Womanhood. How do we learn how to be proper women? By learning from the female parental figures in our life, of course.
 
Except here’s the thing: when it comes to wearing makeup and proper eyebrow grooming, my mother is clueless. As, I suspect, was her mother before her, and maybe even Grandma’s mother before that. Not a one of us knows how to put on mascara without poking ourselves in the eye with the wand.
 
My sister worked as a receptionist for a hair salon back in her teen years. From the stylists there, she did learn the importance of clean makeup brushes and how to apply liquid eyeliner. However, that was a long time ago. When I told Kim I was thinking of taking our mother for makeup lessons for her birthday, she wanted to come too. “But you know how to wear makeup,” I said.
 
“I haven’t worn blush since my wedding,” she countered. “The last time I used a mascara wand, it was to comb a snarl out of Nathan’s hair when he was a baby.” Fair point. She was in.
 
It’s not like I think my mother suddenly needs to learn how to wear makeup now that she’s a septuagenarian. In fact, I respect her lifelong decision to choose sleeping later rather than getting up and putting on her face—so much so that I’ve followed in her footsteps all my life. It’s just that she recently had a rather comical driver’s license photo taken, and Mom was feeling blue. I thought the makeover would cheer her up.
 
“You have beautiful skin,” the makeup artist said as soon as Mom sat in the hot seat. I’m sure my mother was flattered, until the woman said it again, to both my sister and me. Repeatedly. This lady really liked our skin. “What’s your skincare regime?” she demanded to know. When all three of us reported sort of splashing our faces with water and maybe using a swipe of bar soap at the same time, she seemed nonplussed. “Fine. Don’t tell me,” the woman said sulkily. How could we explain that the secret to our skin was simply genetics? (Thanks again, Grandma!)
 
The makeup artist then proceeded to plaster four layers of coating on our faces to help us achieve a “natural” tone (moisturizer, tinted moisturizer, concealer, and magic powder). Then she explained how we’ve been doing everything wrong our entire lives.
 
“Light reveals, dark conceals,” she sang, painting my mother’s lids with vanilla cream eye shadow. For the record, my mother has avoided anything she even suspects might be vanilla pretty much her entire life. But the lady was right: Mom’s eyes lifted and popped. (Not literally out of her head. That would be gross.) We learned that women with blue eyes should wear black or brown eyeliner, or even plum, and brown-eyed girls should wear navy or gray. She explained how women with oily eyelids should wear cream shadows, and will not get crows’ feet, and ladies with dry lids should use powders to hide the age lines around our eyes. We saw how to properly apply lip liner, and discovered that glosses have to be reapplied as often as ChapStick, which, with Kim and I both being ChapStick addicts, is about every ten minutes. Most importantly, we learned about the miracle that is an eyebrow stick.
 
I think all three of us had eyebrow concerns. Kim’s always look fine, but probably there’s some maintenance going on for her to pull off that look, and I don't know how confident she was that she was doing it right. Mom has never plucked her brows, and now that she’s no longer twenty, maybe the hairs aren’t always all dark brown. Personally, I had my brows waxed ten years ago, and I’ve sort of just been tweezing along the same path as that decade-old indulgence. But I have scars in my brows, and if I sleep on my face, I wake up looking like a rapper who deliberately shaves lines in his eyebrow hair (Vanilla Ice, I salute you). The eyebrow stick—a pencil on one end, a brush on the other—addressed all our concerns.
 
“Just brush up, draw a light line following your arch, brush down, fill in the holes, and voila!” She spun each one of us toward the mirror. We each suddenly had movie-star-worthy eyebrows.
 
After spending a small fortune on makeup—you didn’t think these things came without a price, did you?—the three of us left with our fancy eyebrow sticks and other assorted goodies in our fancy Nordstrom bags. Given the cost of each item, we all vowed to use our new blushes, glosses, and liners every day. I was especially excited to try the magic eyebrow pencil my own self.
 
The next morning, my alarm went off for work. I’d set it ten minutes earlier so I could get up and work on my new “natural” makeup look. I glanced at the clock. Eyed the snooze button. Perfect eyebrows, or nine more minutes in bed? 
 
You know what else is good for the skin? Plenty of sleep.