The Raccoon Situation

There is a very specific kind of hubris that comes over a person when they decide, on a slow Sunday morning with nowhere to be, that today is the day they will finally figure out the smoky eye. I don't know what made me think this was a good use of November.

I'll be honest with you: I've been doing the same three-step mascara-and-lip-gloss routine since approximately 2004 and it has served me well. But I'd had this little palette sitting on the corner of my counter for weeks, the kind you pick up at the drugstore because the packaging is pretty and the colors look achievable under fluorescent lights, and this morning I opened it and thought: how hard could it be.

The answer is: harder than I thought. One eye looked purposeful. The other eye looked like I'd lost a negotiation with a felt-tip pen. I stood at the mirror doing the thing where you try to make the second eye match the first, which only results in both eyes being a problem. At some point I was squinting so hard to see what I was doing that I couldn't even evaluate the damage anymore.

the moment it was not getting better

I removed all of it. Cotton round, some of my grandmother's old cold cream that I've been slowly working through, dignity: gone. My actual face emerged from underneath looking fine, totally fine, the way it always does, as if to say it didn't need any help in the first place. I put the palette back in the corner. Maybe next Sunday.

retirement ceremony for the smoky eye