This past summer, on the heels of my nineteenth birthday, I worked up the courage to walk into my hometown Sephora and buy concealer for the first time. With my twenties suddenly in sight, it occurred to me that my time of being “just a girl” was running out, and I was terrified to embrace being a woman without ever learning to do makeup. I felt a twinge of nostalgia, tackling yet another hallmark of girlhood by myself.
I’ve never talked about it before, but growing up was mostly an awkward trial-and-error experience for me. In the spirit of being a girl’s girl, my truth is that I learned to shave my legs via wikiHow illustrations, insert a tampon following advice from the Secret Chats feature on the Flo period tracker app, and Dutch braid due to sheer willpower and a mirror — which explains why I’ve never been able to braid anyone’s hair but mine. I did it all by myself.
I always felt a sense of accomplishment and pride in being an independent child; I liked being able to figure things out alone. But really, it stemmed from a natural shyness that grew into a fear that everybody but me already knew everything, and that asking questions would expose how far behind I was. In a battle against curiosity and girlhood, embarrassment always won.
A large part of me had always wanted to experience that silver screen feeling of “being girls together,” braiding your friends’ hair and using silly code names to whisper about the boys you liked. I wanted to figure out all the quintessential parts of girlhood with my friends, giggling on bedroom floors and crowded around bathroom sinks. Instead, I bit my tongue and reminded myself that I was good at flying solo.
Makeup was the one project that I was too embarrassed to tackle, though. The entire process of learning felt so open — if I messed up, everyone could literally see it on my face. I was more comfortable not wearing makeup than wearing it wrong.
Strangely enough, I was a competitive cheerleader for eight years, so I technically had some experience. I could cake on whatever drugstore foundation my mom bought me, which was always a few shades off — though no fault of her own, I simply never went with her to buy it — and work through my fear of eyelash curlers, but the end result was always far from great. It didn’t have to be — the subpar cheer makeup didn’t make me feel particularly pretty or confident, but it could endure the bright stage lights at cheer competitions. It fulfilled its duty, and nothing more.
So there I was on a Tuesday afternoon in September, standing in the Sephora I had walked by a hundred times. It was located in the heart of the most feared place on earth: my hometown shopping mall. The only makeup I had on was mascara, the Lash Slick from Glossier that my mom gifted me, ironically good for making it look like you’re not wearing makeup.
I was surrounded by a bunch of pre-teens who couldn’t even drive to the mall themselves, and watched them confidently grab products off of shelves. At their age, I remember weaving through the shelves of my public library, looking for my next read. I didn’t feel so different, scanning the aisles in that Sephora so many years later.
But I must have looked as out of place as I felt, because an employee approached me almost immediately and asked if I wanted a shade match. I had no idea what that entailed, but it sounded like the right first step in finding concealer.
Apparently, getting a shade match is a mortifying experience that involves standing in the middle of the store as an employee holds a tablet with a massive camera lens directly on your face — name a more obvious way to show everyone that you have no clue what you’re doing. If I could’ve seen myself, I would’ve laughed. All I could do was stand there hoping that none of my high school acquaintances and opps were around.
After what felt like forever, the employee put her tablet down and pulled up my results. She snagged a bunch of sponges, and asked if I was interested in a specific brand.
Thankfully, I had come prepared for this question. With a whole five minutes of research under my belt, I decided that Tower 28 Beauty would be a solid place to start. In a sea of beauty brands and shades emphasizing intensity and sex appeal, the Los Angeles-based company named after a lifeguard tower in Santa Monica makes makeup a little less intimidating.
As an added bonus, Tower 28 is the only makeup brand to have 100% compliance with the National Eczema Association’s ingredient guidelines. A lifelong eczema girlie myself, it made my heart happy to find a brand that caters to sensitive skin and skin conditions without feeling overly clinical or abandoning a sense of personability.
Feeling giddy and girly, I walked out of the store with my new staple: the Swipe Serum Concealer in 9.0 MDR (or Marina Del Rey — all the concealer shades are named after places in Southern California). I was so excited to finally be able to participate in another piece of girlhood, albeit by myself and years behind most of my peers. It was well worth the awkward Sephora experience.
I never needed makeup. Nobody ever needs makeup. But it’s out there, for everybody and every purpose. Maybe it’s a self-confidence booster. Maybe it’s an art form, a way of self-expression. Maybe it’s just a necessity for surviving bright lights at sports competitions. And maybe its purpose changes over time, like it did for me.
It’s a bit hard to describe, but learning to do makeup feels a little like finally being a part of a club that you were too nervous to join before. Once you take the step, you find that it was nothing to be embarrassed or scared of. Nobody even cares that you’re late to the party — there’s still so much time to dance.
In the two months since then, I’ve been slowly improving my craft, trying out other products that I never had as a kid, like lip gloss and bronzer. This past week, I decided to try my hand at the eyeliner pencil that has forever lived, untouched, at the bottom of my makeup bag. I opted to wing it without a tutorial, no pun intended, and texted a photo of my attempt to a friend at the University of Chicago.
An hour later, she sent back a two-minute tutorial, filmed in her dorm bathroom 2,000 miles away. And it hit me. I finally felt it. At nineteen, I’m finally learning how to do makeup. Sure, it’s a little unusual and uncomfortable. Maybe I am years behind, maybe it really is just me figuring all of this out now. But my friends are here with me, and we’re dancing together. It’s never too late for girlhood.