Beauty That Kills

            If I were to spend 12 hours in Sephora and emerge as a multi-colored zebra, the only person in the world who wouldn’t notice would be my husband.

            After I’ve spent time primping, I say, “Hey, Hon, I've colored my eyebrows thicker!  Do you like them?”  I wiggle them for dramatic effect.

He answers, “You look the same.”

After I’ve curled my lashes so that they reach astronomical heights- imagine Won Bin getting poked with my eyelashes when I blink- his comment is, "You look the same."  I’m pretty sure that if I said, “Hey, Hon, I got my lips tattooed three times bigger and added three lip piercings!”, he’d probably say, "You look the same.”

This might seem inattentive, but in an ironic way, it’s also very reassuring. He does not love me for the molecules which surround my skin, but for who I am inside.  At least that’s what he tells me.

            When we got married, Won Bin said to me, “Someday, you will get old, fat, and wrinkly.  And I will still love you.”

He's a real sweetie, and as icing on the cake, Won Bin encourages me to spend on skin care.  So that’s why I go to Sephora twice a year.  Did you know that at Sephora, you can walk in with distress about any physical characteristic and poof!  They’ll give you the magic potion.  If you say “My nose looks too big!”, then they’ll hand you the perfect powder to shrink it.  If you say “I have really nice smelling armpits but the stench of my feet make my cats throw up!”, then they’ll hand you a magic bottle to fix all your problems.  They don’t just have makeup and perfumes but also tools and weapons.  If you said, “I need to clean the dirt out of the obscure sections of my belly button!”, they’d give you something like a miniature pick axe that can simultaneously serve as a ninja star, capable of slicing off the arm of any rampaging shooter who is disturbing your movie time.  And you thought that we shop at Sephora solely for vanity purposes. 

            You can also get FREE samples at Sephora of your luxury $200 night cream, made of mud from the bottom of the ocean, caviar, dragon’s blood, and grass from the lawn of Bill Gates.

The thing that keeps me going to Sephora is dry skin and a skin condition I have called melasma. (Melasma basically makes you spotted brown like a giraffe, and no, you don't get the elongated neck as an added perk.) When you go into Sephora with not one, but two physical distresses, all these sales people dressed in black drown you in so many serums, potions, creams, and lighteners that you're just hoping you can swim your way out of there alive.

After going to Sephora, I have received enough free samples and bought enough products that my vanity table sometimes reminds me of a mad scientist’s laboratory. I’m pretty sure that if I stirred them all up in a big cauldron, I would have the first homemade recipe for an atomic bomb.

Though on a normal day, I only put on moisturizer and sunscreen, once in a blue moon, I actually follow through on Sephora’s prescription for all my skin problems.  On those mornings, this includes- get this- softener, moisturizer, eye cream, spot whitener, sunscreen, foundation, and concealer. And then I can no longer lift my face because it weighs too much.   So I lie on the bathroom ground, mumbling through the layers for assistance from my children, but when they come, they can no longer find a resemblance of a face on Mommy.  When they realize that my face is not a demented frosted cake and find that I am bemoaning the fact that I forgot foundation primer, then they get disinterested and leave me to perish. 

It is comforting to know that when I am found dead, my skin will be moisturized and treated for melasma.

And my husband will be there saying, “She looks the same.”