Sometimes makeup is not my friend.

I was not brought up in a very girly-girlish household. My mother wears powder and a little lipstick and has a very low-maintence hairstyle. My father is not impressed by makeup and perfume. He once tried to make a deal with me that if I promised never ever to wear eyeshadow, he would pay for me to get my eyelashes dyed.

I said no, mainly on the principle that I don't approve of doing permanent or semi-permanent things to my body. It's the same reason I would never use electrolysis. Maybe I'll want hair growing on my legs someday, dammit. Don't take that option away from me. Any permanent changes that befall my body are going to come about by accident, like the little scar I got on my wrist from when I fell off a set of cabinets onto an uncovered wall-hung pencil sharpener.

Anyway, I'm glad I said no because later I read that dyeing your eyelashes can make you go blind, and how much would that suck.

My sisters and I learned the majority of our grooming techniques from our school friends, like monkeys turning to the tribe at large for guidance, and these days we take varying degrees of bother about our appearance.

My middle sister, for example, grew her hair out into a golden Rapunzel braid and rarely wears more makeup than our mother. My little sister wears full makeup everyday, especially for those two weeks when she needed to smear extra base on her forehead to cover the gaping burn where she nicked herself with the curling iron while styling her bangs to utter perfection.

I fall somewhere in the middle. I get bored fixing my hair, so I generally let it do what it wants. I do, however, try to fix my face up at certain times to avoid getting carded every two steps or to shore up my mask of authority. When I was teaching, I always made sure to 'do my face', because I figured it would help make the kids forget that I was barely five years older than them.

One day I came home from teaching my morning class, and mr rampy (it was a vacation day for him and he was just getting up) stared strangely at my face.

"Your eyebrows," he said. "They're red."

"Yes," I answered. "If you hadn't already noticed, I have red hair."

"No," he shook his head. "I mean red red. Like candy apples."

So I looked in the mirror, and sure enough. I had just taught an entire class while wearing bright red eyebrows.

So that day I learned an important new grooming tip: putting your makeup on by touch in the dark so as not to disturb your sleeping husband is a very very bad idea because eyebrow pencils and lip liners are all the same in the dark. Just like cats.

I try to think of self-presentation as an ever-evolving process.