Animal parts, and my love of salmon and sushi

The past few days I've been thinking a lot, about a topic that seems shallow but isn't always: makeup. Mascara, blush, lipstick, all that jazz. In America, we produce and use vast quantities of these products in the process of a neverending quest for eternal beauty and everlasting youth. If you really think about it, what's the purpose? We all grow old, with lines and wrinkles and pale, wispy hair. Makeup can't cover that up. Maybe it can render us temporarily more attractive, gain us a mate for the night, but in the long run, it's not your artful application of eyeshadow that makes someone want to stay with you. So in essence, it is by its very nature a quick fix, a temporary solution to a long-term "problem" - not having naturally purple eyelids. We spend outrageous sums of money on the stuff, a total of $45 billion a year in the US alone, but makeup takes time, too. Every day, there are certain "upkeep" sorts of activities that most of us do: we shower. We brush our teeth, hopefully twice. We brush our hair, eat, and answer nature's call, all the while trying to be productive, trying to do something with our lives. So then makeup just adds to this, adds to the 1.5+ hours of necessary daily activity. Applying it, removing it, cleaning your face so your pores don't get clogged. It's ridiculous.

But most importantly of all, more important than its superficiality, its inherent falsity and lies, and the money and time wasted while going through the cycle of application and removal, is how we produce it. All of this was brought on by a simple realization: every day, I spread a bit of dead animal on my face. Sure, I may be sporting less animal than people who wear foundation, and certainly less than that woman who walks by my office in the mink coat, but is any amount really appropriate? We kill the animal; use the animal to make an entirely unnecessary, intrinsically disposable product, going down the drain every night; and whatever we don't use up in a certain period of time, we throw away. Granted, this speaks to a deeper societal issue, the disposable nature of American culture, but anything we do will help. I think that we have a serious problem when we find it acceptable to treat life so callously, all in the name of beauty or fashion. I'm not a vegetarian, and I don't know if I ever will be again; I love fish too much, and Europeans do really genius things with beef. But I see no need to kill an animal just so I can look slightly more dramatic for a few hours.

And I have nothing against wearing makeup, in theory. I have to admit, I have a bit of a mascara addiction; I like my eyelashes. I like to cover up the circles under my eyes, since I never seem to sleep enough. But I don't think the level of importance that women accord it in their lives is by any means proper or healthy. Why would you waste five, ten, fifteen minutes of your precious day applying coat after coat of artificial color? We at least need to gain a little more perspective on the issue. If it must be worn, choose the application time wisely. And why not buy vegan makeup? I've started. It doesn't cost any more than normal drug-store makeup (to say nothing of the department-store makeup prices), it's kinder to animals, and frankly, it smells better. I can't find any good reason not to.

Gabriel Cosmetics (my favorite)
Honeybee Gardens
Burt's Bees
Hemp Organics is good, too; I don't think they have their own website yet, but they're highly googleable.

A UMich student writing about makeup
A blog about makeup