of gold dust and cleavage

I didn’t think I would be posting on makeup again, but I stumbled upon this:

I know there are people reading this essay who will say that makeup is absurd, and I won’t quarrel with them. All esthetic activity is on some level absurd. By the same token, philosophers have argued since the dawn of time that there is an essential human need to engage in ostensibly useless and purely esthetic activity. Applying makeup is a small act of artistry, performed every morning and touched up throughout the day. It’s the same old canvas, to be sure, but it offers itself anew again and again. All art involves repetition with variations. Besides, the sameness of the face is belied by the fact that it contains a mutating consciousness, that it shifts in its relationship to the world, that it ages.

The return of youth that makeup promises is not really bought seriously by most women. We know that makeup is a frail stop-gap measure, a lame palliative. We don’t need Hamlet to tell us that we can “paint an inch thick, [but] to this favor [we] we must come” — we know it every time we look at ourselves in the mirror. We don’t expect it to stop us from aging, only to gussy us up a bit in the face of time’s relentless sickle.

One of the most poignant and wondrous spectacles I know is seeing a very old woman insist on having someone put on her makeup. It’s something I’ve seen numerous times in hospitals and nursing homes. I did it for my own mother before she died. Even as she knew she was close to death, she still wasn’t prepared to give up on art and succumb to nature. I loved that determination in her and cling to it in myself. If we are, as Shakespeare said, “this quintessence of dust,” let it at least be gold-flecked and luminous.

~ Paula Marantz Cohen, All Made Up

While Cohen tends to ignore the corporate behemoth that moves and shakes the cosmetic industry, she writes eloquently and thoroughly about the “art” of makeup. She writes about makeup as it were an act of play, of interaction with your face as a canvas, and not so much as a coverup, a crutch upon which we rely, a sign of a society where appearances are so often valued more than substance.

Meanwhile, this other article reviews a book that provides a slightly different perspective:

“Show me a woman with a good three inches of cleavage on display, and I’ll show you a woman who, rightly or wrongly, has little faith in her powers of conversation.”

~ Hadley Freeman in book The Meaning of Sunglasses: And a Guide to Almost All Things Fashionable

While we may like to believe that clothing and makeup is all about self-expression and art, more often than not, it’s a matter of hiding parts of body we’re ashamed of, or of impressing the opposite (or the same) sex, and of a comfortable escape of deeper pains that afflict us.