Ashleigh Young on lessons in makeup

A study in make up triggered glossy memories for Ashleigh Young. Photo / Getty

I remember watching my mother pouring talcum powder over her head and rubbing it through her hair to turn it white. She was playing Mrs Higgins in a production of My Fair Lady in our town. To me, the white hair was majestic. Even with deep lines drawn on her face to make her look older, she was graceful and tall and soft; she was Falkor from The Neverending Story. The day after seeing her as Mrs Higgins, I went to school with talcum powder all through my hair, like a tiny pensioner in a bean-green tracksuit.

Why can't the Falkor moment last forever? That moment when you hold a pure reverence for how your mother – or any adult you look up to – presents herself to the world, even if her lipstick is crooked or she's wearing a jacket with shoulder pads so huge they seem to vibrate? But the moment must end. You grow up. You notice how beady-eyed the world is, how a person's appearance is proof-read for errors. So I began to study.

The older sister of my best friend was fantastically knowledgeable about beauty. She gave my friend and me a series of lectures about makeup and fashion. When I say lectures, I mean proper lectures, written up and delivered from a lectern (her bed). We would sit, cross-legged, taking notes that we kept in lever-arch folders that we'd stolen from our respective dads' home offices. Don't use a concealer stick on your lips, we learned. Dab toothpaste on your pimples. If you are going to be a model, you have to be able to do a cartwheel in your undies.

But these were introductory classes. The only way to advance was to pursue independent study. I got an after-school job and spent all my wages on women's magazines. There were a lot of articles about the shapes of people's heads. Were you a heart, an oval, a square or a "round"? I was in between a square and a round, which meant I shouldn't get a bob, the only haircut I knew. In the magazines I also saw that none of the models wore the energetically applied terracotta lipstick that my mother wore, or the eyeliner she called "toad green". None of them looked like they finished their makeup and said, "Right!" then went out to feed the chooks. Instead, they stood around, enjoying having faces. These faces never ventured into ordinary human expression. It was like the models had been told to demonstrate how faces worked, like someone in an infomercial demonstrating a sponge.

So many lipsticks, so little time. Photo / Getty

I became an expert in having opinions about my mum's makeup. "Your foundation isn't blended into your neck." "Your eyeliner is wonky on both eyes." I wonder what it must have been like for her, with three surly teenagers, a teaching job that meant more surly teenagers, unending chores, a dog who ate poo then trotted inside triumphantly – and look, now a child has some feedback about your mascara. Once, I seized control of her tools and gave her a "fresh look" – pearly eyeshadow, nude lips. It looked good, if you wanted to look like a flavourless broth. I was critical, too, of her makeup drawer, which was a sea of pottles, lipsticks without caps, ancient eyeshadows and powder puffs covered in lint, all of it rolling around like an oily tide. I thought it mattered more than any of the hundred other things she had to do.

I think of those magazines, the wages I poured into them, all those pages now sludge in a landfill. I'd thought that doing your makeup properly was more important than who you were. It was nerve-racking to see my mother on stage or at the front of a classroom, so tall and confident and utterly herself. If I could control how people saw her, maybe I could control how they saw me.

Recently when Mum visited me, I was hurrying to prepare for an event on a stage. I was nervous. "You do what you need to do, love," she said. "Now! I'll just stand here and watch you do your makeup." We both looked at my face in the mirror. It reminded me of the time she was trying to teach me to drive and every so often she'd scream and grab the steering wheel (granted, she would only do this when I was about to roll smoothly out of an intersection and into a passing car). It felt like she was about to leap in front of the mirror to shield me from all the things I thought I saw, or couldn't see. I wished I could rub talcum powder all through my hair, see a majestic Falkor looking back and go out on the stage like that.