Does anyone’s carpet match their curtains?

For once I am not talking about my pubic hair, or even referring to yours.  (‘Cause let’s face it, the boat carrying that particular shade of carpet sailed decades ago when I discovered Flirt hair colour.)

It’s all about lipstick.  Please follow my idiomatic extrapolation.  I’ve been testing lipstick shades on the back of my hand for many years. Okay, I’m lying.  I haven’t really been using the back of my hand, which I only just discovered, according to the internet, is the recommended body part you’re supposed to test lipstick on.  I’ve been using the inside of my wrist, because when I started trying on cosmetics (probably with the leftovers from Avon parties), the inside of the wrist was the rumoured place that one tried lipsticks.  I began lipstick trials when I was about 10, and haven’t thought that I needed to change my methodology because why mess with a good thing – unless one realizes it’s not a good thing – which is what happened last night.

My pattern has been this: I go to Shoppers Drug Mart for something other than lipstick.  Somehow on my way to find the random ‘other than lipstick’ item, I wind up browsing the cosmetic aisle.  Whilst in the cosmetic aisle, I find several shades of lipstick that I think might be ‘the ones,’ which I then test on the inside of my left wrist.  I haphazardly hold that wrist next to my face in the bad fluorescent lighting, and then, based on the best of the ‘wrist test,’ I take my prize-winning, exorbitantly-priced colours home.

I get home, properly apply said lipstick and immediately think the lighting is bad, my eyes are bad or maybe I was really high when I chose the colours in the first place, because the new lipsticks make me look like a clown hooker.  I easily have 10 different shades of the perfect 1950s red for this reason.

Now some of you might be saying to yourself, why don’t you just use the testers?  On your actual lips?  If you are one of these people, Are you OUT of your fucking mind?  A cold sore will be the least of your worries.  Cold, flu and viral meningitis anyone?

If you want to apply the testers at Shoppers to your lips, you need to come prepared.  You have to have a bottle of alcohol handy, something you can wipe those suckers off with, and little lipstick palettes or swabs to get that colour onto your lips. Or you ask for help from the gal at the cosmetic counter, which you never generally do as a Canadian because you don’t want to inconvenience anyone, and let’s face it, choosing the ‘right’ lipstick with proper empirical testing is going to take you upwards of 16 hours.

Last night, dissatisfied and confused by the practical results of my two new “wrist-approved” lipsticks – I turned said wrist to my face.  As I gazed into our bathroom mirror, an epiphany struck, whacking me upside the head while singing out the word  DUUUUUU-FUS!!!  at the top of its epiphanic lungs.  My face is nowhere close to the same shade as my wrist nor the back of my hand.  Not even a little bit.  It use to be, before peri-menopause hit and my skin went all sallow and melasma-y, but no longer.

No wonder lipsticks never look the way I think they will – the comparative skin I’ve been using doesn’t exist on my face! The closest thing to the skin on my face is the patchy, freckly bit on my decolletage that got badly sunburnt last April which has yet to return to the ‘fish belly white’ skin that exists on every other part of my body but my face.  My sun-damaged decolletage is the perfect lipstick testing spot!  And really, apart from the odd looks that I’ll get when I start drawing on my boobs in Shoppers (plus the subsequent jumping up to get a good look at these colours in any of the face-level mirrors), I am confident that this technique will serve me well. 

*I wasn’t sure of the correct phrasing for the idiom ‘Does the carpet match the curtains?’ There were conflicting reports online.   So  I called my parents.  When my Dad answered the phone I asked him, “Is it ‘does the carpet match the curtains or carpet match the drapes?’ ” He replied that it depended upon what side of the Atlantic you were on.  He’s British, so he went with curtains.  When I asked my Mom, she went with drapes.  I liked the alliteration of the double c’s, hence the post’s title.  What’s great? Neither of them batted and eye when I asked.  They get me.