Making It Up As I Go Along Read Free Page A

was from Lancôme, and this was
around the time when women were trampling over each other in beauty halls to get their paws on
Juicy Tubes, and I got three – THREE! – of the new colours in the envelope. It was
so thrilling that a family conference was called, and all my brothers and sisters and Mam and
Dad came to admire the free make-up, and we sat around the kitchen table staring at it, and no
one could really believe it, and Dad, who used to be an accountant, totted up how much it would
have cost if I’d paid for it, and we MARVELLED at the figure, and my mammy became quite
anxious because she was sure there had to be a catch, but all in all, it was
bloody
fabulous
!
    Overnight, the arrival of the postman flipped
from being something to dread – bills and strange requests and that sort of thing –
to something to anticipate. If he rang the bell, it was a really good day – it meant that
he had a Padded Envelope of Loveliness that was too big to be shoved through the letter box. No
matter how early he arrived, it was with a joyous heart that I skipped down the stairs to open
the door to him. Soon he began to realize that I was causing him more work than the rest of the
road put together, and all I could do was apologize and give him a decent tip at Christmas time.
    I hit a rough patch when I worried that loving
make-up was incompatible with being a feminist, but I’ve eventually made my peace with it.
    However, as we know, all good things come to an
end and eventually the magazine I was writing for folded and the Padded Envelopes of Loveliness
stopped arriving. (Ten years on, thinking about it still gives me a stabbing pain of loss in my
sternum.) However, I stayed passionately interested in all aspects of beauty, getting
particularly animated by anything officially ‘New and Exciting’.
    Now the thing is that I
wasn’t (and I’m still not) a beautician or a trained make-up artist, I’m
simply an enthusiastic amateur – a very,
very
enthusiastic amateur. But I do have
my moments of insight. Like, you’ve heard of the ‘Lipstick Index’? It’s
the theory that during a recession, sales of lipsticks increase as women shift their spending
habits from expensive fripperies like shoes and handbags to more affordable things like
lipsticks. Well, it’s been overtaken by the Nail Varnish Index, and what kills me is that
I predicted it! I knew it was happening because I could see it in my own behaviour – I was
haunting Rimmel counters and buying two or three nail varnishes in super-bright colours, bagging
the whole lot for under a tenner. But the only person I shared my theory with was Himself, and
I’m
raging
that I didn’t do a David McWilliams and write a scholarly paper
on the topic for the
Sunday Business Post
, and be hailed as the new Irish economic
sage, but shur, there we are.
    First published in
Irish Tatler
, November
2014.

Eyelash Extensions
    Eyelashes. Such lovely things. The more the
merrier, thanks. Over the years, when I’d had my make-up done, I’d seen the dramatic
effect of false eyelashes, but I never got the hang of doing them myself.
    Then I heard about eyelash extensions: false
eyelashes that are glued, one by one, to a person’s own lashes and last until the lashes
fall out naturally. No more mascara. Just constant, round-the-clock, dark-lashed loveliness. It
sounded like something from a fantasy.
    So I went and lay on a bed and – this was a
few years back – to my great dismay, the extensions were so heavy they pulled my eyelids
down and, in the following days, I was told, more than once, that I looked like Salman Rushdie.
    Also, I felt very ‘blinky’. Every
time I blinked (and I discovered that I blink an awful lot) it was as if it was happening in
slow motion. Worse still, the lashes were rigid and sort of crunchy, so at night I was kept
awake by them scritchy-scratching against my pillow and if I slept on them funny I awoke to find
them bent into strange geometric