I remember my first love affair with the eyeshadow palette. With a wrinkled silver wrap and a cute foam skull applique, Urban Decay’s Skull Shadow Box appeared in the 2000s in a nine-bread colour story that could be described as “elic-like.” The colour that caught my eye was cherry. Cherry is a pastel pink with silver microglitter and has been worn on metal many times. I regularly repurchased the palette just for that one shade.
As a suburban teenager who can’t see credit cards or Sephora at the time, I save all my Christmas and birthday cash, steal eBay for my most coveted products, trek to drug stores, buy and pay for money orders. The packaging was waiting for weeks so that each product felt like a treasure.
Now, as my 30s professional makeup artist, I am blessed with the level of access to products that my younger self envy. I have a fully stored kit, a palette-filled drawer, a stack of PR mailers, all the shades and formulas I had dreamed of at the time. Still, something is missing. When I open a new product, I can no longer get such a rush. In fact, when I recently organized my entire collection, I went from boring necessities like mascara, primers and brow pencils to azid, but my kit had some products I liked everywhere as much as my old favorites. The last thing I was really excited about beauty products was realizing I was in high school.
At first I thought this was because many of my original favorites were obsolete. Because Natasha Denona’s palette had a bright pink shade that looked somewhat similar to Urban Decay’s Cherry. That wasn’t the case. It’s beautiful, too refined, too wet, and not correct at all. So I went back to eBay. There was a talc-free skull shadow box there for over 20 years. I bought both and waited hoping for a small package of emails. I wondered: Has my enthusiasm really gone, or would it feel like opening these products would have been decades ago? When they arrived my heart raced. It felt the same way. Better, maybe – it felt like going home.
“Influencer culture has transformed beauty into performance. This means that the purpose of makeup is satisfaction, not ritual.”
Anyone who has become conscious about makeup in the 90s and 2000s will tell you that their magic never came to the formula. Many of the products themselves were undoubtedly worse than they were today. The hard candy polish was quickly missing. Urban Decay’s sparkly eyeshadow was Fallout Central (I love you, I’ll ride a midnight cowboy again, but your thick glitter wasn’t the most eye-opener). Mac Lipsticks couldn’t help but be as engrossed and sweet as it smelled. Rather, magic was born from beauty as a whole, such as beauty, product, practice, culture, now imagination, possibilities, context, etc.
