My partner offered to do my makeup today. I was excited both because she’s been iffy on the whole transition thing and because she’s very good at doing her own makeup and I was excited to get some instruction.
I’ve always thought I look young for my age and fairly attractive (if you’re into mountain men) so I was cautiously optimistic about the results. But when she was done I looked in the mirror and my first thought was: shit, I hope Napoleon comes through that door and puts me out of my misery. I looked like an old french duke or a sad theatre queen in a Christmas pantomime.
Without the makeup I looked around 5 years younger than my age, but with it I looked easily 25 years older. My eyelids especially looked like poorly tanned leather. I know estrogen is amazing for your skin, but Jesus Christ does it have some heavy fucking lifting to do.
The best bang for you buck makeup to feminize the face, at least for me, has been just eyeliner and mascara. Unfortunately, my eyesight is so bad, I have a focal range of ~70-150 mm and anything outside that is a blob, so doing my own eyeliner is nearly impossible until I can get some contacts 😠. I still tend to get called sir at stores/restaurants, but when I look in the mirror it’s a hell of a lot easier to see a girl even with just mascara.
My boss’ daughter is a movie MUA and when he mentioned that I had come out as trans, she got very excited to teach me how to do my makeup. The biggest things I took away were not to ignore colour correction, and eyeliner is pretty easy to do with dark eyeshadow and a fine brush if your eyes actually work lol 😋
I’ve never met anyone who needed -10D lenses! Although one of my ex’s had -8D which I thought was really bad.
I’ll experiment with the eye makeup, but there’s no rush. I’m going to be going incognito until I can’t. And based on today, that’ll be a while. I’d like to be able to just get on with it when the time comes though.