Trigger warning for discussion of eating disorders.
One of the nice things about beauty - and this weirdo column, by proxy - is that it provides the tiniest of escape hatches when your clanging-like-keys brain gets too messy and murky and unfathomable.
Sugar scrubs! Eye cream! It's sort of stupid how I ditzily dash to the mirror, products in hand, for mental reprieve. But life is filled with uncontrollable variables, and I am grateful that the shape of my eyebrows is not among those. The shape of my body, however, is another story.
Like too many people I know and love and have stalked on Facebook, I've struggled with an eating disorder on and off for many years. April is a hard month for me. If you've noticed, many functional humans have just recently snapped out of winter carb comas to start working toward bikini bodies or whatever. Bare legs have sprung up like flower stalks. Crop tops, inexplicably, are back in style.
Of course, stressors multiply my neuroses 'til my brain reeks as rotten as the state of Denmark. It's been a hard week for our community and, though not to equate the two, a hard month for me as an individual.
But, at least in my experience, this is when beauty products do their best work. Nothing distracts from ugly realities like an exfoliant and a face mask, ya know? Cosmetics and skincare are super-temporary life fixes, of course, and they're in cahoots with the very same messed-up beauty standards that screw so catastrophically with my head. I don't know. A coping mechanism is a coping mechanism - and trust me, babes, I've had worse.
Anyway. Enough real talk. My intent was to share a few thoughts about the hot (ha) mess that is summer beauty, and share them I will. Some dos and don'ts - or, more accurately, take-its and leave-its.
Leave it: Tanning. Jesus. I am about to graduate the 16th grade and I still fried my butt like an egg on spring break this year. Why do I continue to do this to myself? Plus, I would rather bite down on an emery board than call a doctor to investigate a suspicious freckle. Bearing that in mind, I should really. Stop. Tanning.
Take it: I suck at fake tanning, so I'll stick to cheek stains that evoke May flowers, even though my brain is unrelentingly April showers-y and my skin Boston-winter fluorescent. An old fave: Benefit's Benetint in rose ($30, Sephora.com). It works on all skin tones, and offers a sun-kissed flush sans sun.
Leave it: Stupid summer beauty trends that don't look good on anybody. I don't even know what's hot this year. I recall light pink liquid eyeliner many moons ago. Don't do the bad thing.
Take it: Stuff that looks and has always looked good on you. If you're still figuring that out, might I suggest Clinique Chubby Sticks ($16, Clinique.com)? They sound like dildos but in fact are dreamy-smooth lip balms.
Leave it: Bikini-season rhetoric. Juice cleanses, which are an extra-bad idea for those of us who don't even like eating salads, let alone drinking them. Running on the treadmill because you feel you have to, not because you want to; running and feeling like you're never getting anywhere.
Take it: Having a bathing suit-ready body the moment you buy a bathing suit, which is to say, knowing that your body is ready for a bathing suit at any damn moment you please. Remembering that, contrary to popular belief, most people do not spend their entire summers in bikinis, sprawling lithely across Spanish beaches as foreign lovers lift grapes to their cherry-plump lips. Jobs, you know? Dress codes.
All right, gang, what summer beauty musts are you blowing off this year? Get at me on Twitter.
