All too often I give my Mum her standard weekend check-in phonecall and she tells me from the other end of the line how she’s having a clear-out. After living under her roof for a grand total of twenty something years I know that all this means is that she is emptying the contents of her cupboards, crying, laughing or both at the relics she finds and packing it all away again without as much as a birthday card from her sixth birthday making its way into the bin bag. Yup, she’s a hoarder. I happened witness one of these episodes last weekend and while getting roped in to read a Fathers Day card my sister and I had gone a bit ‘Blue Peter’ with back in the day, I stumbled across her sorting through her makeup bag. Now my Mum’s not massively into beauty bits (spot her here), but she has the uncanny ability to hold onto things well past their welcome and amongst the more recent Anna hand-me-down additions, I spotted some gems from her youth nestled inside. So we sat, swatched and chatted all things ’80’s.
Let’s just address the jaw-dropper first. Miss Selfridge did makeup!?! And my Mum’s word on it was that it was really rather good. Two eyeshadows still remain in the depths of her stash; the Eye Colour’s in Sort of Peach (the one you can see open), and Rent A Cloud which is weirdly similar to my favourite eyeshadow of all time MAC All That Glitters. But apparently it was all about the colour when my Mum was in her teens – blues, greens, heck peach on the eyes – I’m fascinated. There’s a well-worn Rimmel Eye Spy in there too in the the shade Matte Pink, which my Mum mentioned was her daily go-to. And then her most cherished item of all, Estée Lauder’s Re-Nutriv Lipstick in Half Apricot that she slicked on for her wedding day back in ’87. It always makes me laugh how my Mum’s a peachy lip lover too – maybe it just runs in the family, huh?Â
The item though that stood out to me the most was the St Michael (what we know as M&S) Faceshaper Kit – an ’80’s lesson in contouring featuring three blushers, a highlighter and a how-to chart of where to place them all on the cheek. The dent in Rose is a teller that it was my Mum’s favourite and there’s a hefty amount of the highlighter gone too. My Mum told me she used to stripe them on, with very little blending involved and head on down to the Pink Coconut in town (again, surprisingly it’s no longer called that).
A colourful blast from the past which my Mum has assured me will never make the bin bag cut. And who knows maybe twenty years down the line I’ll be giving the same lecture, ‘There were these things called BB Creams and everyone went wild for them’…
Comments