Makeup Experiment for An Amateur

by Devina Gunawan

I fancy vintage. I fancy anything old.

So after watching ‘the Man from U.N.C.L.E’ I decided to buy some makeup products and try them on my face.

Of course, I had no idea how to start – or where to start – so I had to open some makeup tutorial videos on YouTube. And trust me, boy, do they not help us amateurs.

I got to my curiosity and asked my cousin Katya, a skilled makeup artist, to teach me how to put on fake eyelashes. Because I’d like to have some on my face so I can play with them when I’m bored.

My cousin told me that for the ‘budget’ type of makeup for someone who had close to zero knowledge on it, Maybeline would be the best option. Which, I would like to think, was true, since that was what I bought.

However, for the fake lashes, she could not really tell me which to get.

There’s something really funny about fake lashes. Watching someone flutter fake lashes always tickles me.

So I would like to have some too. At least once a year that is.

And since Halloween is coming up, I have decided that I would learn how to put on makeup on my face and how to glue fake lashes. My goal is to have bright blue fake lashes on, because I think that would look pretty cool.

So we start with my face when I wake up in the morning – after washing my face. I tend to have puffy eyes these days due to stress and work, so I hope I didn’t burden my cousin too much when she was putting on the eye makeup.

So my cousin started working her magic.

I want to dress up as Hepburn on Halloween, so she did the eyes for me. However, since she was also talking me the step by step of doing it, and letting me observe how it’s done, she only glued the fake lashes on my right eye. Also, the blush-on was done differently left and right.

My eyebrows are thick already, and really messy. I have a thing against doing anything to my brows, due to some superstition, so she did minimal work on them.

My cousin did the contour on my cheekbones. She did each cheek differently. This is why the picture is better off taken in black and white, or the weird colors on my cheeks would show.

She was showing me how people do contour differently.

I have never done it before, and I am not sure when I will ever. However, seeing it, it looked like it would really hard to balance the right and left. What if one side was darker than the other.

Makeup is such a tricky thing. I did not know that eyeliner goes on the bottom lids as well. I had only seen people do it to the top lids. So when it’s done on mine, I was a bit – scared.

At some point, when my cousin did the mascara, I blinked and accidentally had the brush poke my eye. It hurt so bad that my eye started watering up. 

Afterwards, my cousin taught me how to do the trick for my lips to get the Kylie Jenner look. I was never a big fan of Kylie, but it sounded interesting enough that I let her do the ‘lip trick’ on me. It worked. My lips looked swollen afterwards.

I am not sure why swollen lips would look good on anyone.

However, I was not a big fan. And maybe it was just because I was never used to makeup.

My cousin told me that for someone like me, who used no makeup, putting on this much makeup would be a surprise.

And it was. It really was a surprise. I felt different. I looked different as well. I could easily decide that I liked the way I normally looked better. I had my other cousin, another makeup artist genius, do my face last year. She did it naturally, and I still liked my usual makeup free face better.

We concluded that I looked better without makeup. Or at least, most of us were already used to seeing me without it. For Halloween though, I am already set in the Hepburn makeup steps that my cousin had taught me.

So next time I will do this myself and record the result.

Till then, I’m definitely off the makeup zone. Big thanks to my awesome Katya for doing this little makeover for me.

Makeup by: Katya Shuri