Dear Cosmetics Industry,
I have no idea how you do it, but you do. You take a little seed, a fluttering, fledgling of nothing and nurture it into an amazing flower with nothing more than a bit of colored dust, water, and maybe a little whale bile. Whatever it takes. You make us look on the outside like you tell us we look on the inside, and we are so willing to pay you dearly for the chance to bring our little light out from under that rough, hand-hewn wicker basket that is the earthly shell we are eternally confined within.
But what is it about this transformation that amazes me the most? At what moment am I overwhelmed with realizing the magnitude of what it is that you truly accomplish for millions of people each and every day? Is it when I look in the mirror and see the glamor shine through? Is it when the photos look like a poster from the next Hollywood blockbuster? Is it when I see the looks of awe and adoration in the eyes of the men, women, children, and animals (both wild and domesticated) around me? Nay. It is not at these times.
It is when I am removing these aforementioned colored-particulate laden whale-bile products from my person that the vastness of the universal impact of the depth of your influence reaches into my soul and warms the cockles of my organ of respect.
It is then that I realize that you are marketing, advertising, and product placement evolutionary lords, and we should all swim silently before you if we ever desire to emerge from the muck in which we live to be able to one day gaze directly up at you upon your pedestal.
Perplexed? Please, let me clarify. I don’t wear make-up often. A few times a year at best. But what I have discovered is that when I do wear it, as easy as it is to go on, it takes about 10 times more effort to get it off. I wash. I scrub. I cleanse. I rinse. I look up – and it’s still there. WTF? Repeat. Wash, scrub, cleanse, wash, scrub, cleanse, rinse, look – WTF!!! This is the moment I am talking about. How do people do this every day?
I get the opposite side, putting on the make-up makes sense. Masks, imperfections, protection, sure, what ever you need. You get something out of it, so you put in the time at the beginning of your day. Fine. But having to invest ANOTHER HOUR to wash the shit off? These guys are marketing geniuses. How have they convinced so many people that they need to invest this much time into looking like, well, looking like anything? They don’t even say we’ll look like anything! Just not like us! And we get to spend our good money and our good time to do it. I don’t even like to sit too long on the toilet, and that’s something that is actually necessary. If it doesn’t come, it’s going to wait until next time. I’m busy.
So after last night where I was the pirate guide at the haunted house, and after tonight at the Denver Zombie Crawl, my wife and son understand that for the next few days, I will have some eye make-up hanging around. I’m not gouging out my eyes to get it off. I’m not buying another pot of some other chemical to get it off. And I’m not going to soak my face in warm water for the next 2 hours waiting for the muck to get soft enough to wipe off easily with a moist towelette drenched in denatured alcohol or MEK. When the skin cells fall off, so goes the muck.
I am beautiful. I will swim with my muck and gaze up at the marketing lords of the cosmetic industry, forever in awe of their prowess. And while they have discovered what makes us tick, they will never understand why over 7,000 grown adults will dress as zombies and descend upon downtown Denver. And why we bring our kids. And we love it. So there.
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