By Tanvi Madugonde
“Most of us undergraduates know what it was like to experience the ‘awkward middle school’ phase. The scrunchy hair tie stacks that inched their way up to our elbows, the high ponytails and big bows, the mismatched tights, the Children’s Place t-shirts, and the memes that decorated 90% of our apparel. We look back on those memories and reminisce about the ‘good old days,’ when homework assignments were a couple worksheets maximum and TikTok was just beginning to skyrocket.
I look back at my middle school photos with a different kind of nostalgia. My eyes migrate away from the frumpy outfits and instead towards the body hair that splayed across my limbs, the dark hair decorating my unibrow and upper lip, my grey elbows and knees that seemed extra ‘dirty’ and unclean because they showed up on brown skin instead of pale. These were the photos of a girl who felt more than adolescent abashedness. She was afraid of her melanin, her culture, and the growing pains that separated her as an Indian girl growing up in a sea of lightness in her small northern Arizona town.
In my pieces “Habits I Hate” and “To Blush Purple,” I explore the feelings of growing with instead of away from my insecurities of belonging to a culture that drew a line between my identity and my peers’. To grow up desi was to grow up different — there was no doubt about it. But now, I can look back at my middle-school self with the kind of love she deserved from her community back then, knowing that to realize my value later in life was better than never realizing at all.”
To Blush Purple:
I learned what lipstick was at a second-grade birthday party, where we had a fashion show for all the moms and grandmas, dressed to the nines in feather boas and fedora hats. Except I didn’t want to walk the show after my mom forced me into a frumpy dress that showed off my ashy knees, and walking down the walkway with my ashy knees meant that people would actually see my ashy knees, and more likely than not make comments about my ashy knees. Instead I tried to pretend to be the “stage manager” – helping organize the show, telling the other girls where to put their ribbons and hairbows, adjusting posture and straightening wrinkles – at least then I’d have a better shot at being taken seriously than tripping down a runway. But I still ended up walking the show with a random pink Claire’s lipstick smeared across my lips, coerced into thinking it made me pretty. The other girls said I looked like a fifth grader now, and I believed them. They told me that looking older would help me feel like I matter. I went home proudly and stared into my vanity mirror and looked at my pouted lips for the first time. And that’s when I noticed that the color didn’t suit me. I didn’t look older. The makeup didn’t work, and they lied.
—
My best friends in sixth grade told me that I had big eyes but short eyelashes, and unless I got longer eyelashes, I wouldn’t look like a high schooler, and if I didn’t look like a high schooler, boys wouldn’t take me to the school dance, and in the sixth grade, you need a boy to take you to a school dance. Everybody who was somebody had a boy taking them to the school dance. So, I went home crying to my mom about my eyelashes. In sixth grade I learned what mascara was, and I sat there silently at the foot of my white wood vanity, sparsely decorated with rainbow eyeshadow palettes and the occasional lip gloss, watching the mirror as my mom brushed my lashes, down and up, with the mascara wand, making them thicker and smudgier and droopier until I felt like my eyes were sinking, and by the time I got to the dance, all the mascara had turned into dark circles instead. It was a mascara wand, but I couldn’t wave it and fix all of my issues – it was still just plastic. I looked back into my vanity – it was still better than nothing. But why didn’t I feel older yet?
—
The pandemic year was the perfect year to begin learning YouTube makeup tutorials, since the only thing I had keeping me occupied at home was my mom’s old makeup sponges and some expired concealer. I could’ve learned how to hide the hyperpigmentation on my upper lip and cover up my unibrow. I could’ve learned how to even my two-toned lips with the right shade of lip tint, except I chose not to do any of that and ended up learning how to apply foundation on the school bathroom floor with a girl who was nice enough to teach me how to properly apply the powder to the back of your palm. “The kind of makeup you can wear underneath that COVID mask,” she told me. She applied the cream to my face in “downward strokes only”, picking up my mom’s old sponge and dabbing away until any trace of blemishes, picked acne scars, and discoloration on my face faded into one smooth coat, swirling the sponge around until her consistent strokes turned into a mousse. And I felt pretty because I thought my dark upper lip was gone, that my unibrow looked separated. I pulled a mask over my ears and walked back into class with my back a little bit taller. And then I went home and realized that the foundation shade I’d hurriedly bought didn’t even match my skin tone. So I sunk back into the suffocating seat of my vanity and placed the two-shades-too-light foundation next to lipsticks and mascaras that also didn’t suit my face. And I picked up a hairbrush, stared into the vanity mirror, and began wrestling my hairline into the middle because I read somewhere that middle parts make you look older. If my makeup couldn’t then maybe my hair could.
—
I bought my first blush in tenth grade, a hot pink that I saw influencers use, sold on the idea that it would transform the apples of my cheeks into a translucent pink glow. I must have used it for three months until a friend was kind enough to tell me it “couldn’t be farther from the right shade.” So I begged my mom, pleading to let me go back to Sephora and spend another $40 on something that probably wasn’t even going to work again. After spending too many hours looking up “blush for brown skin”, I trudged into an aisle with a deep purple liquid that resembled wine rather than makeup, holding up the tube skeptically as the worker helping me smiled sadly, almost as if she’d seen this before. I didn’t think it’d work, that the internet lied to me again and that I needed to just give up. I went home, back to the sunken seat of my vanity, staring at piles of gently used products that I’d felt too guilty to dispose of because of the money they cost, but couldn’t use because it kept going wrong. I placed two hesitant drops of the purple near the corners of my eyes, rubbing them in with my eyes wide as I stared back at the face looking at me from the vanity, finally seeing something that made sense.
—
My father was about to turn 50, and my mom mistakenly put me in charge of party planning, so I spent a day driving to Target to pick up supplies, driving home to drop off the supplies, then driving back to Target because I picked up the wrong supplies. Thirty minutes prior to the party was all I was allotted to finally get ready. But that was all the time I needed. I sat at the edge of my vanity seat, stared into the glowing mirror, and squeezed out two pumps of a deep tan foundation, aerating the mixture for thirty seconds before application onto my face in “downward strokes only.” I slid the black eye pencil across and over my waterline, highlighting my short eyelashes and applying mascara, down and up, until they looked long enough to reach my brow bone. Grabbed a beige setting powder to brighten my under eyes, highlighting the apples of my cheeks with a golden powdery highlighter. I stretched my lips thin as I sketched the arch of my cupid’s bow with a chocolate colored lip liner, filling in the empty space with a nude lipstick. I held my breath as I rubbed my plum shade blush into my cheeks, not stopping until I looked rosy and a little sunburnt, but just the right amount. I sprayed the setting mist over my face, eyes clenched tight and opened to see my face, just my face, but emboldened. And I prepared myself for the flurry of conversation I’d hear when cutting cake.
“You look so much older!”
So this time it worked.
Habits I Hate:
I hate that some people reach the ripe age of 17 years old and still think it’s socially acceptable to pick their nose, even though I made a three-course meal out of it when I was five years old.
“It’s honestly hard for me to watch a nail-biter. I don’t know how the idea of gauging your teeth into your nail bed to rip out excess can seem a tempting stress-coping mechanism for anyone,” I typed, with my cuticles ripped to shreds, blood spouting in at least three different places as I set aside a pair of blue plastic gloves to wear later in the shower. Shower gloves because my fingertips are so torn to shreds that hot water seeping into the narrow crevices would send hot spikes of pain and karma into each finger. The one thing I hate most about myself are my hands. Well, my hands and my nose. But mostly my hands, with their rough, flaky palms and chewed fingernail tips that make for extremely uncomfortable handshakes. My mother always warned me from a young age that if I continued to have a go at my hands the way I still do, I’d be at risk of infecting them. Sepsis. My mother’s hands are perfect – the kind you’d see modelling the latest bracelets in a jewelry commercial. Despite the hours she spends fighting her way through crowded Costco aisles or Indian markets, making hand-made meals crafted from scratch every night, her hands appear as if their most difficult task is typing away softly at her keyboard. I don’t cook. I’ve never been in a Costco for more than a couple minutes for their churros. My hands look like the washed palms of a dirty coal miner’s.
I tic. A new dirty habit I’ve discovered tends to happen in moments of peak stress (probably why people often ask if I have Tourrette’s during college application season). I, admittedly, do not have Tourrette’s. But my disgusting little tic will never go away, like the devil on my shoulder constantly reminding me there are reasons for stress. I get asked why I blink weird. I can’t explain why. I can’t explain why my right eye flutters open and shut without my command or notice. Why it may seem like I’m violently winking at people when really the nerves in my eye itch to stray from the perfect machinery of the rest of my face, choosing erraticness over normalcy. I can’t explain that when I try to stop the tics, it feels like someone’s holding me underwater as I fight my way to the surface but never reappear. I can’t explain that when I don’t tic, I begin to breathe strangely, rasping and heaving and wheezing. I try to avoid looking people in the eye, because when I do, I hyperfixate on every little movement my face makes, suddenly wary of the wrinkles in the middle of my eyebrows, of whether my mouth is open too wide, of whether they can see the tics I’m trying to drown, to submerge so that I can get through one conversation without feeling defective.
I hate hearing my family eat at the dinner table. Each gargantuan sip taken from their drinks, each slurp and lick of their utensils sounding like a broken symphony of noise erupting from the inside of everyone’s cheeks, making my heart race and my forehead sweat, making me want to curl inside of myself like a reversible cushion. Dinner time is my least favorite meal of the day.
I hate acne scars. I pick off each pimple and watch the blood sneak out with every new blemish that barges past my skin barrier.
There’s a scab on my left earlobe that hasn’t disappeared for the past nine months, probably because my fingers need something to distract themselves with when they’re not tearing each other apart while my right eye starts twitching out of control.
I already have thin eyelashes, so rubbing my eyes until they keep falling out isn’t a beauty-standard-supportive habit.
Not to forget is the way I suck my stomach inwards during every family trip to India, because I don’t need more distantly related family members asking if I’ve gained weight or lost it.
I hate the way I scratch at my nose, pick at my ripped fingers, blink my right eye unharmonically, and chew the snacks by my side. I hate how my blemishes protrude ready for bleeding, my ear scab itches, my eyelashes fall, and my stomach sucks in while I think of things to include in this essay.
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