The beguiling language of beauty

Today I patted my new magical serum into my face as demonstrated yesterday by a much younger woman at Shoppers Drug Mart. This serum is full of workers who will run off and find the other workers in my other serum and they will all work together. And in one week I will appear visibly younger. That’s a paraphrase, but that is what I was told. And I kindof believed it because I bought a jar of sublimessence, didn’t I?

I almost turned around and came home as I was driving to my class with David Vincent, Lise Watier’s International Makeup Artist, who was visiting our town to help us all. I was thinking how stupid I would feel if someone I knew saw me, or if, God forbid, someone from Syria wandered by. But I stuck to it, partly because I knew my daughter was proud of me for signing up. I sat down at a table with my fellow registrants and asked loudly: “Does everyone feel as silly as I do?” laugh laugh laugh. And they all said, “No.”  Then I banged my knees into the legs of the cramped and crowded table and spilled their plastic wine glasses of orange drink. A horrible beginning.

But then David came out and bewitched us all.

There is a special, magical language these wizards use as part of their spells. Where else would you hear grown adults speak of elixirs and serums? And use the word radiance so much? And say luminous without laughing?

There are now pre-serums to be applied before serums. And you are to push these into your face, not the clumsy, naive upward strokes we have been doing for decades. David did step in and correct one of his young minions on the use of the word “push.” Which made me respect him even more actually. It was a relief when he clarified. He said, no, no, you’re not actually pushing the serum into your pores, you are patting it into your pores. And it’s a special cocktail of active ingredients. And it’s a creme not a cream. And it’s a precise action with targets and goals. It’s about a luminous corrective base on your skin, one option of which contains a diamond luminous complex. That would be patted on prior to the miracle base primer. All of this helps to blur the flaws. With luminescence.

The thing is, even as I cackled to myself and took down my sneaky notes on my “Your Skincare Ritual” handout so I could write this blog and also text Holly the new language I was learning, a warm camaraderie was growing at my table.

The ladies had forgiven me by then, I think, for spilling. People were smiling and sharing their beauty challenges like vanishing eyebrows and saggy chins and droopy eyes and makeup settling into wrinkles and the dreaded fine lines. (Okay, yes, that part was a bit distressing). Then David wrapped up and there was almost a stampede (as much as there can be a stampede in the corner of Shoppers Drug Mart) to go meet one on one with members of his team to get individualized care.

By then I was helpless, fully under the enchantment. I met with a lovely and kind young woman, a graduate of George Brown college in Toronto I found out, who spoke to me of eyebrows and eyeliners and blush colours and made me show her how I applied eyeliner in my neanderthal way. And she gently corrected me and whispered supportive things. And it was all I could do to not give her a hug.