Lessons in Lipstick

Editorial Assistant Rahima Bilgrami reminisces on the unmatched childhood delight of discovery. She lovingly recounts the first rifles through a treasure trove—her mother’s makeup bag.

When I was a child, there was no object in our home more mysterious or magnetic than my mother’s makeup bag. It was never left entirely in the open, though it wasn’t hidden either. It lived in the corners of drawers, on the bathroom counter, and sometimes in her handbag when we were going out. But wherever it appeared, it felt partly forbidden, partly ordinary and entirely fascinating.

I would eye it the way other children might eye jars of sweets, but with a different want. Each object seemed coded with adult power: the small black bullets of lipstick, the gleaming pans of powder, the pencils that looked like weapons for drawing on a new face. If I wanted to join the Big League of Life, I figured, makeup was the way to go.

So I began my crime career with eyebrow pencils. Not full theft, more like temporary liberation. My mother’s frustrated (and suspicious) “Where’s my pencil gone?!” was always followed by a guilty return. The mirror in my room became a private stage. I’d wrap my sari—made from a bedsheet—around myself, smear Mum’s red lipstick on my face and pretend there was no tomorrow.

There is a strange intimacy in learning about your own mother through her reflection. As a child, you study her face more than anyone else’s. You notice the places she touches more often, the small sighs she lets out when her foundation isn’t a shade match, the satisfaction in the corners of her mouth when a new colour she bought looks flattering on her. I absorbed all of it without knowing I was storing techniques, preferences, gestures. Even the messiness of my early experiments was a kind of apprenticeship.

Eventually, the secret raids gave way to a sanctioned career. I saved pocket money, bought my own arsenal, learned the holy distinctions: matte versus satin, drugstore versus luxury, liquid versus powder. My face became the new canvas.

Now the circle has flipped. My mother comes to me for advice. She asks me which foundation will suit her skin better, which blush will light up her eyes, or how to do a black smoky eye without looking like a panda (to which I still have no idea). She asks me to trial looks on her face—me, the child who once fumbled through her bag with guilty hands. There’s a tenderness in those moments that feels almost unnameable.

Nostalgia is often thought of as longing for the past, but for me it is more circular. It is the recognition that the past echoes into the present. When I was a child, makeup was a symbol of everything I didn’t yet have: adulthood, authority, mystery. Now it is a bridge back to my mother, one that allows us to meet as equals, even as I still carry the memory of watching her in awe.

Now, every time she asks me to try something on her, I remember my younger self crouched at the mirror, lips painted unevenly, dancing away to raging 2000s Bollywood hits. That child could never have imagined these moments. Nostalgia is not just about looking back. It is looking through; through the mirror, through time, through the shifting roles between mother and child.