Self-Isolation Is the Right Time for a 1980s Career-Woman Makeover

By Emily Alford | May 27, 2020 | 3:45pm

Celebrities

On March 12, the day before my birthday, I allowed myself to go into a once-yearly Sephora fugue for several hours, and when I returned to my body, I’d bought a Fenty eye shadow palette containing all the corn-and-sage hues that made 1970s Tupperware so glamorous, along with a cobalt blue eyeliner that looked straight out Joan Collins’s early ’80s Dynasty makeup drawer. I was thrilled, as these colors absolutely represent my sense of style; my highest praise is a statement along the lines of “That’s horrible. I love it.” So I was incredibly excited to spackle my face like something from the pages of an archaic Avon lookbook and hit the town in celebration of my birth. Then on March 13, everything went to hell, and I’ve left my house about six times since.

But that doesn’t mean I haven’t used my new products to give myself a terribly glamorous late-’70s/early ’80s career woman makeover. The application of cosmetics need not service other people’s gazes. In fact, self-isolation makeovers are more honest and pure than those I’d wear out of the house by virtue of no one seeing them, liberating me to render my most authentic, horrible self in the privacy of my own bathroom, armoring against malaise with a thick shield of steely blue eyeliner, extending those eyeliner wings right out of body and up to heaven.