this post was submitted on 07 May 2026
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Trans Memes
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Ngl, makeup is a combination of craft and art, and it ain't easy.
When I would have female patients back in the day, there was a marked benefit in them being able to get dressed up, do all the extra stuff and feel pretty in the chapel, or at dinner or whatever. Didn't do as much of that in home health as in facilities what with male caregivers being less requested in that branch of care. But that's why I put effort into tying, because the benefits were massive.
Learning to shave legs was easy enough, especially compared to faces. Armpits took some adjustments, but wasn't something that would get screwed up by inexperience, it would just take longer. Even figuring out how to help an elderly lady get into a bra right was simple enough once I got past the awkward.
But makeup? I never got good at it. Just passable. Lipstick was simple enough, I guess, but it still had a learning curve, and I wasn't responsible for picking the right colors, I just put on what they had. Same with stuff like mascara (the easiest for me), blush, or the dreaded eye shadow (that was where my skills were weakest).
The point being that anyone struggling should take it easy on themselves. It's a learned skill, not something people are born knowing. Well, maybe there's some inborn ability for color choosing, I dunno. All the little gender coded skills are similar, imo, but make-up is a much more complicated art to gain proficiency in than most, and it has a major effect on one's self image if one wants to use it at all.
Mind you, it is a skill anyone can learn. If my goofy ass could manage to pick up the basics, someone with more coordination and attention to detail will get there way faster and more fully than I did. So, ladies, don't beat yourself up over the learning curve. You'll get there eventually :)
I'm pretty good at doing makeup, but that's because I had the privilege of being able to fuck around and find out when I wore makeup as a teenager, which was a context in which being bad at doing the makeup wasn't as high stakes as if I were learning as an adult. I only got this good by a heckton of experimentation.
Whilst that's probably little comfort to all my trans sisters learning as adults, I'm sharing this sentiment because I consider the struggle to figure out how the hell to do one's makeup well (and hard mode: doing it well, but also being able to use it to express one's personality) is a potential source of feminine solidarity, because the vast majority of women who wear makeup have gone through this frustration.
Though I would also note that when I was learning as a teenager, it wasn't just the daily makeup that gave me lots of practice, but also times where I would carve out some time to sit down and practice with more ambitious looks. Have makeup wipes on hand, because you'll probably fuck it up a lot, but that's part of the journey. It is emotionally intensive, because there will be so many times when you look in the mirror and hate how things turned out (that was something I struggled with a lot, and I didn't have gender dysphoria adding to my distress), but the only way to get better is to grind that XP