Not Makeup

My daughter noted a while back that I get into things rather intensely for a while and then move on to the next thing of interest.   I don't ever fully abandon things, my interest just goes to a back burner state until needed.

Makeup has been one of these things.   I have plenty of makeup options to do whatever style I want.   I am lacking in some skills that would make the makeup look really good and I was running into some technical issues that were causing the makeup to look not so good.

Some of this is a factor of age and some is related to skill and knowledge.  The knowledge part is understandable.  The products these days are far superior to what I used when I was younger (read high school.). They perform well and are hard to mess up.   But there are some things I was still having trouble with.   The other area was colors.   I kept messing around with different colors and hadn't settled in on what I thought looked natural and complimentary on me.

Because I was less than satisfied with how things looked, mostly thinking it was a net sum zero when I was done putting everything on appearance-wise and a negative on the investment of time in order to get to the look, I stopped rushing about in the morning, trying to get seventeen products on before heading out the door (these were pre-COVID-19 mornings.)

I kept up with watching videos from some of the people I was following though.   The one thing that I've seen again and again is something I just wasn't doing—at all.

My daily skincare routine has always consisted of this:
   1)

If that looks like an empty list, it's because it is.   I've never worn makeup, but I've also never had any skincare regime.   I don't even wash my face aside from when water gets on it in the course of washing my hair.  What caused me to delve into the world of makeup in the first place were two factors.   The first is I always think I need something when I get to lose color I had from the summer months.  Maybe makeup could help?  The second was I was just looking older.

All these young, beautiful, beauty gurus looked fabulous.   If I put on makeup like they were doing, maybe I could look like I was younger myself.   More stylish.  Less drab.    I didn't find an easy and quick path to a more radiant, youthful me, so partly because of that and mostly because of the time commitment, I dropped the makeup aside from special occasions.

With one exception.   What I kept hearing about in video after video was the need to hydrate the skin and moisturize.   There were steps you needed to do before you ever got to the makeup.   One product, hyaluronic acid, kept coming up.   It's a humectant that acts like a tiny sponge, holding up to a thousand times its weight in water.  That, along with a moisturizer were the pre-makeup steps.

I started just doing those two things and I've been amazed because moisturizing my skin has made me look a lot better.   It's helped with the wrinkles.  I've been so impressed with these two, not makeup, steps that I haven't even needed to put on makeup to look younger and better, I think.  And that's a whole lot easier than makeup.

The Big Boy Update:  My daughter is going to do a stained glass project for her retired braillest.   The project is in a box and she knew some things about it, but my son, of his own accord, said, "can I see that so I can describe it to Reese?"   He very accurately told her about everything in the design, starting with the largest elements, "there's a rainbow in the middle with two dolphins, one on each side above the rainbow."  He went into further detail and she listened carefully.   She will be putting individual elements into the project but just like someone creating a cross stitch pattern, it's hard to get a sense of what you're making when you're working sone small element at a time.   I was proud of my son for offering to describe the project to her.   He did a very thorough job.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter was working on a list of her classmates today, adding a descriptive adjective for each one.   The student's lists will be combined and each person will have their own list of character traits that their friends think best describe them.   When formatting the file I had tried to get the list all on one page—which I had done successfully—but the information was a little tight.   My daughter was moving up and down rows, rolling the paper fractionally in and out of her braillewriter as she changed her mind or wasn't sure what to do about one friend yet and had skipped forward.   I wasn't sure how she was keeping her place and apparently I wasn't alone because she cried out from her desk, "Help, I got off course!"