I’m hung over and grumpy. My mum is stripping the paper in the hallway and I’ve slipped into petulant child mode, I have announced that all I am capable of today is making the tea and project managing from the couch. Husband has put on some 40’s music for her and all I can hear is intermittent warbling to Bing Crosby and scraping.
When I finally rose from my pit today, I decided to dedicate the day to my blog and catch up on some of the things I’m yet to do. One of them is to put foundation on my lips pre lipstick, then with a lip brush apply some neon bright colour. So the hooker lipstick from July was resurrected.
I can’t be bothered to get dressed though, or brush my hair. I just about managed a shower and to plaster on the vile lippy – and that’s it. When I skulked down the stairs, my mum looked up to say hello.. and then I saw it.
My mum looks like butter wouldn’t melt. She’s 5 foot 2 at a whisker, with big brown eyes like Moley out of Wind in the Willows and a silly, stupid grin after just half a gin. But underneath it all, she’s a finely tuned machine of strong (and heroically organised) womanhood.
When she doesn’t like something, her head cocks to one side, eyes open a bit wider, lips slightly purse and then it comes - the ultimate sign… the sign that she can neither hide nor deny to those that know her inside out … The nostril flare.
When the nostrils flare, you have lost before you have begun. Whatever the nostrils are flaring at, are firmly and permanently placed into her “I don’t like it, I never will and there is nothing you can do or say that will change my mind …. But I don’t want to say anything about it because I may upset you” category.
The pink lips most DEFINITELY fall into this category. As I walked down the stairs the nostrils flared that wide I half expected a little flame and a puff of smoke to follow.
“I know I know mum – it’s a Marie Claire thing”
“OOoh I’m not keen”
“Sigh – neither am I mum, that’s why I’m doing it on a day when I don’t have to leave the house”
“Good, because it’s horrible.”
Maybe Marie Claire’s beauty editor could fight the hooker lipstick’s corner with my mum, that would be a death match worth watching.
Being a slave to the cause, I thought I would road test the staying power of the lippy, atop foundation– by eating a bacon sarnie and then giving husband a smooch.
It faded pretty quick to be honest, which I was thankful for as now my mum can get on with the paper stripping without her dilated nostrils getting in her way.
