CHENNAI : It is a truth universally acknowledged, that when you are a beauty writer, people are constantly going to keep asking you (cheerfully, politely and not obnoxiously) to do their make-up.“Sure thing,” is what you would probably expect most of us to say (most do react this way and are super into doing other people’s hair and make-up). But me? “I am not a make-up artist” I usually scream before I can stop myself... It’s a knee-jerk reaction. “I just write about it and know what the best products are. It is not any validation to how skilled I am at this make-up...Craft. I don’t know how...To do it to you. I can’t. No. I won’t! Aaaack! I’m sorry! I just cannot!!”
This is followed by crazed running in the opposite direction and said person probably getting weirded out in the worst possible way.“You don’t want to touch my face, do you?” sighed a pretend-exasperated best friend, who chased me down and maybe even purred a bit. “It’s okay, you don’t have to touch me.”
“No, I’m just really bad at it,” I’d retort. “Oh it’s alright. I’m not going to force you to touch me if you don’t want to,” she sighed... I was sold, and cried “I WANT TO TOUCH YOU!” And made a beeline to my make-up stash, proceeded to take her from bare-faced lovely to completely awful in under three minutes.
“Oh no,” I’d think after each jerky stroke and each hideously misplaced contour. Oh no! Oh no! Oh no!.
“SAUMS!” She cried, on looking at her lopsided bronzer swipes, wobbly eyeliner and near-white under eye concealer. “What are you DOING to me?? You really are terrible at this!” And then she vanished and removed the disaster makeover with wipes and an animal sacrifice. Anyway, this is a long rambling way of telling you that I’m not good at applying make-up on anyone- except for maybe smokey eyes. Which brings me to the my most ill-guarded secret to the best smokey eyes: false eyelashes!
Most crucially (and this really kills me) I finally mastered the art of applying lashes on myself. The trouble with lash application is that it is so very easy for it to look so fake.No, the trick here isn’t to cut up the lash in three bits before applying (though you should most definitely do that too) but it’s actually that everything is better with curves! Wrap your lashes around your brush or glue the ends together to make a tiny lash crown before putting them on. It’s easier to apply severely curled lashes as opposed to straight ones. They stick better and are seamless!
I hope I get better at applying make-up on others soon, and let this be an open invitation to anyone who wants to walk around with make-up that looks like it’s drawn in by a 10-year-old till I do! No really, hit me up if you want to be my make-up guinea pig!!!