Two weeks without an update? Shameful! I can’t keep blaming for work stress for not providing regular updates (no matter how tempting…), or else I might never post again! Just a short and sweet update about one single goal this week!
48. Remain a conscious makeup consumer
In order to provide a worthwhile update about this goal, first I ought to give my reasoning for setting myself this goal in the first place. What, in fact, is a ‘conscious makeup consumer’? Why is conscious consumption important to me? How do I plan to reach this goal? First of all, makeup has been something I’ve been interested in for more than fifteen years. I started playing with makeup when I was 7 or 8, and was wearing makeup regularly when I went to secondary school at age 11. From the frosted silver eyeshadow and glittery lip glosses of the early 2000s to the thick black eyeshadow of my goth/emo phase, I’ve certainly been around the proverbial block! Nowadays, I wear a full face of makeup almost every day, and even though I don’t cake it on, I’m probably more interested in makeup than the general consumer.
Is this a problem? Not necessarily, or maybe I should say, not yet. I’m certainly not spending ungodly amounts of money on makeup, but for about a year I was buying more makeup than I was using. Cheaper brands have improved a lot in quality since I was younger (disregarding Boots’ Seventeen, which has always been bloody brilliant), and the fact that I could buy a 2 euro lipstick and it could look good on me was a revelation. The low price point made it easy to buy an eyeliner when I went to the chemist for some facial wash, or to try a nail polish in a fun colour, or grab a new blush because I’d had a rubbish day at work. Even though I was not spending more than 5 euros per month, non-essential makeup was slowly but cluttering up my shelves.
I’m not very materialistic, or at least, I think I’m not. My main vice is and always has been books, and I love my collection of houseplants, but I don’t have a messy house full of rubbish. I try to be a conscious consumer and am mindful of the fact that western society is very much based on capitalism and the constant encouragement to buy, buy, buy. I find it important to not create unnecessary waste, but I also don’t like looking at a bulging makeup bag in despair because I’m overwhelmed by my options. I like to keep my life as clutter-free as possible, mainly because mess causes me stress.
And then, stumbling across Reddit’s many makeup-related boards, I came across the MakeupRehab subreddit. This board is a tongue-in-cheek counterbalance to the more popular MakeupAddiction subreddit, where people discuss new products and show off pictures of their makeup. The focus of the MakeupRehab board is to stop mindlessly and endlessly buying product after product and instead determining what you actually enjoy using and fully enjoying what you already own. No matter what YouTube ‘gurus’ insist, makeup is a consumable good, not a collector’s item or an investment piece. I decided to get on board and have since discovered a lot about my makeup habits and preferences. I’ve finished 24 makeup products since last year and have only bought replacements for essentials that I ran out of – no ‘fun’ products like lipsticks or eyeshadows. Until last week, that is.
Yes, that’s right, after a full year of so-called ‘replacement-only’ purchases, I bought a whopping big eyeshadow palette with 24 shadows and a highlighter. Why? Well, I wish I could say that I was in dire need of metallic forest green eyeshadow, but I’m not. The fact of the matter is that I enjoy buying makeup, however shallow, materialistic or privileged that might be. I like painting pretty colours on my face, and my ascetic attitude towards makeup has sucked a lot of the joy out of it for me. The Zodiac Palette by BH Cosmetics was so visually appealing that it drew me right in, and it features a lot of colours I don’t own and have wanted to try and wear for ages. Do I think this will be the beginning of a buying spree? No, but it might be the start of allowing myself to stop adhering so strictly to self-imposed rules and live a little. May this be the last makeup purchase for the foreseeable future, or at least until I run out of mascara again.
Fun fact: the makeup boards are absolutely filled with people who cite My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way as the driving force behind their first experiments with makeup. I, for one, definitely wore red lipliner underneath my eyes in 2006 because Gerard did, and in fact I will proudly do so again once I am in possession of my Zodiac palette. Gerard, it’ll be in your honour.
