My Aunt Eloise was a character, a good one, and I sure thought she was neat. Ten years older than mom, Aunt Eloise was Grandma Johnson's oldest daughter. By the time mom was a teenager Aunt Eloise was already living in California, married, and working as a beautician. By the time I was born she had her own beauty shop in Beverly Hills, and she was the coolest person I knew.
Aunt Eloise had bright orange hair, always fixed in the latest short haircut. Everyone was "honey" to her, and she made me feel important when she recognized or talked to me. By the time I was a teenager Aunt Eloise had started her own cosmetic company, Continental Girl, and she was a fount of knowledge on how to look beautiful.
I needed that. All of my life I had known I was not beautiful, and I wanted to learn how to improve my looks. As soon as I was old enough I started using makeup. I studied movie stars faces so I could imitate their eye shadow and mascara. I gave up on my hair, it was too thin and the back of my head was flat, a trait I inherited from Grandma Johnson and my hard headed Swedish ancestors, but I sure envied the girls at school with their thick, long hair falling lushly over their shoulders. I was also too tall, and not thin. I wanted to be a size 3, or 5, but even if I had been just skin and bones my bones would have never fit into those clothes, so I eventually gave up dreaming about being a Barbie doll and just tried to look as good as I could with the body the Lord had given me. But it sure would have been nice to be tiny and petite.
When I was a little girl I read a story about the most beautiful girl in the world, who even when she lost her gorgeous clothes and hair and skin, was still beautiful because of her smile. It made me think, and I after that I tried to remember to smile all the time, hoping it would help me look beautiful, too.
The one feature I did like, and was probably too proud of, were my eyes. I inherited my dad's blue eyes. His were the color of the sky on a clear, fresh spring day, startlingly deep blue. Mine were, too, if there was anything blue around me. One day an elderly gentleman told me I had bedroom eyes, and that fed my ego for years. The only problem was that it seemed to be only the older men who thought I was pretty. Nobody my age did. I guessed my kind of looks must have gone out of style back before I was born.
Anyway, when Aunt Eloise started her cosmetics company she wanted to market them in Arizona. She worked up a deal with Penny's to sell them in their store at the mall, but she needed sales-girls to give away free samples and coupons. I guess I was the right age, and I didn't have anything better to do, so I became one of her Continental Girl sales-people. It was fun, scary, intimidating, and a good experience, all at the same time.
All I had to do was stand around the entrance to Penny's, handing out brochures about Continental Girl cosmetics, and point people into the store where they could buy the merchandise. At first it was way out of my comfort zone, but after awhile I got so I could smile and hand fliers to just about everyone. Until the fellow stopped to ask me if I used Continental Girl cosmetics myself? I smiled and assured him I did. "Then why do you still have pimples?" he wanted to know.
Jerk! First of all, I only had maybe one or two little pimples, which was really good for a teenage girl with dark hair and oily skin. How many other teenagers did he know that had that few pimples? Second, I really did use Aunt Eloise's cosmetics, and they really were helping my skin to be healthy, he should have seen the way it looked before I began daily scrubbing my face with her facial scrub, firming it up with her mask, and finally moisturizing it with Valhalla, her special moisturizer that was so expensive I could never have afforded using it if she didn't give it to me for free.
Anyway, looking back I have a feeling the fellow really was a jerk and he was just trying to get a rise out of me, but it worked. I blushed scarlet, stammered around, unable to think up any kind of reply, and was very happy when the end of my shift came and I was able to go home. I didn't go back to sell cosmetics ever again. (Of course, that may have had something to do with the fact that Aunt Eloise was done promoting her cosmetics and she didn't need anyone to advertise for her anymore, but even if she had wanted me to I don't think I'd have gone back. Who needs people telling them they aren't pretty, especially when they already know it?)
At any rate, I enjoyed being a sales-girl for awhile, and I was really lucky to get to use Continental Girl Cosmetics for free all during my teenage years. I think they helped. Someone asked Grandma Johnson once how she managed to have such lovely skin. She was in her upper 90's at the time. She told them it was because she had put lotion on her face twice a day her whole adult life. Maybe she had wrinkles, but her skin was soft and beautiful. I'm not 90 yet, but hopefully learning from Aunt Eloise how to take care of my skin will help me to have beautiful skin all of my life too, even if it doesn't make my hair thick or give me a size 3 body.
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