Image: Don’t like sharing your lipstick? Too late. (Image via Thinkstock)
Your body is not the only thing that changes after you have a baby. Your beauty routine does too, because you’re never alone in your bathroom and you have no time.
Remember the days of luxuriating in the bath or cranking up the music while you spend a satisfying 25 minutes trying to perfect a make-up trick you saw in a magazine?
BAHAHAHAHAHHAAA.
How times change. Here are the beauty truths only mothers can understand.
1. Your bikini line is now something for public commentary. “My mummy has a hairy front bum” is something every child will announce, usually in a supermarket queue.
2. Having to answer these and 100 other questions while putting on makeup or doing your hair: “What actually happens when you die? What rocks are made of? Where do farts go when you can’t smell them anymore?”
3. Eye makeup remover is the best way to remove lipstick from all over your child’s face. Also from the carpet and the dog.
4. Red lipstick and black eyeliner are the best way to create realistic looking scars and wounds. Particularly useful at Halloween.
5. You no longer associate the word ‘bath’ with relaxation or peace. Instead, you associate it with 37 bath toys and an inevitable tantrum when it’s time to wash hair.
6. Doing your makeup takes twice as long because your children want to play with all the brushes / EVERYTHING YOU OWN.
7. Eyeshadow is a bitch to get out of tiles when someone drops it on the floor and it smashes into a thousand powdery pieces.
8. You will be judged when you take your 2-year-old to the nail salon, even though you just really needed to get a pedicure and that’s what iPads were invented for.
9. You will always have chipped nail polish and chipped nails. Always.
10. You embrace ‘natural’ makeup because you actually have no time for the routine you once had and who actually cares what you look like today?
11. You will be asked “what's that on your face, mummy?” as curious fingers are pointed at your pimples, moles and freckles.
12. Your GHD is covered in inches of dust, and you can't remember the last time you switched it on.
13. Cleansing your face with anything other than a facial wipe? Not going to happen.
14. You have to keep your makeup hidden at all times, because lipsticks, even really, really expensive ones, are crayons.
15. You become an expert at putting makeup on without a mirror in two minutes flat because LITTLE CHILDREN. (This explains a lot about how I look before my first office bathroom visit of the day).
16. You can't blow-dry your hair properly because either a) your child hates the sound of the hairdryer and will wail the whole time it's running or b) loves the sound of the hairdryer and just keeps insisting you turn it on them in a HILARIOUS game.
17. "Grooming" now means shaving your legs once a month. In winter, it's once every three months.
18. Shapewear. Shapewear. Shapewear.
19. "Doing your hair" now means just spraying it with dry shampoo.
20. Conversations like this when you’re putting on makeup:
"But Mama WHY are you painting your face?"
"Because it makes me feel good.
"Why does it make you feel good?"
"Er... because it makes me feel nicer."
"But why? it looks sticky. Can I put it on?"
"No, little boys don't really wear makeup..."
"But why? I want to look like a vampire too."
(oh.)
21. Finding your makeup brushes being used as paint brushes. And the paint is... (oh no) your eye shadow. And the canvas is (oh no)... the wall.
22. Explaining to your three year old that she is too pretty for makeup... and then putting in on yourself.
23. Answering the urgent question every single day: "No, your hair isn't as long as Elsa's yet... No, your hair isn't as long as Elsa's yet. No, your hair isn't a long as Elsa's yet..."
24. Acting nonchalant when your daughter tells you that she has put "nappies" on her "babies" - the nappies being an entire packet of pads!
25. When your daughter becomes a teenager, you must start hiding every beauty product you own because she nicks them. All. The. Time.
26. On the flipside, you get to start nicking hers when she starts buying cool stuff.
What have you learned about beauty since having kids?
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