An Ode To My Teenage Makeup Bag

Grab your grape-flavoured lip gloss and come for a walk down memory lane.

In primary school I had a friend called Annabel who told me that she had a friend who owned several Hard Candy nail polishes. Hard Candy nail polish cost $20 a bottle (so she told me) and you could only buy it overseas.

You can imagine the high regard with which I held Annabel’s friend, whom I did not know. I was a California Nail Polish girl, which was significantly cheaper and therefore nowhere near as cool. I had a black polish and a yellow polish and I would practise creating yin and yang nail art, and admittedly for a 10-year-old, I was quite talented.

By this point, I had already bleached my hair with Sun In, so I was also a 10-year-old with regrowth. I’m not sure why my mum agreed to let me do it, but I now wonder whether it was to shut me up about wanting to get my ears pierced.

My first pimple, I recall vividly. It erupted on my chin the day of the 1996 end-of-year school concert, and I sneakily swiped my mum’s Shiseido stick foundation from her makeup bag in an attempt to cover it up.

I don’t remember much about Mum’s makeup stash, other than her penchant for a Shiseido stick, but I do remember that my nana had pastel-coloured Guerlain Meteorites in the round cardboard box and, even then, I knew that was just the chicest thing. She was chic; she wore Thierry Mugler Angel.

My first perfume was Tommy Girl by Tommy Hilfiger and after that, YSL Baby Doll. I desperately wanted Clinique Happy and would spritz it on whenever I was at the pharmacy. Me graduating to perfume was probably a great day for my parents, who were no longer having to breathe in the sickening aroma of Impulse Spice, and every time my dad went overseas for work, he would bring me back the fragrance of my choice, often selected after smelling the scent card inside the latest issue of Mum’s Marie Claire.

Alongside the fragrance experimentation, I began to dabble in makeup — a rite of passage for any teenager, but in the late 90s and early 2000s learning the technique was all on us. There was no TikTok to teach us or YouTube tutorials to follow. I remember asking Mum for a Clean & Clear mattifying powder, thinking it was the answer to covering up my teenage pimples. Instead, it made me look white as a ghost and I’m sure only served to enhance my blemished skin.

One day, Mum came home with a small pack of rock melon-scented cleanser, toner and moisturiser from Boots (purchased from the local pharmacy, not England) and it was my introduction to regular face-washing. To this day, I have never gone to bed without washing off my makeup, so, thanks for that, Mum.

Intermediate school was an awkward time and I have no memories of experimenting with beauty products for those two years, but once I was at high school, and Y2K was just around the corner, things really started to get fun. My friend Sarah bought body glitter from The $2 Shop and as we walked to school together, we would swipe it across our cheekbones and feel so mature and glamorous as it hardened on to our skin like glue. We weren’t allowed to wear colourful makeup or nail polish, so we had to be discreet you see. Silver glitter was our form of subtle rebellion.

Subtle too, was smearing on a thick layer of shimmery Lancome Juicy Tube in Marshmallow, or strawberry Lip Smacker — anything that tasted like a bag full of lollies and might entice our crushes to want to get closer. We were all about trying to achieve the smoothest, glossiest lips possible as it was really the only kind of makeup we knew how to use at this point in time.

My best friend Hanna had this purple roll-a-ball lip gloss which was about the size of a tube of deodorant and would apply so much that it essentially dripped from her lips. We thought it was the greatest invention ever. Who wouldn’t want to kiss such a glossy, grape-scented pout?

When we were allowed to go to the mall by ourselves, Hanna and I would always make a beeline for The Body Shop on the ground floor of Shore City in Takapuna. They had a display of oil perfumes in the centre of the store that were presented in glass vials with glass droppers for testing. I would reach for Dewberry, while Hanna’s signature scent was Ananya.

We would smear Mango Body Butter over any exposed limbs and use the pocket money we had to buy those little bath oil balls, which we never actually used in the bath but instead collected as status symbols because they were The Thing To Have. It was always a sad day when one of them burst.

With any leftover money, we would head straight for Farmers to buy single-use sachets of Freeman Cucumber Facial Peel Off Mask, catch the bus home, cut up a cucumber and relax in all our glory before practicing our favourite duet together in front of the mirror.

READ: The Viva Team’s Desert Island Beauty Products

Hanna’s mum still has a box of photos of our “modelling” pics, where we dressed up, did our makeup (coloured eyeshadow, of course) and then directed a photoshoot in her backyard. We both entered the Girlfriend Model Competition with our snaps and got nowhere, but it never deterred us from experimenting with makeup and clothes and dreaming of our futures in front of the camera.

That was well over 20 years ago now and many of those trends have come back around — coloured eyeliner, glitter, stick-on jewels, butterfly clips, et al — but teenagers today, with the help of social media, don’t seem to do it all with quite the same level of awkwardness that we did. I’m sure they must feel that way on the inside, but they’ve developed the skills to make it all look very natural and effortless on the outside.

We performed dance routines to Backstreet’s Back in front of the mirror in our bedrooms (or in the lounge for our parents); they’re doing them on TikTok for millions of people to see. We were looking at thin, white models on the pages of Girlfriend and Dolly and wishing our armpits looked as smooth as their (photoshopped) armpits did, while teens today get much more diversity in terms of the people they’re influenced by online, but they still don’t know whether they’ve FaceTuned themselves or if they’re appearing au naturel.

Regardless of the decade or the technology available, experimenting with beauty will always be a way of finding out who you are, escaping from reality and years later, looking back on those teenage years with nostalgia for all the good laughs, botched self-tan and myriad mishaps and missteps.

I’m just thankful that teens today no longer have to risk their lives straightening their hair on the ironing board. The Vidal Sasson Convertible Crimper/Straightener changed all of that, and it’s only gone up from there.