawyer to start her own brand, Reina Rebelde. (I wrote about her a few months ago in “You Have to Start Where You Are.”)
I think most of us learn about beauty from the women in our families—mothers, older sisters, grandmothers. I used to watch my mom get ready when she and my dad would go out, but it was a short ceremony: My mom never really wore makeup, aside from a bright swipe of drugstore berry lipstick, and she’s had a pixie cut for most of my life—jet black hair that turned a shocking white by the time she was my age. She had some palettes of Mary Kay eyeshadow from what I remember that she rarely used, but that was it. People would say that she didn’t need makeup, a statement I’ve come to realize says a lot both about beauty standards and how we think about what women “need.”
My mom was and is very striking—as I watched her age, I noted that she became increasingly beautiful, more complex and interesting, more textured. A little softer in some ways and sharper in others. The only time I remember her being mournful about her face was in the aftermath of a lifesaving surgery to repair a partially ruptured aneurism behind her eye. She ultimately needed a second surgery to remove a piece of gauze that had been forgotten. She endured a lot of damage to her eye area—I remember hearing her mention she wished she could get an eye-lift. Ultimately, age has evened it out.
Like all my friends in the simpler days before TikTok, I was obsessed with the St. Ive’s mask that you could peel off, Bonne Belle Lipsmackers, and eventually Clinique Black Honey lip gloss, my first department store buy. I graduated to a much darker lipstick at some point my freshman year until I noticed I looked like a corpse without it—it was altering how I saw myself and I abruptly stopped. That, and I started to get attention from boys and men, which felt dangerous and undesired. (I write about this a fair bit in On Our Best Behavior.)
I’ve never wanted to hold the male gaze—aside from my husband’s—and have done what I can from my mid-twenties on to staunchly avoid it. I’ve always had tomboy-esque tendencies, and those have been what I’ve promoted. Yes, a swipe of lipstick, but that’s kind of been it.
Until the last year.
It started with the nails. And then a few months later, I went to Australia with my friend Richard (podcast episode here) to do press for my book there and to spend time with the team at Mecca, speaking at one of the summits they hold for all their retail leaders. I’d never been to Australia and so I’d never been to a Mecca—their stores are exclusively in Australia and New Zealand—but I’d heard tales of this legendary beauty retailer, where the experience is centered around service, service that’s brand agnostic. At the first store I walked into, at least three women asked me if they could help me find something—not in a pushy, perfume bottle wielding way, but casually, kindly. I didn’t know what to say because I know nothing about makeup and it’s been a long time since I’ve actually spoken to someone on a shop floor.
“I need a new mascara,” I offered.
“Tubing?”
“I have no idea what that means?”
“Do you touch and rub your eyes?” (I do.) “It wraps a polymer around each lash so it doesn’t smudge or smear—you’re not applying a pigment to the lash, so it’s cleaner and tidier.” She helped me apply one so I could see its effect. We laughed. It was fun.
Richard and I were also in Australia with Violette, a classically trained painter turned makeup artist from France, who is just so cool. (I wrote a bit about this trip, and friendship, here, in “The Layers.”) Violette was there to introduce her brand to Australia via Mecca and she led a makeup masterclass at the summit, where she painted a woman’s face and told the retail team stories, leading with this quote, from Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park:
“She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn’t supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”
Ooph.
That line felt big to me, raising an uneasy question I’ve always had. When is our appearance self-expression and when is it a coerced performance? Do I dress for myself, or for everyone else? Is makeup a way to blend in or stand out? What’s the “empowered” position, the one that aligns with the right feminist values? How many of us judge women who wear makeup, or have disdain for women who “care what people think”? (I’ve judged. I’ve felt disdain. I’ve felt worried about being judged too, and a bit like a traitor when I try to look my best.) All I knew is that I wanted Violette’s boldness and freedom. I started wearing a red lip in her honor—and soon a little bit of her blush.
Before I left Australia, I went to the Mecca flagship in Sydney where I pierced my ear, got a facial, and sat down with a fragrance specialist, which was maybe the last thing I thought I’d ever want to do. I’ve been living an unscented life for 20 years, but as she offered me little vials of grass and rose and patchouli (my fave) to smell, and then brought me fragrances to try, it felt like we were engaged in a great whodunnit. Would I love where we ended up? Would I smell familiar to myself? I left with Floral Street’s Chypre Sublime EDP, and then ordered Ellis Brooklyn’s Raven (she names her scents for literary tales) as soon as I got home because I kept smelling my wrist long after I’d left the store. It still shocks me, but I’m someone who wears perfume now, though as someone who rarely leaves my house, I promise: It’s just for me.
I went back to Australia in early March for more time at Mecca HQ, and this time, back in the Armadale store, I had a goal in mind.
“Can you teach me how to wear eyeliner?”
A woman named Finn sat me at one of the store’s makeup stations and looked carefully at my face. “I bet if you put eyeliner on it immediately travels.”
“How did you know?” I asked. “I mean, I don’t know how to put on makeup, but when I put it on, it really looks like I applied it in the wrong place.”
“It’s because you have hooded eyelids,” she explained. “It’s going to travel. I have a different idea that will be very simple.”
Finn then took an eyeshadow stick—this is an actual thing—filled in my eyelid, and blended it with a brush, like a windshield wiper. Then she watched as I did the other side.
“A little mascara and you’re done,” she offered.
But I wasn’t. I wanted more. I don’t know what’s infected me, but midlife makeup has come to seem…so fun.
A day after I got home, I spoke at a women’s retreat hosted by Monica Corcoran Harel of Pretty Ripe, a site she started for women who are 40+. At dinner the first night she asked us if, as mid-lifers and beyond, we feel invisible. This is an interesting question and I’ve been thinking about it a lot in the days and weeks since. And invisible to whom? I think I feel more visible now than I have in my whole life. I don’t know if I’m visible to men—I’ve so long trained myself to avoid their attention, I couldn’t tell you if they look at me or not—but I’m visible to me. And I feel like other women see me too.
I have to wonder if that’s why I suddenly feel so free to wear a “bold lip.” (Still don’t know how to do a smoky eye.) Perhaps the cloak of cultural invisibility—if visibility is indeed, brokered solely by men—makes us more visible to ourselves, and each other, like a secret world that only women of a certain age can enter.
Last year, a week before my book came out, Martha Stewart popped up on the cover of Sports Illustrated. This was a complete Rorsach test for my friends: Some of them were exhilarated at the prospect that an 80-year-old woman could finally be celebrated as a sex symbol; others were furious and exhausted. “So wait, there’s really no age now where there’s not pressure to be publicly hot? We’re still supposed to care about this shit when we’re on the waiting list for retirement communities? How do we get off this ride?”
These are great questions, and this debate is so old, particularly in the way it pits us against each other. What would it look like to lose the conflict, not only for ourselves, but for our daughters? Do you all know?
And do you feel invisible? Invisible to whom?
THE LATEST FROM THE PODCAST:
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4/4: Understanding the Drama Triangle with Courtney Smith
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3/28: The collective power of teenage girls with Mattie Kahn
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3/21: Breaking family patterns with Vienna Pharaon
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3/14: The upsides of menopause with Lisa Mosconi, PhD
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3/7: On the scientific and the spiritual with Jeffrey Kripal, PhD
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2/29: Five things I’ve been thinking about (Solo Episode)
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2/22: The basics of Spiral Dynamics with Nicole Churchill
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2/15: On being “Basic” with Kate Kennedy
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2/8: On maintaining sexual desire with Emily Nagoski PhD
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2/1: On the essential nature of relational conflict with John & Julie Gottman, PhDs
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You Have to Start Where You Are
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PART 4: The Achilles Heel of Women
PART 3: Who Gets to Be an Expert?
PART 2: The Perception (and Reality) of Scarcity
PART 1: Ending the “Manel”—Doing this Requires Understanding Ourselves
My Baby-Thin Skin: The Shame of “Disappointing” People and Our Doubled Selves
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Full archive HERE
My New York Times bestselling book—On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good—is out now.
I don’t have a clear reason but I’m writing this comment through tears. I’m 62, happily single (divorced) but wondering how that might work or not as I get older. I've always been told things like, “you don’t need makeup, you’re beautiful without,” and I’m actually content with my appearance, but I do often feel invisible - and dismissed. I’m watching my own beautiful mother fade. She’s 92 and in remarkably good health. She looks much younger than her years, but her memory is going and she’s very tired. Invisible and dismissed takes on a whole new meaning when I think about her and many of the other elderly people who live in retirement & assisted living communities. There has to be a better way.
This is such an interesting concept. I’m a gel-manicures-for-life kinda girl. I wear some makeup, but not a lot. What’s interesting though, is I will watch makeup tutorials like it’s nobody’s business 🤷♀️. There’s this weird tug and I’m constantly intrigued. Having an 18 year old daughter, I can say for certain that beauty conversations are hard, and they have been for a while. The programming starts so early. Elise, we need a young adult version of OOB…for tweens and young teens so we can get ahead of the programming.