Your alarm goes off three hours before you even have to think about leaving for your day. It’s not so you have time for breakfast, and it’s not so you can sneak in a few episodes of Friends before you head off to class. It’s so you can fight an uphill battle we like to call “getting ready.”
Getting ready in the morning feels really great after it’s all said and done, but getting there is a series of misses we prefer not to acknowledge. Take for instance, the energy-draining exercise of foundation application. You use so many squirts of the slightly orange yet very expensive paste just so that your skin tone turns out even, and then you use several more so as to not look like an Oompa-Loompa (which seems counter-intuitive, doesn’t it?). Then about 20 minutes later, your nose itches, leaving you with no choice but to change the color of your nose back to its original shade by way of your index finger and a Kleenex. Or worse, you know that zit that you just spent 7 minutes and half a gallon of concealer trying to convert it from its putrid shade of purple to only a slight, flesh-colored bump on your face? You know you’re going to bump it, rub all of the color off, return it to its putrid purple shade, and negate all that time you spent making it look like you weren’t growing a horn.
The rest of make-up application is no walk in the park either. Let’s imagine you just perfected a really amazing smoky eye. Six hours later and you’re having a bout of itchy eye so naturally you thoughtlessly rub your eyelids, leaving half of your face in a smudgy, glittery, dark-colored nightmare of different eyeshadow shades. Or when you get a magnificent eyeliner wing going on, but then you read a clickbait story about sibling puppies getting adopted by the same owner on Facebook and suddenly you’re in inexplicable tears, rendering your eyeliner wing unrecognizable. Or when you choose the perfect lip color to go with your aesthetic but you have false confidence in its staying power so you leave the tube at home. Lunch rolls around and you are really craving on a sandwich, leaving you with only the edges of your lips covered in color. Because of all your false confidence, all you’ve got now is a tube of Blistex and a silent prayer to the gods of make-up that you can make it work.
It’s not just limited to makeup. Sometimes you get this crazy desire to pick out your outfit the night before to save time. Then the weather or your mood steps in and crushes your plans leaving you with wasted attempts at planning ahead because putting those jeans with that top just wasn’t good enough. Once you finally pick out a completely different outfit, you do your hair only to go outside and have the wind give you a hand with that on the way to the car.
Basically, getting ready in the morning is the most fruitless exercise. But it sure makes us feel good when we look good, doesn’t it?