When Eyes Deceive.

There was a particularly striking young woman in the coffee shop today, and I’m sure my motive will escape misconstruction when I say that it is ever my need to discover what factor or factors are the cause of making a striking young woman look particularly so. And that’s why I studied her face for a few seconds and soon realised that the primary agent was her eye make-up. It was heavy.

So then I perused the fact over my Americano and quite expensive Belgian something-or-other fancy bun, and soon came to an interesting conclusion. The appearance of a person’s eyes can be, and usually are, radically altered by the strength and style of eye make-up. And you now what that means: it means you can neither assess their outer selves nor trust the inner person. That’s because:

a. You don’t know what they actually look like in real life, and

b. The revelations about character traits, which are usually so reliable if you know how to read them, are all but lost behind a cloaking device of Klingon-esque proportions.

So that must be my lesson for today. When encountering heavy eye make-up, ask first what it is trying to hide. (And while I’m at it, scorn the skilled make-up artist who works to create a false face in order to trap the unwary.)

I lived with a woman for three years once and never saw her without make-up, including the painted eyes variety. Every night at bed time she would disappear into the bathroom, there to remove the jaded mask and don a new one. And then she would emerge from the cocoon a freshened but flatteringly false butterfly. What time was left the relationship became characterised first by acrimony, and then silence, and then separation. And I never did get to find out what she really looked like or what she really meant when she said 'God will punish you.'