Member-only story
SELF-ESTEEM
The Miracle of Makeup
Wait a second while I put on my face.
It started with the head.
Back in the 1970s, before diversity was invented, Mattel made a disembodied Barbie’s head, complete with long (of course) blonde (needless to say) hair and a small selection of water-based makeup. This was meant to properly indoctrinate young minds into the acceptable ideals of beauty.
The makeup lasted about a week. You could still style the hair, but the makeup was the fun part. No makeup = no fun. Could you buy more? Who knows.
In that way, the Barbie head was similar to the Lite-Brite. The Lite-Brite came with paper design templates and numerous small bags of colored plastic pegs which either didn’t fit into the holes because they were molded wrong or they simply disappeared into the ether.
Maybe you swallowed some. Maybe you dropped some down the furnace vent. Maybe the dog or the vacuum ate them. It’s hard to say. And once you poked a design through the templates, it was all over.
But when I was a kid, you didn’t throw things away like you do now just because they were broken.
