on lent

For Lent, or Lent[en] as some call it, I decided to give up something easy and something hard. The easy is "gossip" - not because I don't do it (au contraire, it is something I do daily), but because it doesn't really scare me to stop doing it. And really all it involves is shutting my mouth at the appropriate moment.

The hard is, I've decided: to give up wearing "skin makeup" for 40 days. For someone who didn't know the first thing about makeup when she first started wearing it (my friend actually had to pull me into a bathroom, and told me to wipe off whatever the heck I was wearing on my face), I've grown quite attached to my morning routine of "putting on my face" Literally, the thought of not wearing foundation and powder actually worried me.

As I put away my MAC Studio Stick SPF 15 and and MAC Studio Finished Pressed Powder in a zip bag and pushed it into the far reaches of my cupboard, I felt the slight bit of anxiety I had had when I first contemplated the idea, burgeon out into a full fledged "oh crap, what have I done?". Questions started whizzing about in my brain. What if I had a party to go to? A date? What if I had a pimple? What if I had to......leave my room? The prospect seemed daunting, especially when I confronted my shiny (and I don't mean healthy, dewy shiny) face in the mirror, with scars from pimple battles past, red patches, and dark shades under my eyes.

Shortly after, today in fact, the fear was realized when I determined I had exactly 25.5 minutes to get ready for a wedding reception at which I knew no one. I quickly calculated the positives and negatives of this fact: (Positives: Knowing no one, Negatives: Knowing no one) and came up even.

I decided that I would not scramble around in my cupboard to retrieve my MAC survival kit. Instead, I smeared on sunscreen, worked up a sweat dancing to a merengue CD in my room, and ran out the door to join my friend. Welcome to a more carefree (and more shiny), me.