How makeup can become a powerful personal expression weapon

This issue was published in the November 2021 number of Vogue Spain

Very white skin, the fine lips of a very lively and bright red, blue abéñula for the delineated: thus pepita Santiago Sanz was made up.Like so many other women of his time - he was born in 1921: his life was broken by the dictatorship - my maternal grandmother had a difficult life that faced the resistance from the resistance.I always remember it like that, white and red and blue, with its slopes and a necklace and the most beautiful dress - Flores, many flowers, or moles - that you fit in its budget.The hair, molded between silver gray and the generational lilac: two days before they died, it regretted that the hairdresser had been missing due to its hospital admission.From it I inherited a skin that remains with little attention - thanks -, a wide hips - why? - And my decisions in makeup: very white skin, dark red lips.

A prestigious American university developed conspicuous studies around The Lipstick Effect: the link between the economic crisis and the rise of cosmetics use.If a professor from Misuri or Texas and his team of experts put a PowerPoint with many data, who dares to take them the opposite?In 2008, first year of our era of this crisis of never ending, the sales of the industry were only sank the opposite: while we stopped recognizing the known world, that plane of the reality in which the Pintau and the Eyeliners liveand color creams with color imposed.Maybe your salary - once you, if you charge a salary - do not allow you the mortgage or the car or the dream vacations, but surely you can invest a few euros in a lipstick to move the attention of your dark circles - sleeping darknessNothing, because you work too much - to your mouth.Here the makeup does not cover imperfections or accentuates those features you prefer, but acts as placebo.

Before sleeping –Martes, March 10, 2020 - I get detainee in the hotel bathroom.At the airport, the first surgical masks;Upon returning home under the Super to buy rice, some fruit and vegetables, a lot of fish to freeze and toilet paper.During the first week I change from tracksuit to nightgown, from nightstone to tracksuit, and I do not comb myself and I forget the moisturizer.When I assume that the situation will last beyond fifteen days, I invented a custom: as soonDo not wait for me in zoom.Some nights consult tutorials to try the Cat Eye or try with colors that I would never exhibit in public.I recognize myself in the table mirror: I am my first spectator.With my smoked or with my shadows, I walk from the bedroom room, from the bedroom to the balcony, from the balcony to the toilet: I am my only spectator.I have not made up for anyone to see me: I have made up to see me.

During my depression I cut my hair, fat and fat and fattening - after thinning and thinning and thinning - I don't care about the lonely hair that is born in my chin or the width of my eyebrowThe neckline and arms and legs: I aspire to invisibility and my mind is twisted to consider that neglecting - what I consider neglecting: to deny my attention - facilitates the journey.Now I know that makeup underlines me.His absence emphasizes others, for them, and is fine;But it serves me as a language that my mood or my intentions tells, just like words.

Pepita Santiago Sanz: the first woman I contemplated - the verb implies fascination, the care with which I admired her care - makeup.His example gave me several consciences: that of dignity and beauty, here braided because she understood them not as an aesthetic issue, but ethical.If almost everything is political - in effect: almost everything is political - I also want to overflow with ideology the moment when my grandmother, in the first years of the postwar period, poses before a photographer with his face washed - his older brother is missing, his little brother has died - and a black fabric dress is enough.He has barely turned twenty years old, and I imagine that it is already the woman who grews me: flirtatious, faithful to the idea that we must offer the rest of our most careful image, not for the opinion of others but because of their own pride.It does not need money - on the other hand, it does not have it - for beauty, or skins coats or magnificent jewels: it is enough for you.If they impose on her the resignations and mourning, she accepts the resignations and mourning, clean face and rough clothes, the habit that does not make the monk but arms the rebel to the rebel.He faces the goal with such courage - although they do not want it, there she is - that the sepia of the image becomes white, red and blue.