How Makeup Made Me More Creative

In which makeup became a surprising source of my creativity.

I used to hide my makeup, because if I was caught, it was game over.

My father is a traditional Iranian father, one who stubbornly abides by the values he thinks are right. And the first time he saw his youngest daughter, me, wearing makeup, he got upset. He told me no man would want me, something that had been reiterated by the way I dressed and the way that I often brashly spoke, and that natural beauty is best. And so I found my form of resistance in a different way.

I only saw my father early in the morning, when he dropped me off for the school bus, and late at night, when he came home from the restaurant. My solution to the makeup dilemma, so I wasn’t dragged each time for wearing makeup, was to make a makeup bag out of Ziploc bags. In the bathroom in front of the literary classroom, where my friend group up until senior year resided, I slapped on makeup before the morning bell. Sometimes I brought the wrong lipstick color and I’d look like a clown, or I’d not do my concealer properly due to the lack of time, but it got me going with makeup.

This is how I got speed down with precision. The more I did this, the better I got at quickly doing my makeup and looking good. But that wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to express myself through visuals, to continue improving on my game because I was creative. Regular makeup wasn’t doing it for me.

I’m no makeup artist, but eventually I settled down and found the makeup that worked for me: brown lipsticks, Glossier Lash Slick and Boy Brow, no foundation, and, of course, a red lipstick when I was feeling cute. But like clothes, it was through this act of experimentation did I start to find my voice as a creative. I also learned the act of resistance, to keep doing something even when my family disapproved.

That became the basis for my work as a writer. I think it’s helped that I had no background experience in poetry what-so-ever, never attended the prestige writing camps and whatnot, and so I just did my own thing. I don’t adhere to the normal conventions in poetry, nor do I want to. At the end of the day, I just want to be me. And that’s what makeup ended up teaching me. That at the beginning, we can try and fail, but if you keep pushing, you’ll get there.