Basic B*tch

My mother in the mirror

Everyone knows the best part of going out is the getting ready with

the girls. Make-up chat is uniquely intimate. Looking yourself in the eye, it’s like talking to yourself. It’s honest. RuPaul’s Drag Race

fans will know that the only time the queens’ artifice slips is in front of the make-up mirror, when stories of estranged parents, abuse, HIV, and addiction are confided.

As a child, my favourite thing to do was to watch my grandmother putting on her make-up, wrapped up in a dressing gown, and hairnet in the morning

— a rare time that is just hers. Turned away from me and looking in the mirror, this was when she told me the best stories. And still does.

Aged 13, I’d closely observe my big cousin Amy getting ready for an impossibly glamorous night out, when the five years between us felt like a lifetime. She’d talk, interspersing lessons about lip liner with grown-up gossip. My very own beauty blogger. Now, the five years have melted away to nothing, and when we need comforting, we turn to silly talk about Bobbi Brown and boys.

My mother wasn’t a great woman for cosmetics, but when I close my eyes, I can still see her putting on her red lipstick in a cloud of Going Out perfume, smelling like babysitters, late-night chocolate, and staying up past my bedtime.

Years later, she’d come to my bedroom and ask me to do her eyeshadow

— “Not too much now. No black”. Now she’s gone, I remember those times as when I felt as close to her as ever, our noses just centimetres apart, making up a face that was a mirror of my own, and one that I knew much better.

Make-up gets a bad rap. It’s vain and silly and distracts us from the important task of smashing the patriarchy. But if the revolution ever comes, it will start in front of a make-up mirror, with some women talking, sharing, laughing, and being more themselves than ever.