You Can't Make This Shit Up #4: Makeup Madness

For almost two years now I've been working in cosmetics doing sales and makeup artistry. I've moved on to another endeavor so now I feel comfortable sharing some of my quirkier stories about my clients. This little gem is nothing short of crazy. In fact, that is what I intend to call her.

So one day a perfectly average housewife walks up to the counter and starts examining the lipsticks. Weirdly, lipstick appears to be the most difficult decision women make. Otherwise intelligent and capable women who make hundreds of critical decisions at work and home each day are utterly flabbergasted by lipstick. As a salesperson this can be a grueling and unfruitful sale that can suck up an hour of your time for a $22.00 sale, resulting in your inevitable frustration and a whopping $.66 commission. Thus, I developed a foolproof system to speed the sale along AND sell them something else.

The first thing you have to do is get the woman away from the display unit filled with over a hundred colors of lipstick in 4 formulas. This is too complicated, too much choice. You have her sit down and ask her questions. What is the lipstick for? What will it be worn with? Where will she wear it? Is this an everyday choice or something for evening? What kinds of colors do you already like and wear? You keep asking questions until you can narrow it down to 3 lipsticks to show her and you choose the appropriate liner, don't even ask about that, it's too complicated. Once she is presented with just three choices the decision is fairly easy and you put the one she likes on her. While she is sitting there you throw on a little blush to match it, maybe touch up her eyeshadow and eyeliner and then have her look in the mirror. Presto! She looks lovely, she buys the lipstick, liner and lip gloss and wow, that blush looks great, she gets that too. This technique works nearly every time and thus it was always my practice to use it.

And so I did, not knowing that this woman was crazy. Having someone validate every one of her bizarre lipstick concerns opened the door for what was tantamount to a therapy session. What she would really like is to be the prettiest woman in the room, but not look like she tried too hard to be that way. She wants the makeup to not be recognizable as makeup and yet significantly alter her appearance. Because certainly I must know how it feels to be a woman, constantly being judged and compared and held to an unreasonable standard. After all when you walk in a room everyone is really staring at you even if they don't appear to be. She then paused to let me know how connected she felt to me. "You must be an angel. I just know it."

She had left home that afternoon in an uproar over some emotional upset that apparently involved all members of her family and somehow I understood her. Of course truth be told the only thing that I did understand about our bizarre encounter was that this woman was incredibly insecure, borderline paranoid and had strange intimacy issues that involved her glomming onto perfect strangers at cosmetics counters. She proceeded to buy a lipstick and liner totaling $43.00, which in her view was some sort of wild rebellion that would teach her husband a lesson. As an added bonus, she became a regular customer and our therapy sessions became a regular part of my routine.

What's funny really is that she is representative of an entire group of strange women. There are all kinds of crazies out there. Needy women who seek the council of a makeup artist instead of their neighborhood bartender as the good lord intended............ honestly, you just can't make this shit up.