The other day I was watching this interview that beauty journalist Sali Hughes did with my makeup spirit animal, Sir John, a.k.a Beyonce’s makeup artist, a.k.a a living makeup legend, and Sali asked Sir John what made him fall in love with beauty.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.
Sir John said that for him, beauty was watching his mom, a makeup minimalist, put on her makeup every morning… For me, that wasn’t the case because my mom really wasn’t a makeup person. (I know, we’re so different!) She didn’t really wear a lot of it, and I didn’t have any sisters or close aunts or other family members to watch put on their makeup, but I was still always interested in makeup.
I remember my mom had a couple pieces (an eyeshadow compact and a blush) that she kept in the bathroom, and I remember going in there and looking at them with curiosity and wonder… They seemed so magical and mysterious to me!
But the real obsession didn’t kick in until I was 12 and 13, and it was fueled by magazines. This is probably going to sound odd to someone growing up now, because magazines don’t have the pull they did back in the day, but we didn’t have the Internet in the ’80s and early ’90s. I mean, our Internet was the magazine aisle at Thrifty’s, and I would tear into my monthly issue of Seventeen every month for the beauty stories, especially the makeup and hair stories. I did that from about 13 to 20… I don’t remember nails getting a lot of attention back then, though.
Oh, and here’s another sign of the times: I don’t remember seeing a lot of diversity in the how-to articles. Like, hooded lids? What’s that?! I would try eyeshadow tutorials and wonder what I was doing wrong because when I put shadow in my crease, it didn’t look anything like what Cameron Diaz was doing, LOL! Oh, and the hair how-tos were all made for girls with stick straight hair, so again I would wonder why they wouldn’t work on my wavy, unruly hair.
One thing I would do is tear out pages with pictures of makeup I liked and tuck them away for future reference, and I still do it today! I find old torn out pages in the most random places…
It’s a little sad to me that print publishing isn’t what it used to be, because I still remember how exciting it was to get all my beauty magazines every month and dive into them. I hope they stick around a while longer.
So, yeah, magazines fueled my love for beauty!
What fueled yours?
Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,
Karen
I loved my Young Miss and Seventeen!
Two things did it for me:
1) when I was 5-years old, I had a Barbie bust, but I rebranded her Judy Garland because I was crazy about The Wizard of Oz. That kindled my makeup artist tendencies;
2) when I was 7-years old I received a cheap girls’ “makeup kit” for Christmas. I applied the horrible frost shades (it was ALL FROST, eyeshadow, lips, err thang!), put on my new polyester red dress with the Holly Hobby sleeves and bib, and expected all eyes to turn to me as I solemnly sauntered down the basement steps where the playroom was located at a Christmas party we went to that night. No one even looked at me. That’s when I realized that beauty was more than makeup; however, it still didn’t stop me from experimenting and being deep into the goth eyeliner by the time I was 13. 😀
Your website!!
I tried to love makeup a few times before finding your website. But this is what really made it all make sense and click.
Thanks, Karen. 🙂
Aww, Amy! This makes me so happy. I’m glad that you’ve been able to discover and fuel your love for beauty here on MBB.
Happy Friday and have a wonderful weekend!
I would say magazines then shortly after that the Internet. I always like hearing what products celebrities use. I have 2 aunts and 3 cousins that went through beauty school so maybe it’s in my blood a little too!
It’s so great that you have a job doing something you love/are passionate about! I’m still waiting for my love of beauty to be ignited but I’m definitely more interested and educated because of your site. So, thanks for that! 🙂 I think a lot of it has to do with personality. In all things, I have a tendency to look for what I like best and then keep it forever. Some people love trends and trying new things but I guess I’m just pretty boring. While I do enjoy trying new makeup, it’s really just because I’m looking for that holy grail product in each category that I can then wear forever. Like Malice. HAHA! Btw, I was checking out Zulily for a work project and saw that they had the liters of Pureology Pure Volume. You can imagine how quickly I pulled out my credit card for that. It’s been pretty much impossible to find! Oh, and happy Friday. One of the boys is playing on a travel hockey team and his first game is tonight. I can’t tell you how thrilled I am! I’ll be so sad when those days are done. 🙁
Showing my age here, but I grew up in the 70’s/80’s, in the era when every girl wanted to look like Brooke Shields. I also love my Seventeen and Teen magazines. My first beauty products were from Bonnie Bell, when they still sold the HUGE lip smackers. Then when I was about 14, an aunt give me a purse full of an Avon makeup line tailored to teens, complete with pink lips gloss and frosty blue eyeshadow and I was HOOKED! I love the transformative power of makeup and how it can empower a woman, so much so, I spent 12 years being a beauty consultant. I long since have left the biz, but my love of makeup will go on forever.
I was super young and impressionable in the late 80’s, and every woman I knew wore serious amounts of makeup and perfume. My mom wouldn’t wear it every day, but she went hard on the blush and lipstick when the occasion called for it. lol I loved everything about beauty, and all of the fashion/ beauty magazines from Cosmo to Mademoiselle. It seemed so glamorous and fun!
Like you, few of the women in my family really went in for makeup, so that wasn’t a factor for me when I was younger. I started getting into makeup seriously in my mid-twenties. I’ve always loved art and I love making crafty things, especially involving color. So I think I was drawn to makeup as another way to explore the use of color and, really, another form of art.
Goodness what a marvelous question!
I have to agree with you and say magazines. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been a voracious reader most of my life but I remember reading my mom’s Cosmo and Glamour magazines at age 8 and 9! (She was a young mom! She wasn’t like a regular mom she was a cool mom!) But, not really.
I was 21 when Allure published its first issue and my world was finally complete. A whole magazine completely devoted to beauty and nothing else. I was in heaven.
However, when I was little and we were living in Arizona I had a Mexican babysitter named Lola and I found her so glamorous. Every day around mid-morning, she would sit at either her kitchen table or our kitchen table with her case of makeup and “paint her face,” as she called it.
That was my very favorite time of day, watching her apply color. My mom was in 1975 very much a hippie and a minimalist one at that. She didn’t wear makeup except for very special occasions and then it was a bit of blush and lip gloss. Meanwhile, Lola applied All The Things!
My sister and I were fascinated with makeup from a young age, even though my mom barely used a lick of it – I wonder if it was just from seeing commercials? Not sure what started the whole pursuit, though I think part of it was that it was “off limits” till I was about 14 and it all seemed so mysterious, haha. But I used to get all sorts of beauty books (hair and makeup instructional books, but especially DIY recipe books) from the library across the street, and I think that’s what really fueled the passion for me. I still love a good beauty book, and really enjoy using household ingredients to whip up a quick beauty treatment – I’ve been super into homemade salt scrubs lately!
My first job was an “under the table” type, at a burger joint where I was too young to work at 14 so I got paid under the table. I would get cash and go to local 7-11 to buy a pickle and Vogue!! I don’t know how at that age I even knew about Vogue. I think it was just the cover and I loved that the magazine was so thick! My parents were too poor to buy Guess jeans, etc so I saved up to buy my own clothes and make up. Ahhhh! The good old days!
What a sweet story, Becca! I started working when I was young, too. My first job was playing flute for a church choir (my music teacher passed it off on me because he couldn’t make it).
When I had dance recitals when I was little, mom would put the works on me because the lights would “wash me out” as they would say back then… I just loved the colors so much. Also, back then, Avon would pass out those tiny little lipstick tubes of sample colors, and mom always had a bunch of those lying around, so I would get into them when playing dress up (which I LOVED). When I was almost middle school age, my grandma gave me a cardboard box full of old nail polish to mess around with, and from there I was HOOKED on nails.
My mom would give me those little Avon sample tubes of colors she didn’t want, too, and sometimes matchbook samples (though those were getting rare even in the 70s and 80s). I loved both kinds dearly!
I was in a pageant in my school the senior year of high school and they had a local Mary Kay consultant help us with our makeup and I loved it. My mom wears almost no makeup (she’s never worn eyeliner!) so ur wasn’t something I was exposed to at home. I owned some makeup items but mostly went au naturel. I’ve worn moisturizer from a young age because I have dry skin and needed SPF as a ginger, but the pageant was my first real experience with makeup. The colors chosen for me were a bright coppery red lip (my dress was a dark emerald green) and coppery earth tones on the eyes. I had makeup help again for our prom fashion show and it just sealed the deal.
For me, the rebellious and “global” trends in the late 90s allowed me to experiment with makeup in a way that felt right to me. Kohl eye with a blue glitter lip? Just don’t forget the crystal tattoos! Brands like urban decay and hard candy made it feel like there was a place for me to play with my self-expression, because I felt like I was outside the beauty norms and didn’t want to be a girly girl. 20+ years later I still wear a lot of urban decay but I’ve handled most of my issues ?
Seventeen magazine! My first lessons in applying eyeshadows came from that magazine in the 80s. My mom wore some eyeshadow in the 60s and 70s, but after that she only ever wore a shimmery white brownbone highlighter, black liquid liner on the top lid, Maybelline Great Lash Mascara, and black brow pencil to drawn in brow tails (she had thyroid issues). We had different eye shapes and colors, so she probably wouldn’t have been helpful there, anyway.
My mom was a model in her teens before meeting my dad, and she always had makeup around, especially lipsticks. Her favorite lipsticks were Helena Rubenstein. That’s where I became obsessed with makeup as a toddler. I loved looking at her collection and watching her applying her makeup when she went out in public. Some of the few good memories I have of her.