The connection I feel between makeup and mental health started before I was old enough to wear it out of the house – either the cosmetics or the mood swings. It first began with someone else’s irrational behaviour: antisemitism at primary school. This was exactly the age I was starting to contemplate my appearance. The club classic: “Aren’t you sorry you killed Christ?” was a regular. Because of my curly hair and olive skin they called me the N-word – a small child has to really yearn to use the N-word to say it to a predominantly Ashkenazi Jew. They also incorporated into their bullying the three moles I have on my right cheek. “See, that’s proof, these are the mark of the devil,” they said. So you’d think I was interested in things to flatten and cover those moles, but I actually retaliated by using my mum’s eye pencil to draw them on even more prominently.
After a bad day at secondary school – where I had friends, but an impossible time concentrating – I’d lock myself in the bathroom to make up my face with immaculate focus. If I got it slightly wrong, I’d need to make it much worse – swooping lipstick circles and bad words in eyeliner – until I’d made myself look how I felt inside. Once I’d studied the monster in the mirror, I meticulously washed it off. It was, I realised later, a gateway drug to bulimia and self-harm.
The source of my tools was the regular care packages I received from my mum’s friend, Nancy, who lived in Manhattan, where she designed Clinique packaging. It isn’t lost on me that it was a high-end “career-lady-you-can-have-it-all” brand I used to express my terror at impending womanhood. Their unbeatable “Black Honey” lipgloss was as sticky and dark as my inner world.
By the time I went into the world at 15 as a working journalist, I was wearing the wrong foundation – garish, mad, the wrong colour and generally in service of a place I shouldn’t have been with someone who should have known better. Someone who should have said: “This girl does not know how to apply makeup. This girl is a child and should not be out with adults.”
There was something legitimately “wrong” with me and it emerged when I moved to New York at 21, as if the city were medieval leeches placed on my skin. I would be successfully rewired with medication, a great talk therapist and regular physical exercise (all three I keep up to this day, decades later, and have had no bipolar incidents in 15 years).
When I moved to New York, one of the first friends I made was Bianca, a receptionist at Nylon magazine who oversaw the makeup closet, which was full of samples and freebies. She also worked as a sales girl at Miu Miu, and we’d sneak into the dressing room of the store to have her do my makeup if I was ever doing a photoshoot.
When I attempted suicide at 22, I ended up in St Vincent’s Hospital in the West Village, and I remember Bianca leaning over me in the ward, touching my face with her bag of different brushes. I don’t know if she was the one who’d cleaned off the black charcoal from my jaw that they’d used to make me puke up the pills. But, under the fluorescent glare, she was applying blush to my cheeks, because having arrived in the ER as an attempted suicide and then, on being saved, immediately asking the handsome attending doctor if he wanted to make love – what was there to say?
Only a few months later, 9/11 happened and we raced to St Vincent’s to give blood, but they didn’t need any because there were no survivors. We sat all week on the stoop of the Cherry Tavern bar in masks we’d been told to wear because of the toxic ash in the air.
At 25, I fell hard for a visiting Māori actor, who’d met me at a rooftop party in high summer and approached, thinking I was Latina. When he introduced me to his Māori friends he always said: “She’s not British, she’s Jewish.” He was proud of the same part of me those kids at school had been repulsed by. I left trails of bronzer on his clothes, a terracotta Guerlain powder I bought at an airport on one of the many backs and forths of this longest of long-distance relationships, my triangle of satanic moles photographed at various points in the Polynesian triangle.
In winter, I wore a perfect red lipstick from Shu Uemura, who no longer produce makeup at all. Discontinued makeup turns my stomach in a particular way that most closely resembles the end of love: what makes you feel beautiful can’t always stay and you can only try to source a duplicate. Or, to see it more optimistically, none of us has only one soulmate, and it’s OK to have a “type”.
Now I won’t buy a lipstick if I’ve forgotten my glasses and can’t read the name – because the name, as much as the colour, is the invocation, as sure as laying out your crystals to be charged by the full moon. I wrote my third novel in 2004, and called it Cherries in the Snow, inspired by a job my mum did at Revlon, coming up with the names for their products. The most famous, “Fire and Ice” and “Cherries in the Snow”, weren’t hers, but she did come up with “Flamingo”. The idea – which I don’t think I fully brought to fruition in that book, being still too young and unstable – was: “Can you make things safe by naming them?”
I’ve reached my 40s with the same signature makeup still in place: red bow-shaped lips. On the surface they mean, “Don’t kiss me, just watch me speak.” But the red mouth stems from a core childhood memory: the opening credit sequence of The Rocky Horror Picture Show where the lips are in sync with the music, until the moment they peel back to reveal their teeth and morph into an x-ray. What was offered as sexy, covers the disturbance underneath. I’ve been “sane” for so long now, but that image still does something to me.
I married while living and working in Hollywood. We had a child, I got divorced and moved back to London two decades after leaving. When, recently, on a whim, I started doing makeup videos on my Instagram, I said, realising as I said it, “There are celebrity makeup lines I don’t want to put on my face, because your skin is the largest organ of your body, and it is porous.” As good as her tinted serum may be, I don’t want what I personally perceive of, for example, Victoria Beckham, to touch me. I don’t want that on me, even when I read about it in the papers. I want it off me.
And I remain alarmed by Kylie Jenner’s billion-dollar cosmetics line, particularly her stay-put lip product. I’ve tried it; it is a hit because it works. But think about what the Kardashian name was first ever connected to in the public domain: OJ Simpson being defended at his murder trial by Robert Kardashian. I don’t want the Kardashian family’s “Out Damned Spot” on my lips.
I didn’t know, when I first started experimenting with makeup that, in my 40s, I’d allocate so much of any cheque for skincare – laser, facials, micro-needling – that I don’t ever wear foundation. Maybe the teenage cutter in me would like to have known about the paid package version of self-inflicted pain that’s actually self-improvement.
Anchored and domestic, I still think of that 12-year-old girl defacing her face in the locked bathroom, even as I take note of the makeup columns in every newspaper. I am always waiting to see what washcloths get recommended: microfibre? Sea sponge? What will wash things away so you can start again? Double cleansing? Foaming oil? The pricey version of this routine is hotel rooms. The fresh start each day: the room made clean for you. Every woman’s makeup and cleansing routine is a hotel room that they can afford and is easy to travel to.
Makeup today can be so heavy on intricate tutorials that it’s alienating for someone who dropped out of school. I love makeup, but to see the step-by-step guides it’s become as if blowjobs were only jobs. This is the autodidact nature of having quit school at 15: the profound offence I take at anything, including makeup, that offers instruction.
In 2024, the makeup collaborations you can find (with Hello Kitty for Pixi or the Muppets for Ciaté) confuse that line between child and adult woman in a more overt way than I navigated as a “working” child. I battle with my 11-year-old daughter about makeup being for play and not for wearing out of the house. How do I explain that this is because there are bad people out there, in a way that isn’t frightening? How, then, to make sense for her of the Sanrio and Disney crossover lines?
Where I am in life is this: my kid can’t wear her expertly applied makeup publicly, but when I see garish makeup on an older woman I love it, especially under the harsh lights on public transport. Because I – who first used makeup as self-harm – am now seeing makeup for joy, not to look older or to look younger. Haus Labs, Lady Gaga’s range, is particularly play friendly.
My biggest hatred, however, is the Euphoria makeup trend: the confusion and distress of the teen painted directly on to the face in glitter tears. You might argue it’s a modern take on the Pierrot, but Pierrot is elegant and this is an aesthetic trickled down from hardcore porn: that a woman’s makeup should be smeared. That the vulnerable should be visually ruined.
When I struggled with mental health, we used makeup to cover up. Bianca, who’d made me up in the hospital, turned me on to Diorshow waterproof mascara, which we both relied on because we were always crying and didn’t want anyone to know. It is shocking for me, the girl from that locked bathroom, to see makeup as a display of what’s being battled inside. The neon star stickers worn publicly for pimples is the right of a generation whose mental-health status is listed on their dating app profile. Everything is named. Nothing is blended. Nothing is camouflage.
TikTok beauty enthusiasts ask you to take a quiz for your most flattering makeup look: are you an autumn or a summer, spring or winter? I am emotionally autumn, because I am in my late 40s and feel earthed without being earth-bound, the potency of my leaves turning golden, so I catch my own breath in wonder. It can’t last. Winter has to come, but there will be makeup for that. I love Ruth Gordon in Rosemary’s Baby as a makeup icon. I’d love to wear green eye powder that suggests I might impregnate you with the devil’s baby while also admiring your furniture. Maybe that’s full life circle from the kids who said my moles were the sign of the antichrist.
Makeup artist Kay Montano asked me, ahead of this Observer portrait, what I wanted her to convey. My initial answer was, please convey that, even if I can’t fix them, I know what all my problems are. Instead, I sent her a photo where I thought I’d done my makeup well. “I get the kind of makeup you like,” she replied, “It works day-to-night, overnight and the day after.” Yes! That’s what I was trying to say! The play makeup of youth and old age is invigorating, but in autumn – when a lot has been unpacked and nothing has been buried alive – just give me makeup that says you saw me for who I really was.
If you have been affected by any of these issues, contact Samaritans on 116 123, or call Mind on 0300 123 3393
