When it comes to makeup, you’ve heard the phrase “cake face” before. Now, imagine a world where people would spend their mornings deciding if they should go for a birthday, wedding or ice cream cake look. Perhaps there’s a party later, which obviously calls for funfetti to get that pop of color.
Jokes aside, I, for some unknown reason, decided to test what would happen if all the makeup I had to work with was food.
Grocery stores are full of different colors and consistencies, yet I found myself at a lost while walking through the aisles of Gristedes. I’ll admit, a lot of my indecision had to do with an unwillingness to put certain things on my face, but ultimately I acquired my beauty supplies and I was ready to experiment.
I started with my skin — a combination of Hershey’s cocoa powder and flour to create the perfect, powder for my skin tone. Despite lots of mixing, the concoction still looked like flecks of brown mixed in with flecks of white. Using my DIY broccoli brush, I applied the powder to my face. The broccoli made it impossible for the powder to lay even and it ended up looking like I took a dandruff shower. So yummy.
Next came the strawberry juice acting as blush. While this worked a bit better than the flour, I’d rather not have my fingers stick to my face everytime I go to scratch an itch on my cheek. Aside from the gooiness, the color was a bit too dark for my complexion. I think someone in the strawberry industry should really do something about the lack of variety in shades.
Next I mixed the cocoa powder with water to make a dye and went to work on my eyebrows. Though my application was too heavy and my brows were darker than they have ever been, this seemed to work the best out of all of my food-for-makeup ideas. Perhaps the shade problem could be solved with different proportions of cocoa to water? I’ll just have to keep trying every day until I get things right — she said sarcastically.
This next step was the worst by far — using a dry spaghetti noodle to apply blackberry juice as eyeliner. It turns out that the juice from a blackberry is mostly translucent, so I adapted and used little pieces of blackberry to line my upper lid. I’ll say it for you: It looks disgusting. Not to mention it burned a little bit every time I blinked. Kids, seriously, don’t try this at home.
Deciding I couldn’t put my face through more unnecessary pain, I took the easy route with my final step and used red food coloring as lipstick. This actually worked out pretty well, and I could definitely see myself using this as a backup plan in the future when my roommate forgets to return my red lipstick.
After covering my face in food and calling it makeup, I only have one thing to say. Thank goodness for Sephora.
Email Calais Watkins at [email protected].
