Tinted Love

Look at me, looking at me.

Congratulations to everyone who has perfected their skincare routines in the past 14 months. You have faced your face. Makeup in the past year may have been benched, largely because people weren’t really leaving their houses, but were still perceiving and being perceived on screens. Looks remained unturned. I sometimes wore eye makeup and gradually have started revisiting my blushes and my lipsticks. While it feels silly to wear lipstick under a facemask, the impulse is too deeply ingrained to lose it, and now lipstick prints are indelibly ingrained into the insides of my Uniqlo face masks. Oops.

It may seem pointless to wear makeup when you’re not leaving the house or being seen, but “outside face” (like the opposite of indoor voice) is a flex that requires no occasion. I’ve seen a few agreements to the tune of see, women really do wear makeup for themselves, not for men! about it. (But I don’t know how true that is considering the patriarchy is so far conditioned into our brains that the way we see ourselves is the way the patriarchy has always pressed us to appear.)

I don’t think men (I mean in a cis-het context) have much to do with makeup anyway. They don’t even know we are wearing makeup most of the time, especially considering how the natural “no-makeup makeup” aesthetic prevails to the point of innovation into invisibility. These lip and cheek tints, I swear to god, are just getting more and more Ed Sheeran—once you blend them in, you don’t even know if you are wearing makeup yourself. You may as well be wearing nothing at all (nothing at all, nothing at all).

I use to think, What’s the point of all these tints! They’re expensive, they don’t do a whole lot. Who do they think they are? Back before Glossier really did it, everyone was raving about Smith’s Rosebud Salve, which despite its porky pink hue, did not actually impart any color at all within its petroleum polish (unless UNLESS maybe you were extremely pale or already had naturally pinky lips). You’d be surprised how far a product can go on dewy. Dewy pulls a lot of weight for any makeup that dares boast pigment when in fact it is so subtle it practically has none (again, unless you are extremely pale, and we know who is purporting these claims!).

In some cases, clarity is the sell, like Becca Cosmetics’ Zero No Pigment Foundation, truly a formidable goo that dared to sit with foundations while containing no pigment whatsoever, clear as a windowpane. Maybe that’s why Becca had to go away—such audacity could not go unpunished. Gucci Éclat De Beauté Effet Lumière gel face gloss (official name) also dares but makes no apology for what ostensibly is, which is just Goo By Gucci. (Perhaps the error was that Becca is not Gucci.) Anyway. I refuse to be gaslit by face goo!

Ease of use, like lots of things, is a paramount feature for makeup, maybe even more so than its ambitions. The ability to create your own beauty, to focus your own lens, no skills necessary, is what these passive pigments are truly pushing. So many of these multi-use, all-over colours that come in similar flattering palettes of warm peachy browns, rosy nudes, and plummy wine-stained… I will fall for them each and every time. They are my friends. They don’t want to change me, they just want to see me shine. They will caress and hold my cheeks gently with love and say, honey, it was you all along so that I may fall in love with myself a little bit in the mirror. And here I was, overthinking their intention and complete oversaturation in the market.

Because you know what, everyone loves a tinted face goo. TFG keeps good company. You’re always seeing it on the faces of professionally attractive people, who gas it up as the one thing they love to wear on their face and nothing else. So it’s no surprise at all then that everyone wants the goo that makes gorgeous people gorgeous. Even if all it does is unite the fleshy parts of your face into one shade and enhance the areas you want defined and flushed with a jelly of living color.

Plus, they’re so easy to use you can’t mess it up. They love to tell you this. It’s their first and foremost feature. Imagine! You can’t mess it up. What an indictment. What a humbling plea, a preemptive self-apology, a complete presumption of my skills and desires. How can you mess up something to which there are no rules? Calm down, tints. You have no concept of my penchant for cosmetic chaos. Try believing in yourself.

After months of not leaving my home for days at a time, seeing no one, and venturing the world with my face concealed, not wearing makeup for months really reset my perceiving capacity for cosmetics. The subtly enhanced vibrancy from various colored face goo brought me back to the living in a way that seemed to say, Remember outdoor face? Remember looking? Look at me, looking at me. Looking better than I did before, but also the same. But better than same! I swear there’s a difference, isn't there?