Do We Use Eyeliner as a Metaphor for Self?

By: Kali Lamparelli
Posted In: Opinion

When I was little I loved waking up early and watching my father dab Old Spice on his neck and lace up his work boots one notch at a time until he tied them perfectly, in his very own way. I watched my mother spray perfume and apply her makeup with a certain knowledgeable perfection and make sure everything matched down to the socks in the shoes on her feet. I love men’s Old Spice and Shaving Cream. I feel sexy in work boots and love to sweat. I am obsessed with dresses. I wear sneakers with skirts and buy running shoes every six months. I go broke all the time buying books because learning is my passion.

I have piles upon piles of fashion magazines strewn across my bedroom. The light is rising in the morning sky and I think of all the places I look for the security of myself. Vogue gives me a world of European fashions and seemingly high-powered women. I want to be this beautiful, this perfect, perhaps if I knew how to apply black eyeliner? Would that make me a better person? Would that black eyeliner make me more fantasy-oriented and powerful? Do I need to know how to use makeup for a professional environment? What do real women really look like? Vogue makes me want to sit in front of the mirror and sculpt the perfect eyebrows. Will more people like me if I’m willing to sculpt my eyebrows instead of enjoy a novel?

The only way to find a safe place and a feeling of security is to look within you. We should not, and are not defined by the products we use. I am not my black eyeliner, my work boots do not make me masculine, my Old Spice does not detract from my femininity, my best guy friend going to a salon for a haircut makes him no more feminine than my work boots make me masculine.

I loved to sit with my father in silence watching the news and reading the newspaper. I would steal the novels my mother loved from her shelves before she could read them. She would wake me in the morning asking of me where her books had gone and sure enough I held on tightly to them in my daze of sleep. Fashion magazines to some women are like novels to me, I can be in Paris in five minutes or Rome in ten. I can be a lawyer, a doctor, a heroine, a murderer, even a man.

Whatever source of fantasy or empowerment you find in a novel or a magazine remember that having the perfect eyebrows for your face shape, the manicured nails, the designer names, they will not make you more accepted or a profound and fulfilled person. The journey to ones self- realization is where security comes. Work from within and the outside will never need eyeliner or wrinkle cream.