'Where is make-up'
I'll always remember the phrase being used in one of the television episodes of Spitting Image in the 1980s with a skeleton of an actress who shall be nameless saying "where is make-up". It signified the fact make up made you beautiful and glamorous, without it, well, you were just a horrid skeleton.
Fast forward today: My wife recently came back from a beauty saloon, they were supposed to be doing her up for an engagement party and bang, a revelation, the woman in front of me whom I thought I knew for 30-odd years, was no more.
Her eye lids were blacker as if they have been hit, more prounced stretch marks on the temple, cheek bones hammered by blobs of powder that sort of drooled to the chin, and goodness knows what.
”I think I look like a ghost," she said upon entering our front door and proceeding to the bedroom mirror and started wiping and wiping, with a tissue, lessoning the stuff smacked on her face 20 minutes ago.
Next came in, I think it was my sister totally unrecognizable, a face change, really with the same mortifications, except the make-up saloon girl took it upon herself to experiment with different colors and eyelashes. What a sight, a scene from a horror movie!
"How do I look," she said. I put a brave face on. "It's nice, I said without wanting to hurt her feeling. A long time ago, one teacher said to me nice doesn't mean anything, it's just nice.
The girl had told them the face will soon absorb the creams and they would look better quickly. That is a new one I thought to myself where you have to look awful before you can look better!
Actually the moral of the story especially in this part of the world is you have to go to a good, reputable beauty parlor, and expensive one too, to get a decent and new look-a-like that so you can say this is beauty and glamour.
"This is not cheap," one of them shouted.
"Learn from past experiences, if you want to splash yourself with make-up, do it yourself, it looks much better," I added "of course you can pull your chin up, prepare to pay a bundle, and get the best".
