Tell me what products you have in your beauty and I'll tell you who you are Do makeup and skincare products have a personality?
There's one thing that happens to me a lot. It may be the professional deformation, but when I'm with my friends my gaze almost always ends up on their beauty case. Every time I think the same thing, namely that you tell a lot more about the person who uses it than we imagine. There are those who own only one lipstick and buy it back the same for years. Who would never go out without perfume, even if only to buy bread. Those who invest everything in skincare and consider make-up a detail. And then there's that person who changes their hair color every six months, as if every season needed a new version of themselves. Hence the question of this article: do we really choose our beauty products or at a certain point, are they the ones who tell us who we are?
The product that we always buy back
There are cosmetics that we try once and forget in the drawer. Others, on the other hand, accompany us for years. This is the case of the lipstick that we always buy in the same shade, the perfume that everyone associates with us or that cream that we buy back without even looking at what's new on the shelves. It's not just a matter of habit. Every time we choose a product, we are also choosing the image we have of ourselves. And when we find something that truly represents us, change becomes difficult. I think this is also why we get so angry when a brand decides to reformulate an iconic product or to eliminate it from the market. We are not just losing a cosmetic, but a small certainty.
The beauty case changes with us
What's in my beauty bag? The beauty case doesn't always stay the same. If I opened what I had in my twenties I would probably find completely different products from the ones I use today. Eyeshadows that I would never wear anymore, lipsticks that I would never choose today and products that then seemed indispensable. In the meantime, I have changed. My days have changed, the time I dedicate to my beauty routine, the way I look in the mirror and even what I consider beautiful. And this happens to everyone, because the beauty case does not only tell us about our tastes, but about the moment in life that we are going through.
Are there products that have more identities than others
Among them all, there are some that seem to have a special meaning. Perfume, for example, is perhaps the most identifying product of all. It becomes an invisible signature, something that others end up immediately associating with us. Skincare tells another story. There are those who experience it as a moment of relaxation, some as a preventive gesture and those who, on the other hand, like the continuous search for the product that will finally solve everything. Then there is the hair and probably no other element of beauty follows what we are experiencing so closely. We cut them, grow them, dye them, change fringe or color. Sometimes for fun, sometimes because we need to see an obvious change even in the mirror.
Beauty is also memories
There are products that we stop using because they no longer represent us, others that we keep buying because they remind us of a phase in our lives. Just open a drawer to find a lipstick that we used at university, a perfume that reminds us of a summer or that palette we bought before an important trip. If we think about it, cosmetics do what even photographs do, they keep our best memories.
Tell me what products you have in your beauty and I'll tell you who you are (or vice versa)
In the end, I realized that the initial question was wrong. Beauty products don't have a personality, but it's our personality that inevitably ends up inside those products. For this reason, some people will continue to buy the same lipstick and others will need to change their hair color every six months, who would never go out without perfume and who, on the other hand, would invest all their savings in skincare. It's not just a matter of taste, but the way in which we choose to tell each other. Because the beauty case is a small autobiography and you just have to open it to understand that, very often, it talks about us even before we start doing it ourselves.
