Beauty · Essay
What I Tell My Daughter About Makeup
She's twelve and asking. Here's the answer I settled on after getting it wrong the first time.
My first answer — “you don’t need it, you’re beautiful as you are” — was true and also useless. She wasn’t asking permission to exist. She was asking to participate in something.
The second answer was better: makeup is a skill, like anything else worth learning slowly. We started with what a dermatologist actually recommends at her age (sunscreen, a tinted balm) and left the rest for later, on purpose.
What she heard, I think, is that this is a choice she gets to make with information, not a rule handed down or a door thrown open all at once. That’s the version I can live with.