Last year, my guy best friend Phillip Roquemore dressed me for a week. The results weren’t disastrous. So this year, I asked him to do my makeup for a night. I didn’t trust him enough to do too well, so I didn’t challenge myself to go out with a full face of makeup done by him. That being said, I did trust him to make me look human at the end of it all.
My usual makeup routine starts with primer. I then put on foundation, do some sort of a smokey eye and winged eyeliner, mascara and lipstick. This is what that process results in:
Phillip knew none of this coming in. He just knew that there were things called foundation, eyeliner and lipstick. I’m not sure he knew what eyeshadow was because he never referred to it by name.
Before he started, I looked something like this:
He started with the foundation, and after I explained to him what a beauty blender was, he put spots of foundation on some parts of my face and tried to spread it. It did NOT work.
In his defense, he thought my foundation made me look more orange than he wanted, so he quickly abandoned it to move on to mascara.
Phillip genuinely thought mascara was the first thing he needed to do with regards to my eye makeup. He ended up getting most of it on my eyelid and eyebrows, which led to me introducing him to makeup remover, which I think was his best friend for the night because he used it more that night than I have in the last two weeks.
He then moved onto eyeliner, my favorite aspect of makeup. I am what amateurs call a makeup snob, because if your wings aren’t perfect I will not be your friend. A friendly tip: Using concealer to make your wings sharp makes them imperfect in my eyes. Phillip, however, didn’t know any of this. Out of the 10 different colors of eyeliner I have (liquid and pencil included), he chose my grey liquid eyeliner that he thought would do justice to the look he was “going for.” Whatever that meant.
He started with just a simple line, which I assume he did well on, because it felt like it glided on easily. But I’m also not sure, because he made some faces during this process.
He ended up cleaning most of it with the makeup remover, calling it a “magic do-over.” He mocked me for not having a grey eyeliner pencil, and used my cobalt blue one on my “waterline.” I put it in quotes because he kind of just rubbed the pencil under my eye.
DID NO ONE TEACH HIM HOW TO HOLD A PENCIL?
We moved onto eye shadow next. He chose to use dark blue or “sort of a sapphire,” as he liked to call it. He was decent at applying eye shadow (not that the results were), and for some reason, he remembered winged eyeliner while doing it. “Can’t you do eyeliner that’s kind of off to the side?” I’d never regretted hearing a sentence about eyeliner before that. He got his grey eyeliner back and decided that the way to do a winged eyeliner was to draw two straight lines from the end of my eye, extending up to my eyebrow.
For some reason he also thought this would be a good time to use his left hand, as opposed to his dominant right.
After this little break in eye shadow blending, he chose the lightest shade of pink/purple eye shadow I own and decided that he’d put that under my eyes. Remember, this is a guy with no concept of a waterline. I also don’t think he realized that a lot of the blue eye shadow from earlier was on my face already, because the end result was a weird mix of light pink and blue that I’d never seen before.
“Let me add some blush to complement all this,” he said, opening another eyeshadow palette. After I corrected him, he got the right brush and set to work. Over and over and over again. Apparently he couldn’t see it under the light, so he thought he needed to add more. Phillip also thinks blush is for every part of your face below your eyes, apparently. Here you can see him passionately apply some to my nose.
He then did my lipstick, which was his best work.
Again, why did no one ever teach him how to hold things?
After doing my lipstick, he wanted to use my black eyeliner pencil as a lipliner. Despite my protests, he drew a line, realized his sin, and made me remove it. But the eyeliner also reminded him of the weird beauty spots/birthmarks/moles from the 1960s, and because I naturally already have one, he accentuated it.
When I asked Phillip about the experience he said, “I wasn’t really going for a look so much as an experience. When people look at your makeup, I want them to feel like they’ve just gotten on a roller coaster that they DON’T want to get off.”
He continued, “The experience expended all the emotional and creative energy I could muster and then some. It was beauty, it was brilliance, it was joy, it was life. I felt like a schoolboy again. Your makeup was my playground. My creativity the swing set I swung so expertly from, like a trapeze artist at play.”
Here are the end results:
A full face. I look pissed, because I am.
A side profile to show you that there is a clear line where my foundation ends. You can also get a good look at his “winged” eyeliner.
Here’s a last one, comparing our eye makeup looks because I’ll forever be salty about what he did:
“The result is more than I could have ever asked for and better than I could have ever dreamed. And, oh how I’ve dreamed. At night I used to lie awake, snuggled up under the covers, thinking. Thinking! How can I create the perfect masterpiece of makeup. Answer me God, I would cry out in boyish angst. But an answer never came…not until the day I did your makeup. It was like a curtain was pulled back, and everything became so clear.”