I often have these life epiphanies when I’m standing in a store, bamboozled by so many products that everyone seems to be telling me I need. It was in sainsbury’s last year whilst I was staring at a whole selection of various chicken cuts that I decided to go vegetarian.
Today it was boots. Surrounded by make up.
I went in to town to go and buy a blusher brush. Finances aren’t exactly great at the moment, so I was just looking for something cheap but of good quality, apparently no such product exists. I then started to think about all of the other things I ‘needed’, a highlighter, new foundation, new mascara, a blending sponge. Of course, if I bought all of these things my bill would soon rack up and I’d be left penniless.
And then I started to think, how disordered the makeup industry is. These people are making so much money from women’s insecurities, they are literally telling us we need these products to feel beautiful. One product that seems to be pretty popular with women is the ‘skin perfecter.’ Really? This is a cream that supposedly makes my skin ‘perfect’. Perfect in whose terms? I don’t think there’s anything wrong with my skin as it is, or anyone else’s for that matter.
Another makeup fad at the moment is this ‘countouring’. I hadn’t heard of this makeup method until recently, but looking at YouTube videos, I am disgusted. Countoring means shading and highlighting your face with various products until you’ve more or less changed your whole face’s appearance, some of the transformations made women look unrecognisable. Again, what was wrong with their faces before? Why are we told we need to change our faces?
I was standing in boots thinking about all this, and I just got really angry. I felt like these products were needs and not wants. The way they are marketed makes us think that we can’t do without them, and that we have to spend our money on correcting something that never needed to be corrected in the first place.
So what did I do? I walked straight out of Boots and in to HMV, I bought myself a new CD with the money I would of spent on a blusher brush, and I went home to wash my face.
Happy Lows 