GIVE ME A BREAK:A FRIEND TELLS me I look a bit wrecked sometimes. Maybe she's right. Is it the stress? Sleeplessness? Multi-tasking? Responsibility for things outside my control? Another friend says that every woman my age looks wrecked for pretty much the same reasons and that I should stop the soul-searching. She says I need to buy a new lipstick, since I can't remember what happened to the one I last used at Christmas, though a certain magpie teenager may be implicated.
“At this stage in my life, am I not entitled to let myself go?” I ask.
“No. You need to rebrand yourself.”
“I’m not a product. I’m not Heinz ketchup or Cillit Bang.”
“You need to think of yourself in a new way. Rebrand yourself as the wise older woman. Young people really like that.”
I look around the office at all the talented, clever and committed young people with their blogs and their Twitters and their sense of style. I used to be like them, though without the blogs and the Twitters, since they hadn’t been invented then and I started my career on a Remington when some of them were in pushchairs.
So I head with unnecessary haste to the mother lode of cosmetic ingenuity, Brown Thomas, where you can usually get your make-up done for free or for the cost of a lipstick. I slink shyly past the gorgeous young things mobbing the Mac counters and dawdle for three seconds at Armani, since make-up artists I’ve met say Armani is best for older skin. Older skin. I can’t believe I’m even thinking that thought. This is insane, go to Boots! Then a nice girl with a professional make-up apron around her waist is asking if I need any help. Yes, help to look less wrecked, I tell her, leaving out the re-branding, which may be a little outside her area of expertise.
Before I can fully form the realisation that buying new make-up may cost me more than feeding the family for a week, she has me perched on a chair and has already started with the Light Master Primer. Things have got to this point? A lick of paint isn’t enough and I need primer? If so, shouldn’t we be doing a bit of paint-stripping and sanding first?
The primer has silicone in it to fill “tiny lines”. The last silicone I bought was a tube of DIY gunk to try to stop the shower from leaking, but when I dare look into the mirror, I have to admit that I look better. The make-up girl studies the effect. Would I like to try a little foundation? I might as well.
Foundation applied, my face is a blank and glowing canvas, so there is more work to do. Out comes a bronzing powder – the sort of thing that was called blusher in my day – then a wand-thingy to erase the deep circles around my eyes, until there’s no holding back and product after product is applied.
While she works away, I think about being a product in the personal brand society. Books and blogs preach that “you are a brand” and advise on forming “the brand called you”. When did the becoming a brand thing happen? Was I asleep? It’s no longer good enough to do good, solid, consistent work over many years in an attempt to build what used to be known as integrity. Now it’s “being a brand”. And if your YouTube video goes viral, you can go from nowhere to being a brand in about six days or even six minutes – rather than six years or six decades.
When she is finished, the Armani girl has shaved six years off my face and to celebrate, she brands my lipstick with the initial K in Swarovski crystals free of charge – I am now branded. There is no doubt in my mind, when I see the bill, that I have done something so rash and irresponsible that I will regret it.
Back at the office, I find my friend.
“Notice anything different?”
“You’re wearing make-up, but it looks like you’re not.”
“It takes a lot of make-up to look natural. Am I a brand yet?”
“You still have to do something about the eyebrows.”
Then it’s back to my desk with new resolve and a mental note to replace my missing tweezers (the magpie again).
The next day, somebody says, “You look pretty. And you’ve lost weight.”
“It’s only make-up.”
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned,” she says, “you have to take that extra half hour in the morning to put on that make-up and blowdry that hair, which is difficult, I know, when you’re up late with a teenager sitting on the side of your bed needing to talk.”
“Not to mention the garden in need of weeding and the books I want to write.”
“You can still do those things while wearing make-up.”
Such have been the compliments wreathed with undisguised relief I’ve received. I’m beginning to suspect that, after a certain age, wearing make-up is a social responsibility to stop making other people feel depressed just looking at you. I’m not so sure about becoming a brand, though I’m working on it.
