Marriage Is Not An Option. Yet.

I am one of those girls who loves dressing up, but only once in a while, about less than a typical fashionista but more than the average jobless woman in her late 20s. So, during those days of girly-girl insanity, I might end up either wearing a short skirt, gussying up my face with full make-up, showing some cleavage or walking in 3-inch stilettos.

So, one time, I decided to go to school in sans full female painted warrior mode and proceeded to attack my make-up drawer. Yes, I do not have a kit, like most girls do, but instead I have a drawer for all my cosmetics. Over the years, I have accumulated a vast amount of cheap and not-so-cheap make-up in various kinds, brands and colors, and they are all sitting at the top drawer of my vanity. My beautification skills are still not as brilliant as I would have wanted to but I’ve learned to improvise by using a couple tricks here and there. What has frustrated me when putting on make-up, since time immemorial though, is the fact that I can’t make my eyes pop to save my life.  

You see, I probably have the world’s shortest female eyelashes.

I can only dream about having long flirty eyelashes because apparently mascara and I don’t mix. Whatever I do, I always end up blotting them. An hour after leaving the house, I already looked like the girl who had just spent hours crying after she got dumped, with my raccoon eyes and clumps of mascara sticking to my upper and lower eyelids. I have tried the black mascara, the blue one, the cheap ones, the more expensive ones. In case anybody is about to give me unsolicited advice on how to use a mascara wand properly, trust me, of course, I curled the lashes first using the handy eyelash curler (Hello. Give me some credit. I am not dumb enough to actually not use one before applying the mascara) but still nothing worked. The curl in my eyelashes would only last for a couple minutes before my lacrimal glands would start acting up and proceed to blot out my previously well-applied mascara, making it run all over my eyelids, raccoon style.

It was sooo not the look I was going for.

When I finally resolved to accepting that indeed I do have the world’s shortest eyelashes and have already finished trying to cope up with this by slashing all the pictures of every long eye-lashed Maybelline model in every women’s magazine around the 100 m vicinity from my bedroom, I decided to try using eyeliner instead. Watching Gossip Girls and The Hills somehow inspired me in this new endeavour as I wondered how they looked so chic and casual with eyelinered-eyes and lip-glossed mouths even while apparently just lounging around at the comforts of their own homes.

Now, black eyeliner is making a comeback due to the so-called Emo. In my desire to avoid being stared at by salesladies at cosmetics counters or being mistaken as if I’m vouching for Emo-ness at the age of 27, I avoided the pencil and wanted to try my hand in using black liquid eyeliner. I remembered one particular young lady dentist I met from the community who used liquid eyeliner who looked incredibly fantastic that I sooo wanted to BE her. After poking my eyes repeatedly with the sharp pointed thingie, making weird crooked black lines in my upper and lower eyelids and having it blot all over my face less than 5 minutes after, I finally decided to give that up and stick to pencil instead.

I’ll take the Emo look over the girl-who-just-got-dumped look any day.

This cosmetics-related post looks obviously lost among the dating stories in this blog but I decided to write this because I remembered that Philip once commented that my eyes looked really nice after I had used some black eyeliner (with a pencil) on them. Must be why I’m doubly trying to master the skills for making my eyes pop using make-up, even if I’m repeatedly failing in them. Apparently I can stitch a 10-inch laceration using silk 3.0 in cutting needle in my sleep but I cannot make my eyes pop using mascara and eyeliner.

Sigh… the stupid things we do for love.

— inspired by Charming, but Single’s So… (November 7, 2007)