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How I Rediscovered Beauty in the Pandemic
Putting on your face isn’t as important as it used to be
I grew up with a mother who believed in “putting on her face” before even venturing downstairs to greet company. She long proselytized the power of wearing makeup as a spiritual pick-me-up. Beauty was an exercise I was expected to perform from my earliest stages. Makeup and clothing were types of armor my mom taught me to put on before facing the world. My first, most visible act of interrogating beauty and bucking the norms I was raised to uphold was to cut my hair short in college and then go natural. Now the pandemic has me reconsidering many of the ways and reasons that I beautified myself.
As the creator of Afrobella.com, so much of my life has been devoted to writing about celebrating beauty on my own terms. Was I living that truth? Were they my own terms if these acts didn’t always bring me joy or if they were performed for praise and the public gaze? In a time where all responsible public gatherings are canceled and most of life’s expectations are thrown out the window, I had time to interrogate my personal needs in new ways. I realized how, every day, I performed the standards of beauty that were passed on to me, whether I wanted to or not. I started to notice the aspects of beautifying myself that felt like unnecessary obligations instead of essential grooming or personal care, and I started to ask myself: Why am I doing all of this anymore? For who?
At the beginning of quarantine, I felt a social media-influenced pressure to keep up the practice and perform for likes on #manicuremonday or #makeupmonday. In March and April, I would find myself still reflexively applying lipstick as I had been taught to do my whole life. Wearing my old face, covered in foundation, concealer, highlighter, bronzer, setting powder, lipstick — the works — felt normal, but was a now unnecessary act. Also, let’s sit with that phrase for a bit, “wearing my old face.” It hit me that that’s what I was doing, when, one day in June my husband and I were masking up for a Costco run. He was ready to go and there I was, hurrying up to do what I always would do. Putting on my armor: my foundation and lipstick. Eyeliner and mascara because that’s what people would see. In the midst of the process, I asked myself why I was taking the…
