Think Makeup Means Vanity? Here’s Some Brutal Honesty About How Wrong You Are

When an asshole, whose opinion you didn’t seek, makes a comment about your make-up

Pull out your compact mirror and politely ask him or her to turn themselves inside out for you

This is the poem that I’ve been afraid to expose my scars in

This is the poem for every poem that uses cliché wordplay and metaphors

to conceal a disgust for makeup under the mask of empowerment

The “Queen, you don’t need makeup to make up for something you are lacking” poems

that are as overdone as YouTube tutorials

I hear you, but your preference for my natural beauty

has not been there on the days when I’ve been brave enough to face the world, barefaced,

and you forced your stares, comments, and recommendations into my already irritated skin

It has not been there on the days when no matter what I tried,

acne and eczema were still hell-bent on leaving their mark

This is not vanity. It is survival.

It’s the only way I could avoid having smudges of your jokes

rub off on the collar of my self-esteem

For those women who proudly proclaim, “I don’t need makeup!”

Well, congratu-fucking-lations.

I’m sure there are a plethora of other things you need in order to be more then just pretty

Or for those men who profess, “I don’t like women who wear makeup.”

Well, I don’t like men who wear little dicks, so stop being one

This is not your cross to go bare.

Forget walking a mile in my shoes, your ass wouldn’t last one step outside the front door in my skin

This is not shame

This is cringing each time I hear somebody say the word “makeup” as if it is a curse word

when the only curse has been my bad skin

and makeup has been a blessing

so your preconceived notions for why I’m a cover girl must have been placed in Photoshop,

because a line you have crossed has become blurred

See, not everyone has the privilege of using #nofilter, or #iwokeuplikethis

See, some of us dread the breakout brewing beneath our epidermis

This is for those of us who paint not to change our landscape, but merely to smooth out our canvas

This is not self-hate. This is me loving the skin I’m in even if it is only an allusion that can be washed away with soap and water

This is not me seeking a flood of compliments, this is not choice, it is a lack of one

It is being born a leopard unwillingly put on the spot, unable to hide my own

See, nature has always had a way of randomly selecting which of its creatures will bare a defect,

so on some days I wish that I were reptile enough to crawl my way out of this skin

But, there are those days that I tell myself that this is not hyper-pigmentation,

that when I’m asleep at night God just holds my face so tight in admiration that he leaves his fingerprints on my cheeks

This is not me wishing to be something that I am not,

but me passing for something I already know without a shadow of a blemish that I already am

and that, Texas Grand Slam, is fucking beautiful.