The Dead Dad Diaries

July 1990: even without blurriness, no foundation necessary

As I was having crucial and excruciating eyebrow topiary the other day, I realized that I missed The Chronicles. I put them on hiatus six months ago to focus on The Dead Dad Diaries. But it turns out hair keeps growing during times of grief. It is still necessary to wear clothes most of the time and even to buy them occasionally. Even a tear-filled eye can alight on a Sunday style supplement and be disappointed and incensed by some of the unoriginal, sexist copy therein (oh bite me back, hand that doesn’t feed me).

One blog is about my dad, my memories of him and how I’m dealing with his death. The other blog is my take on retail, fashion, beauty, and more or less whatever takes my fancy or gets my goat. A memory while putting on makeup recently made me consider how the twain might meet in this post.

When I was 11 or 12 and had just moved in with Dad, I was big into Hi! Magazine, then a set text for the tween market (though I don’t think the word tween had been invented). Hi!, like most such media outlets, was cheerfully engaged in encouraging its young readers to buy as much stuff as possible. I gobbled up articles on “makeup bag essentials” and “your perfect daytime face” which instructed me to cleanse, tone, and moisturise, then apply foundation, concealer, blusher, powder, eyeshadow, mascara etc.

My makeup collection started with an ancient lipstick and powder compact handed down from my mum. But Hi! convinced me that this wasn’t nearly enough. I needed foundation and concealer to even out my (already perfect) skin tone and hide my (non-existent) blemishes.  I was 12 and fortunate in having very good skin even for my age. I can say that now. I’ve always been lucky with my skin, have never done much to it, and am still mostly using the same moisturiser I started on when I was, well, about 12 (Simple). But I haven’t got through 20 years entirely unscathed. My 32 year-old face is helped by a splurge of tinted moisturiser (Laura Mercier is the best, but expensive), but I almost never use foundation even now. And yet at the age when I needed it least, I was convinced I had to have it, because Hi! said so and a magazine is more trustworthy than a mirror.

There was no way my modest pocket money was going to stretch to the full complement of “essentials.” So I put the case to Dad, explaining why he really needed to buy me all this slap and backing up my arguments with the printed evidence. Poor man! Recognising that he was no makeup expert and yet questioning whether my peachy cheeks needed embellishment, he asked the secretaries at work whether they thought a 12 year-old needed foundation. Probably not, they ventured.

But Da-a-ad …

I got the makeup but was too lazy and clueless to use it much. Now when I see 12, 13, 14 year-old girls dolled up to look ten years older, I think about how much of wisdom in life — in style, writing, cooking, many things — is shedding the unnecessary or unhelpful and learning that less is more. And I think about Dad, and how well he rose to the many challenges of having a pre-teen daughter, all the new things he had to learn because of me. Also how he took me seriously and let me make silly mistakes and find things out on my own, knowing that if he tried to tell me I wouldn’t listen anyway.

That was the good kind of foundation.