Jolie Laide

When I was young, the story goes, a friend walked into a hair salon in North Jersey and asked for "the Jennifer Snow haircut."

This is nice, but I'm no Aniston, and my hair at age 6 didn't exactly spark a trend.

But I understand the impetus. Of asking.

Last night I walked into Sephora. I was looking for black eyeshadow. I have black eyeshadow. More than one kind. Slate. Midnight. Smoke. I have a whole host of non-colors with which I attempt to make shadows around my eyes. But I'm looking for a specific shadow. And until it came out of my mouth I didn't recognize that it is one that I probably will never achieve.

The smocked-lady asked what I wanted and I realized, "Can you make my eyes look like my French roommate's?"

So now I have an "Onyx"-colored kohl pencil that has a smudgey-sponge at the other end. And buying it, and calling it such, pretty much affirmed that I'll never have that shadow.

This is all sounding like I'm trying to be grossly poetic. It's not. It's simple. I just need to convince myself. I'm not from Paris. My smudging looks less like a smoky shadow than it looks like a mess. A mess I made by drawing on my eyes with a big black crayon. I think that if I start to cry and then rub my eyes it will look better.

This seems like a perfectly viable option.