I’m Tired & I’m No Longer Covering That Up With Concealer

I've had dark circles under my eyes for as long as I can remember. And, for as long as I can remember, I've hated them.

My dark circles are hereditary. Even on my most well-rested days, they'd have a makeup artist's hand twitching for concealer. Another hereditary gift? A kind of morbid eccentricity. At any time, my mind is a jumble of thoughts about serial killers, Lancôme Juicy Tube dupes and 18th-century shipwrecks. I haven't really learnt to love my idiosyncrasies either. I know life would be easier if I were more positive and less preoccupied with defunct beauty products and true crime. I'd feel more attractive if people stopped asking me if I was tired. And trying to change both things about myself has been a lifelong journey. 

It started when I was in school. I noticed Barbie's smooth, plasticine under-eye area and her fixed, convincing smile when I was six years old. I clocked Kirsten Dunst's effervescent Torrance Shipman in Bring it On at ten because I, too, wanted to be sparkly-eyed, sexy, cute and "popular to boot". Sadly for me — brunette, pale and brooding — I was bringing Wednesday Addams energy to the playground long before dark academia was cool. 

Of course my peers noticed. Every time I peeped my head above my copy of A Series of Unfortunate Events, they lobbed insults like "creepy", "weird", and the simple but remarkably effective, "ugly" at me. I’d duck my head back under The Miserable Mill and promise myself I'd bring a copy of The Babysitters Club the next day. I never did. (I just didn't think the writing was very good.)

People have been more kind as I've grown up, but the theme has remained the same. Sitting cross-legged in a hotel room in Paris, an ex once described my eyes as "haunting". I was annoyed. "Haunting" isn't the compliment you give a whimsical girlfriend in a romantic comedy — it's the description given to a consumptive side character in a Brontë-sister novel who dies in the third chapter. "Hot" would also be fine. 

Somewhere in this mix of ill and well-intentioned adjectives, my under eyes have come to symbolise more than just an annoying cosmetic defect, but my failure to fulfil a brief. 

Audrey Hepburn once said, "Happy girls are the prettiest". But depending on your biological makeup, it's much harder to be happy than it is to be pretty. The neural networks in my brain are hard-wired for the dark and uncanny, and diverting them is as difficult as taking a train off its tracks or making it through the first chapter of Boy-Crazy Stacey. 

Covering up your under eyes is easier than renovating your entire personality. So, since I shoplifted my first tube of concealer at age 12, I've been searching for the perfect product. But here's the rub: I've tried hundreds, and they have yet to perfectly hit the mark. 

Whether it's a mismatched shade, a formula that creases, or a texture that cakes, the perfect concealer has remained elusive. It's the hydrating under-eye concealer that you find has melted into laugh lines you never knew you had mid-date. It's the "24-hour", "bulletproof" coverup that you find scaly and crackling post-after-work drinks. Maybe I'm being too critical, but I consider concealer to be the biggest beauty product flop. 

So why have I stayed loyal to it? Because concealer is a contract between women and the world. Of all the forms of makeup, it's the least expressive. Artificially flushed cheeks and just-bitten lips are sexy. Eye makeup articulates who we want to be on any given day. 

As for the clumps of skin-coloured dimethicone we dab under our eyes and over blemishes? They exist purely to hide our flaws and vulnerabilities. Our exhaustion, our fatigue and the fine lines we've developed from squinting incredulously in meetings. We mop up our humanity with concealer and call it our "secret weapon". 

In 2023, my 19-year relationship with concealer ended abruptly. By April, like 50 per cent of workers in Australia, I was experiencing burnout. The notifications on my phone weren't helping. Australia was hurtling towards a recession. The New York Times announced: "Earth to Hit Critical Global Warming Threshold Early". AI would not only take my job but also destroy humanity. Then in May, I was made redundant, and as I sat in a meeting room receiving the news, a person close to me was being admitted to the emergency department in critical condition. 

I was introduced to the kind of real fear and grief I hadn't known before. It was like two hands placed themselves around my heart, twisted, and then held it like that for days. Every breath that week was effortful, every movement uncertain. I wasn't aware of an emotion or thought that belonged to me. I was simply aware of my body, clunkily processing information that my brain found unacceptable.

People knew about my job loss and rushed to reassure me and encourage me. They talked about silver linings, about staying positive, about being excited. Usually, I would have been busy berating myself for not springing into action, for not coming up with a million entrepreneurial ideas or immediately processing my bad feelings into a best-selling novel. That week, words like "positive" and "exciting" slid off me. I felt how I felt. Sure, I could refrain from lying face down in a puddle of my own bad feelings; but going through the motions didn't mean terror would turn into excitement, or anger into a slay. 

So I caved into every negative emotion and found myself, if not happy, then more comfortable in my fear.  I had failed in my life mission of eradicating negative thoughts. But, for the first time, I didn't feel bad for having them. 

When I emerged from the most stressful week of my life, my eyes were swollen, puffy and dark from crying. I was still struggling to take ownership of those emotions. Trying to cover the evidence of them felt both disingenuous and pointless.

So, I stopped wearing concealer. 

At my new job, I couldn't speak to anyone about the forest fire feeling I'd experienced in the previous week and a half. But when I looked at my bare, darkened under eyes in the bathroom mirror, I felt solidarity reflected back at me. 

And it turns out, other people are tired, too. Dazed Beauty has heralded the rise of the "ghoul girl" in 2023 with models like Gabbriette, Lily-Rose Depp, and Vittoria Ceretti serving abrasive hollow eyes.

In 2022, a trend for painting on under-eye bags went viral; TikTokers exaggerated and faked under-eye circles with makeup. There's beauty logic to it. Makeup artist Katie Moore tells me that the recent trend of skipping concealer can accentuate beauty; "It's about embracing the natural tones our eyelids and under eyes throw," she explains. 

Rae Morris also hits the nail on the head: "Discolouration is not a problem… when you block out all the blueness and darkness, you change the shape of your eyes," she says, noting that the practice can erase structure and result in an eerie flatness. 

However, the painterly washes of 2023 are not “ghoul girl”. Images of Gabbriette are compelling because her bare, bruised lids and under eyes are “natural” in the most primal sense of the word. Her look has earned another moniker: “succubus chic”. A succubus is dark and destructive; the opposite of what we’ve been taught is feminine; to create balance and give life. We’re told that if we pedal hard enough and be positive enough, we can erase and correct terrible things in our own lives, and the world. It’s the psychology that has spawned 17.3 billion #manifest videos on TikTok. But, as I learnt this year, those efforts don’t always make a difference.

When my ex-boyfriend described my eyes as haunted, I was angry because it felt othering. People don't stay in haunted houses. They buy tickets, check out the rooms where unimaginable horrors happened, and then skip home to their everyday lives. 

I still wish I was naturally inclined to joyfulness. Skipping concealer hasn’t left me awash with self-love; the fact is, living with an inclination towards darkness means living with risk. The risk that, at times, that darkness will tip you into a hole you need to claw your way out of. It’s hard to love a thing that, at times, makes you feel unsafe in your own body. But when I look at my bare under eyes, I feel sympathy in the word's original sense. Sympathy, as in the mechanism by which philosopher David Hume said affection passes “from one person to another”. Affection and sympathy are smaller, more contingent words than love, but they are the bridges that enable it, and they are part of the new journey I’m on.