This is The Snack Desk, a newsletter in which I’ll share personal essays, gems from different corners of the internet, and other bites for your snack break.
In middle school I wasn’t allowed to wear makeup, so of course I became fascinated with makeup. I watched, no exaggeration, hundreds of hours of makeup tutorials on YouTube, soothed by the repetitive steps that I came to know by heart: primer, foundation, concealer, blush (this was before contouring was mainstream, so no contouring), eyeshadow, eyeliner, mascara.
After a busy day in seventh grade trying to match my gauchos to my layered tank tops and attempting to keep up with my teammates on the volleyball B team, these makeup videos were my time to fully chill. Michelle Phan (who went by the YouTube name ricebunny at the time) taught me about blush placement, and Blair Fowler (juicystar07) explained to me what an eyelash curler was. AndreasChoice, Tanya Burr, Kandee Johnson—the OG YouTube makeup girlies were my instructors, and I was a dedicated student.
This was where I got the entirety of my cosmetic education, as my mom only wore mascara and lipstick for special nights out. One night, she came home wearing a full face of makeup, and I asked, “What’s the occasion?” She told me she’d been at a Mary Kay party. I’d never heard of such a thing, but I knew Mary Kay was a makeup company, so I was all ears.
As my mom explained, Mary Kay parties were gatherings in which representatives from Mary Kay cosmetics were invited to someone’s home, and they’d give demonstrations of the different products in order to sell as many as possible to the guests in attendance. It was a newer iteration of the Tupperware parties of the 50s, but instead of containers for your leftovers, partygoers could purchase what was, for me at the time, the ultimate forbidden fruit: makeup. In an instant I knew exactly what I wanted to do for my 13th birthday.
When I asked my parents for a Mary Kay birthday party, they were skeptical. My dad did catch on to this loophole I’d found in the no makeup rule, and my mom was hesitant to build her kid’s birthday around a sales pitch. But when they tried suggesting any other ideas, I was firm: I wanted a Mary Kay lady to come and tell me the benefits of one particular blush over another, and I wanted my friends and I to give each other our very first makeovers.
They eventually agreed, and I got the birthday I’d been dreaming of. That day, YouTube finally became reality.
The fact that I had this early interest in cosmetics would not be apparent if you saw me today. I don’t usually wear a ton of makeup, and when I do, it’s never applied in a way that would suggest I had years of virtual training under my belt. My makeup skills are remarkably average.
Even so, there is a ritual to the process of applying various beauty products that I still find soothing, and the confidence boost I get from feeling a bit done up doesn’t hurt either. At the end of my 13th birthday party, even though I looked like this:
…I felt beautiful. For an 8th grader with a mouth full of braces and shoulders that hunched to try to minimize how much taller I was than my peers, that was a pretty special thing to feel.
I remember this party. It was a fantastic idea!