On Becoming Halimede. (Part 5)
normalizing C4T, is incidental to my overall mission, which is spending a nice day with my wife whenever possible.
To do the Luna-Terra scar really, really well, you are going to need a few things. One: a decent lipliner pencil in your desired scar-color (Wet n’ Wild will do). Two: either more pencils, or a good neutrals palette for depth and shading. Three: a fresh-shaved and otherwise un-made-up canvas; anything else will quickly peel. Four: Mehron Makeup Rigid Collodion With Brush. Five: a steady hand. Six: a cooperative model.
You’re going to want to start by being super normal about what you’ve planned for the photoshoot. Ideally, you should not be vibrating with nervous energy at this point, as your wife leisurely dresses herself and calls, “babe - where’s the bralette?” from the bedroom. Assemble your materials. Consult your reference. Prepare to take some artistic liberties; you’re no Max Schwartz. Call back, “top drawer! pretty far back, you might have to dig a little.”
Braid her hair back. While the wig wins out for staged stuff, she got honey-blonde highlights for this, in case you ever wanted to take candids at, for example, her martial arts tournaments. There’s a big one coming up, which you are only allowed to post about if she wins. You’ve negotiated and renegotiated boundaries to the point of a performance art form. Fortunately, long distance relationships, which yours was until about a year ago, when it abruptly became a marriage, lend themselves to this sort of thing. The successful ones do, at any rate.
You’re going to want a nice tight crown braid, which makes the wig pin on more easily. It looks cute on her, as well. You will be less tremulous, and better at it, if you kiss her forehead a lot during the process.
Next comes base makeup. She does her own, but spares her left cheek, where the scar goes. Mark it out first with a powder line, to capture the shape. Use whatever eyeshadow you mean to be the darkest part of the wound. Think about the injury. Stretch it down to her throat. Joke a little about how deadly the wound would be.
From here, you’re going to fill in the shape with your neutral-ish lip liner. Stylize the scar in whatever way you feel fits the objective; different references will pull you in different directions. If your wife has scars, you can consult these for additional layers of verisimilitude. If your wife is transgender, she probably does, and if you’re not to the point of talking about that, then you might not be ready to riff off your relationship on the internet to an audience of thousands.
The verisimilitude is sort of important, except the most of the time when it isn’t. Art is just about telling a story. Posting-art, makeup-art. You’re going to carve a new scar into her face, muttering the whole while about shading, frowning at your references and the level of shine to them. There’s a little shimmer to a scar, and you’ll have to balance that out against the matte of the lip liner, which really should be the ‘outer portion’ - once dry, it holds your rigid collodion better than powder.
To get the pucker right, you’re going to want to - words fail me, to describe the kind of ‘corner by corner’ motion I’ve found works best, after extensive practice on my own face and my wife’s. So just look at the nice diagram, okay?
From here, you want to wait. The more you’ve put on, the ‘deeper’ it will seem to dig in, as it seizes up the skin around it. This will sting a little. My wife has the pain threshold of a woman who keeps training MMA with visibly broken fingers for weeks at a time before reluctantly acceding to an x-ray. Your mileage may vary.
If you want to gloop on more, do so quickly and thoroughly. Once you redo one patch, you kind of have to do the same to the rest, for consistency. Take your time. The brush that comes with the rigid collodion is fine for this part.
Let it dry before you put the wig on. Some mistakes only need making once.
There are hairsprays you can use to make it more matte, if that’s your preference, though remember: scars are kind of shiny. I use Tresemme Extra Hold. Don’t screw around too much with the wig, or maybe do, if you’re into that sort of thing. I’m not much for hair. That part, I’m ‘method’ about.
Help her get the jacket on, then the harness, and voila! Luna-Terra scar.
The only reason to do all this is because I love her, and I love spending time with her, and sharing art with her. We met because she liked a musical I wrote and performed and hosted online, and then I edited a novella she wrote, about a woman who dies and is reincarnated as a street dog in a Mexican border town. I like spending artistic time with her, and conspiring with her, and having an activity to share. It’s easy to lose excitement in a marriage, I think, because for many marriages, the act of shared creation ends with the relationship itself, the wedding, maybe the nuptial home or the kids-as-project. But it’s good to be able to provoke each other, and aggrandize each other, and celebrate each other, and expose each other, and defend each other, and decorate each others’ bodies and selves in physical and aphysical space.
This is just an essay about how to paint a scar on someone, though.