First Lipstick

By TAD BARTIMUS

The little girl stared at the 500 lipsticks, awestruck.

A blonde woman in a summer dress stood beside her, watching. It was a transfiguring moment, an irreversible step into womanhood neither would probably remember. I, the unnoticed stranger, couldn't turn away.

Like eating a hot fudge sundae or staying up all night with a novel, buying new makeup is a perk for good behavior; it leavens shopping we have to do for panty hose and black raincoats.

One of the joys of being female is to shop for pretty things. You learn this with your first dollar in the dime store. Since college, it's felt deliciously extravagant to have two anonymous hours to myself to buy a new lipstick, try on an exotic mascara (jungle jade? aubergine?), test out six kinds of $40-for-three-ounces moisturizer while a 20-something salesgirl who never had a zit in her life earnestly tries to explain the difference.

Most days I run around makeup-less, or with just a touch at the eyes and a hurried pass across my lips. But occasionally I do the works. When I was young that was gilding the lily; now it's a restoration job requiring a steady hand and the best materials money can buy.

Which is what brought me to this store, a reward for a hard day. Women use this excuse when we buy something that isn't practical or necessary. Like eating a hot fudge sundae or staying up all night with a novel, buying new makeup is a perk for good behavior; it leavens shopping we have to do for panty hose and black raincoats. With 10,000 square feet devoted entirely to paint, powder and scent, the store where I was watching this child's rite of passage is a hedonist's paradise offering everything from sea kelp soaks to orchid petal oil. "Which one, Mommy?" The choice of colors, sheens, glosses, mattes and irridescents was overwhelming, even for a grownup.

"You pick," said Mom, knowing that ever after, this girl teetering on the cusp of puberty will treat herself with tubes of goop called Peppermint Passion and Perfectly Persimmon. She will believe, until she learns otherwise, that brews and potions offer magic, that her new colored grease will make her more beautiful, and therefore more special.

At least that's what the 14-year-old told us the morning she appeared at the breakfast table wearing cucumber slices on her eyelids. The babysitter in the avocado mask said the same thing. Why women wear makeup is one of the Great Mysteries. Did Nefertiti outline her eyes in kohl and Cleopatra bathe in crushed pearls because they thought beauty begets power and power begets love? Does it? Fifty percent pop culture, 50 percent paganism, makeup is also 100 percent believing that if you think it will, it does.

The little girl carefully unwound a color wand, dabbed it to her finger, then put it back. Soon her hand looked like a harlequin's glove; it was impossible to choose just one. Mom relented and two tubes (the palest pink, the softest peach) were rung up, wrapped in tissue paper, placed in a dainty little sack and handed over the counter.

Mother to daughter, adult to child, this is part of the natural order of things. Dad, however, won't understand when suddenly his little girl appears before him with pink stuff on her lips. How did this happen? Surely it's too soon. He won't remember that Tinkerbelle surrounded herself with fairy dust, and even Peter Pan needed her to sprinkle some on him before he could rescue the Lost Boys.

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