My under-eye circle game is on point. Think of the common complaints that you hear about “panda eyes” after “another late night”: redness, puffiness, dark shadows, and prominent veins – I can guarantee you that at one point or another, I’ve had at least one of the aforementioned conditions. The dark circles that have set up camp under my eyes would make Edward Cullen’s makeup artist blush. And that’s exactly the way I like them.
One of my favorite phrases in defense of my bags are: “if you’re at U of T and you don’t have eye bags, you’re not doing it right.” All jokes aside however, I have actually been plagued with dark circles since I was a child. Most complaints of eye bags arise after too many late nights of catching up on your readings, or typing your way through a fifteen-hundred-word essay for hours. My bags, however, have been with me as long as I can remember.
I suppose I didn’t mind them too much at first, the only reason I concealed them at all was because the women in the makeup tutorials I frequented on YouTube (I’m one of the few who can say they watched Michelle Phan before she made it big – that’s how old I am) always finished off their face routine by “concealing my imperfections” and “clearing up my panda eyes.” I was a twelve year old trying to replicate complex smoky eye routines with a blue Wet n’ Wild eye shadow palette (90’s child, need I say more?), so concealing superfluous bags was the least of my concerns. But because that’s what I saw in the videos, I did it anyway.
I’ve been wearing makeup pretty regularly since then, and have definitely graduated a few looks beyond the bright blue tones of my Wet n’ Wild palette. With every new look I tried, however, I started by covering up the circles under my eyes. Slowly, I had internalized the idea that the darkness was something to be covered up and couldn’t imagine doing makeup in the morning without “perfecting my canvas.”
Life has a habit of getting in the way though, as it did during my first year of university. 9am lectures and readings that took me well into the AMs of the night left me with little time or interest in the morning to brush, wash, comb, eat, and dress. I began to cut corners to steal myself an extra glorious ten minutes of shuteye, and makeup was the first to go.
My roommate can attest to the fact that ninety-percent of my first year at U of T was spent in my trusty navy U of T school sweater. In fact, it had reached the point where, when I bothered to change out of the sweater, she would say “ooooh, somebody’s going out tonight!”
How the mighty have fallen, huh? I had gone from a full face of makeup everyday, complete with false eyelashes on most days, to the kind of person who didn’t even bother changing out of her pajamas in the morning. The 12th grade Lisa wouldn’t have even recognized me.
Funnily enough though, I didn’t mind. I had things more important to worry about than my even skin tone, and I began to realize that other people did too. At work, however, it was a different story. Regardless of how busy I was at school, I almost always made an effort to doll up for work.
I currently work at a high-end retail store in Yorkdale Mall, and my co-workers are the kind that shows up for the daily grind in Louboutins and Valentino Rockstud heels. Let’s just leave it at that. As a bid not to look too shabby while I ran from HIS102 to the TTC, pulling my squashed blazer out of my backpack with my Metropass, I decided that I would put on makeup for work.
The one day I didn’t have enough time to put my face on, my coworkers reacted instantaneously.
“Woah Lisa…what’s wrong with your eyes?”
“Do you have an allergic reaction? Why are your eyes so red?”
“Are you sick?”
If one good thing came out of this experience, it is the realization than an excuse to get out of work or school is just a makeup wipe away. Sorry, I’ve got to go – I have a deathly allergic reaction.
People were genuinely concerned for me and asked if I had been crying, or if I had any allergies. Blithely, I told them:
“I’m fine, I’m just not wearing any makeup.”
Now that the initial barrier had been broken, I started showing up for work more and more often with a bare face, untouched save for a thin layer of moisturizer. People became accustomed to seeing my next level eye bags, and funnily enough, so did I. Under the tastefully muted lights of my store, next to the thousand dollar oak panels and deceptively slimming mirror (now you know the tricks), my eye bags were actually beginning to look – dare I say it, quite pretty in an interesting way?
The more often I saw my eye bags in public, the more I realized they added character to my face. As cheesy as that description sounds, (you don’t have wrinkles, you have character!) I realized that the shadows gave my eyes an interesting, sunken look and added depth to me face. One day, I decided to run a quick google search to see if anybody had stumbled upon the same realization that dark eye circles could actually be kind of sexy.
“I like dark under-eye circles.”
A quick perusal on the front page told me that I might just be a pioneer in this area of thought (if Google can’t find it, it doesn’t exist yet) and a majority of the links led to pages like “How to Banish your Under Eye circles” and “7 Ways to Get Rid of Dark Under Eye Circles.” There wasn’t a single article that portrayed under eye circles in a positive light. I was expecting an article about its function as a badge of honor for university students at the very least.
So let mine be the first.
I’m not saying that I’ve completely abandoned concealing my dark circles, because my half empty tube of Makeup Forever’s Full Cover Concealer would prove otherwise. I suppose what I’m really saying, is it’s okay to change up your look and wear all kinds of makeup, but don’t let that fool you into thinking it’s because what’s underneath needs to be hidden.
Let your features tell your story.
Photo Sources:
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http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/2014-09/14/17/enhanced/webdr02/anigif_en…
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