My Teen Has Discovered Makeup, and I Have Questions
Lately, my second daughter, Mai, has fallen head over heels for makeup. She studies tutorial videos every day and practices what she learns.
Makeup isn’t allowed at school, so she waits until she’s home from club practice, pulls up a video, and gets to work. Then, a few minutes later, she hops in the bath. All that product, down the drain!
When she first started, she was pretty rough at it. Her makeup looked so over-the-top and just plain off. But she’s gotten better and better, and now she can pull off a really polished, grown-up look.
In the beginning, she borrowed my cosmetics. Now her collection has completely outgrown her makeup pouch, and a lot of it is stuff I wouldn’t even know how to use.
And honestly? Up to that point, I was totally fine with it. I have plenty of thoughts, sure, but it’s great to see a kid throw herself into something. And she really did get good.
But then things took a turn. She seems to have lost the plot a little…
She’s now pouring her energy into the “half-face” look: one half of her face in “no-makeup makeup” (makeup carefully applied to look like bare skin), and the other half fully done. You’ve probably seen those before-and-after videos.
Then, somewhere along the way, she started drawing a black line down the middle with eyeliner.
“You don’t need a dividing line.”
And it isn’t even a straight line. It’s a zigzag.
“Well, a straight line is kind of… this just looks cooler, okay?”
Cooler? It’s a dividing line! She looks like a villain from one of those Sunday-morning Super Sentai shows (basically Japan’s Power Rangers).
Then there’s freckle makeup. Apparently you draw on extra freckles on purpose, to get a natural, bare-skin glow. As someone who spends her mornings desperately concealing every dark spot and freckle, I find this baffling.
And then she went right past freckles and landed on “acne makeup.” This one I truly cannot wrap my head around. It’s a style where you paint red dots and raised bumps onto your face to look like pimples.
I want to be clear: this isn’t a story about my daughter doing something goofy on her own. She didn’t invent any of this! These looks are actually a thing. Apparently, half-face, freckle, and acne makeup have all been making the rounds on social media.
I’m completely lost. Isn’t the whole point of makeup to look pretty?!
I have no idea where my daughter is headed with all this. But could she please stop hogging the bathroom for two hours every night during prime time?