No FakeUp Necessary

Bare minimum makeup routines.

In a world full of Kardashian's, be YOURSELF!

As a teenager I would often experiment with different beauty routines. Let’s keep it real here, we all did! Teenage girls are under such immense pressure (hence the acne, right?). We want to catch the eye of our crush who we’re not sure even knows we exist. We want to be accepted by our female peers or, at the very least, remind them that we’re a strong competitor and deserve to be recognized as such. It’s unfortunate to realize the excessive amount of time and energy this pressure consumes during a period when our developing brains could be sponging much more useful information. Perhaps even more unfortunate is the reality that this pressure to compete and impress on a superficial level follows many of us well into adulthood.

I will never forget one morning when my 15 year-old self was ‘glamming’ for school. I had glopped concealer all over my face, then applied a thick layer of off-color foundation and poorly blended blush. I was in the middle of caking on some eye liner, grunting  in frustration as I’d caused myself to tear, when my mother peeked her head into the bathroom doorway. With a loving, knowing smile she said to me “Try honey, but don’t LOOK like you’re trying.”

Little did she know, this tiny moment would shape my entire concept of women’s beauty. No longer was I in awe of the popular girls with their seemingly model-like appearances. I began to see deeper, immediately noticing the layers of makeup and hair product they’d subjected themselves to each morning. It became apparent to me the hours of ‘trying’ that must have gone into these facades and I realized that under it all they really weren’t very different from the rest of us.

Silly isn’t it? To want so badly to be noticed, to be better than the rest, that we all paint on the same face blending ourselves further into the crowd.

To My Beautiful Mother,

Thank you! You are an inspiration to me in so many ways and I cannot imagine the woman I’d be without your influence. 

heart, love, red
Nicole C. Bartlett Signature