Grayed

Grayed, Chapter 1

   I always wake up two hours before I have to go to work.

I start out every morning with a hot shower, washing my hair and lathering my signature lemon fragrance into a foam before rinsing it out. I step out of the shower and dab my hair with a soft towel until it dries a bit. I go over to the counter and take a hair band off the smooth crème linoleum and pull my hair out from my face.

In the mirror, a tired green eyed face stares back at me. My skin has small flecks and imperfections and my jaw has a deep ugly bruise formed on it.

Time to go to work.

My ritual begins with a deep face scrub, a skin peel, which burns a little, but it gets the dead skin off, then a black head removing cream. I finish with a skin tightening mask to get rid of the tired looking lines. There. A well prepared face should be tender and pink.

My first makeup step is the liquid foundation. Last year was a golden bronze, this year it's a pearly white. I open up a liquid container about the size of a coffee can and begin to paint the surface of my skin. From the forehead to my breast line. My ears, neck and even the tops of my hands become a beautiful opalescent white. My ugly bruised face changes colorful hues with a glossy sheen every time I turn my head.

I look like my skin is made of abalone shells. 

I touch up on my tattoos and eyebrows. I don't have many tattoos, just red on my lips, and a small bit of eye liner that shines the colors of peacock feathers, and a twisting angled v shape on my chest. I've been thinking of repeating the pattern somewhere else, maybe my cheekbone or between my shoulders maybe.

I pull my makeup kit out of the top drawer and begin to apply eye shadow. This year's hottest trend is Candy Carnival. Pinks, candies, vertical stripes, clowns, lemonade, flames. Beautiful. At the eyes, I start with pink, then yellow, orange, magenta, purple and end with blue at the ends of my eyebrows. It looks like a soft haze of candy colors.

I make my lips a bright candy pink and gloss them over so they shine like a lollipop. I add blush to my cheeks and then begin to couture my nose and cheekbones.

With a practiced hand, I draw thin lacy lines over my colorful eyelids and form soft butterfly patterns. My eyes look like green pools of water surrounded by a field of flowers. I then put dark blue eye liner on.

After they dry I open a brand new packet that I bought online recently and place them on the counter. They're false eyelashes. They are a powdered blue and they have intricate butterflies in them. I paste them over my real lashes and flutter them. They're so pretty and soft looking.

I dust gold flakes on my cheeks, temples and collar bone and add little stick on pearls near the outside corners of my eyes. Are little pearls too 'under the sea' looking? No, I've seen them on cupcakes before. Wait! Cupcakes! That's it!

I scurry over to my closet and rummage through my wigs until I pull out a raspberry colored wig with gold flecks. Adjusting it on my bathroom mannequin head, I glue on baby blue and bright candy pink extensions on the temples and begin to work the wig until it looks like a swirly cloud of cotton candy, or a swirly cupcake.

I add pearl beads into the hair and pearl earrings. I tug out a sheet of wax paper and a printer pen. I draw white butterflies to match the ones on my eyes and blow on them to cool off. I add them to my mousey brown hair and pin the wig in place.

A lot of people told me that my hair is a drab color, and that I should get it altered. I kind of like it though. Reminds me of cream in coffee, like the kind my father and I would drink on days that rained. Besides, nobody will know what color it is under a wig so what's the point of going through the procedure anyways.