I’d originally intended to spend my entire Christmas bonus on a post-Christmas clothes shopping spree, but was waylaid this afternoon by a store called Sephora.
In case you are an alien, Sephora is a terrifying beauty products boutique filled with designer fragrances, a variety of high-end brand make-up, and certain high-end beauty supplies.
I don’t go to Sephora much, mostly because I don’t go to malls much, and Sephora is usually found in malls. And it’s most likely one of the stores I’d pass by unthinkingly while headed toward Barnes and Noble or something.
I don’t wear much make-up. I do tend to go in for really expensive beauty products like “body sugar” and mud masks and so on, and I love good perfume, but I will scrupulously go without those kinds of products when I’m on a tight budget (which is my usual state of being these days).
What I’m saying is that I haven’t had any kind of beauty indulgence in months (not counting Burt’s Bees tinted lip balm at Walgreen’s), so with my heavy wallet and my light step, I walked into Sephora ready to splurge.
Sephora is… well, it’s like another world. The color scheme is black and white and glossy. The entire store looks laminated. And the lights are as bright as possible, probably to point out all your physical flaws so that you’ll buy all the creams and unguents and balms and bronzers needed to cover them. Perfumes and colognes are arranged all along the perimeter of the store. Cosmetics are sold in aisles that get, I think, classier and classier as you enter the depths of the store. At the back of the store are the bath goodies, and the sales counter is in the middle of everything, approached by a winding path of last-minute beauty goodies that suddenly seem like the most logical addition to your purchase ever. Finally, there’s a “beauty station,” and the head of each aisle is a magnified mirror, back-lit, and a bunch of make-up applicators and removers. The whole place throbs with techno-pop music and the occasional Nirvana remix, and it’s stuffed with women and girls.
It’s an aggressively feminized space. As soon as I walked into the store, I realized I was way out of my ken.
For one thing, I was shoddily dressed. It’s Winter Break, and I’m basically a zombie, and I’d only put a momentary thought into what I wore out today: my blue A Serious Man promo t-shirt (hawt), a terribly stretched-out and hole-y gray raglan jersey top over that, my one pair of jeans, and my orange, patent leather Steve Madden flats that have seen better days and are now clearly half a size too big for me (how did that happen?). I know. I know. To complete the look, I scooped my somewhat dirty hair into a ponytail, pinned back the bangs, and was ready to hit the town. No make-up. Eyebrows a perennial mess. Nails un-manicured. Skin un-moisturized. And (I hate to admit this) I don’t think I even wore deodorant.
So you see, I was in no way ready to compete with the women and girls of Sephora. Everyone in there was coiffed and shellacked to perfection. They were dressed up to shop (a concept I’ve never really understood, since shopping to me is basically like a marathon or a long-distance flight that requires comfort and ease of movement), and they were all lacquered with make-up, and they all smelled way, way better than I did.
I felt exactly as I felt back in the seventh grade, when we first started “dressing out” for P.E. In the girls’ locker room, I had quickly learned that I wasn’t really a girl because a) I did not put on a copious amount of fruit-scented lotion before and after the workout, and b) I was not allowed to shave my legs yet. All the other seventh grade girls had smooth, tanned legs, de-haired thanks to Lady Bic and slatherings of strawberry-papaya body lotion. I, on the other hand, had pale legs, probably dry, fluffed with dark leg hair. (Seventh grade, by the way, was one long lesson in my failure to be adequately feminine: I did not have straight hair, I did not wear make-up, I did not spend a ton of time primping, I did not need to be accompanied to the bathroom by a gaggle of girlfriends, etcetera.) I saw the other girls’ sneers and burned with shame, so within a couple of weeks I brought my own fruit-scented lotion to school and gooped it onto my legs with the rest of the girls in the locker room, ignoring the cheap scent and feeling at least somewhat more accepted. Unfortunately, the lotion only succeeding in plastering my leg hair to down to my legs, which is considerably uglier and less feminine than fluffy, dry leg hair. I was a locker room outsider until the second semester, when I finally got the guts up to shave my legs secretly. I was never tan, though. Some things remained out of my reach.
Being in that Sephora today brought back those memories triple-fold. I suddenly felt like a little kid or worse, a make-up moron. For a while I stuck by the perfumes, testing Dior and Givenchy and Chanel before settling on my old standby, Stella McCartney. Then I wandered over to the bath and body area, snatching up a jar of “body sugar” by fresh, which is honestly the most incredible body scrub you’ll ever come across. Then, feeling bolder, I finally decided to trespass into the cosmetics aisles.
I felt a rising sense of panic as I tried to negotiate the different cosmetics brands. Which brand represents me? I still feel too young and too un-classy for Lancome and Dior, but too old and too square for Urban Decay and that brand that makes you look like a hooker.
I hovered around Stila for a while, trying desperately to look like I knew what I was doing. I gazed at bronzers and blushes unseeingly; I spent way more time than necessary examining the “smudge pots” and tinted eyebrow liner. Finally, to stave off a tailspin of despair, I decided that I needed to focus on finding one beauty item and decided that I’d buy a new lipstick. Every girl needs lipstick, right?
As I crouched down to examine the lip glosses, two girls appeared behind me. These were your typical Valley girls, the kind that used to terrify me when I was younger: aggressively pretty, over made-up, scented to the nines, and wearing the official Valley girl uniform, which consists of an over-sized t-shirt, a fussy coat, a draping scarf unnecessary in 62 degree weather, leggings, and Ugg boots.
To tell you the truth, I was still terrified. I could have been twelve again, and the only girl at Chaparral Middle School who was still not allowed to shave her legs.
Then one of the girls hissed to the other, “Isn’t that the most disgusting thing you’ve ever seen?”
Immediately, I froze. Me? Were they talking about me? Am I the most disgusting thing they’d ever seen? Me? I wasn’t doing anything especially disgusting, unless browsing for lip gloss is disgusting, but considering they were doing the same thing, it couldn’t be my actions. Or could it? As they breezed by me, I made brief but unforgettable eye contact with one of the girls, whose frosted pink lips smirked at me and whose perfectly arched eyebrow arched even further.
I was suddenly seized with the urge to approach her and tell her off. Or to advise her to do something more important with her life than sneer at a strange woman who was just trying to buy some lip gloss. Or to tell her it’s OK, she doesn’t have to criticize other women in order to feel good about herself. Or to run away from the store and never come back.
Instead of doing these things, I simply decided to pay for my two purchases and get the hell out of Sephora. I spent the next ten minutes skilfully negotiating the store, keeping myself separate from the sneering girls by at least twenty feet, and purchasing the perfume and body scrub from a woman whose eyebrows could cure cancer, or something. (At least, they were beautifully groomed.)
Then I vamoosed.
As I vamoosed, I passed by the Aveda store. Now, I’ve been toying with the idea of chopping off my curly, shoulder-length bob, the growth of two and a half years. I used to have this cute, short curly cut that I loved — made me feel fierce — and then and there, still reeling from my Sephora adventure, I decided I’d get that old cut again. Then and there. At that Aveda store.
Now, I know that most likely those Valley girls were probably not talking about me at all. I’d just heard the word “disgusting,” derisively uttered, and feeling like an outsider, I’d attributed it to me. Probably the girl was sneering at something completely different, and I’d just given her the stank eye for no particular reason, at least in her perspective.
But man, I felt like shit. I felt completely un-feminine. And gross. And yeah, a bit disgusting. So even though getting a short haircut is something you prepare carefully for, I just walked right into that Aveda and asked for a haircut.
And I got one.
Thankfully — I mean, thankfully — my stylist knew what she was doing and managed to give me a close approximation of my old cut. It could have turned out very, very wrong, and it didn’t. And at Aveda, at least this Aveda, you get a head massage and a hand massage during the shampoo, which were blissful. And for some reason, my stylist insisted on having me wear a little lipstick and bronzer before I left the salon (do they do this for everybody, or did she take pity on my make-upless self?). So it really was like a little makeover.
I left Aveda with a kicky new ‘do, softly scented arms and hands, lipsticked (finally!), and feeling a lot more victorious and feminine. I walked right back to that Sephora, took a victory lap around the store, and the skedaddled for my car.
I didn’t end up buying any clothes.
