Monologue About Makeup

I remember being ten years old and asking my mother when I would be allowed to wear makeup. I would peruse the aisles of the drugstore, picking out the things I would buy when I was old enough to wear it all. Flipping through magazines was a treat, there were so many girls who looked just like me, girls who I could aspire to be. I wasn’t aware of what a privilege that was the time. I was only a little girl, one who was enamoured with beauty and the pretty people in magazines. As I grew older and made friends with people of many different races. I began to wonder why I couldn’t find people who looked like them in magazines. I asked myself why I couldn’t find makeup that would suit their skin tone when I helped them shop at the drug store. I …show more content…
Going to the drugstore to look at the new launches is still one of my favourite things to do, and my paychecks all eventually go to makeup. Foundation for me had always been a bit tricky, as I’ve always been extremely fair. My brother even ventures to call me Caspar, poking fun at my pale skin tone. The lightest shade of foundation always seemed to be slightly too dark for me, evoking grumbles of discontent as I blended it down my neck to ensure that it didn’t look like a mask I’d put on my face that morning. It never occurred to me that many people had it much worse than I did, my white privilege hindering my view of the real issues with the makeup industry. If you were to look around your nearest drugstore today, zeroing in on the foundations, you would be faced with the unfortunate lack of range in foundation shades. Within most foundation and concealer lines, the darkest colour is one that would match that of a coffee with two creamers. Even lines that do attempt to delve into a more diverse range of shade will often fall short, diversifying their range of “buff” “beige” and “ivory” shades so there is …show more content…
Undergarments have been sexualized, and growing up I noticed that those were the things you didn’t talk about, so we didn’t. As I grew up and started to learn about such things, my mom taught me that nude bras and underwear went under white clothing, so as to not show your underwear through your clothing. I thought the invention was genius, of course I didn’t want anyone to see my bra and underwear! But as most things do, my views on these “nude” lingerie pieces changed. It doesn’t take a genius to see that these “flesh toned” undergarments only cater to one flesh tone. Apparently only fair white people are allowed the luxury of discreet lingerie. The idea of the undergarments is to blend into your own skin tone, making a seamless transition and therefore making your undergarments “disappear.” But the intended purpose is lost on people whose skin tone doesn’t match that of the stock shade they use for every undergarment of the sort. People of colour might as well buy and wear a neon green bra to wear underneath their garments, as the colour would show the same as these bras that are marketed as skin tone. Intersectionality strikes again, as racism and sexism clash to create unequal opportunity within the lingerie