The "getting into makeup" search trend on TikTok is full of people in their teens and early twenties discovering blush and discovering their faces, which is exactly as wonderful as it sounds. But there's a whole subsection of that trend that's people getting into makeup later (late twenties, thirties, forties) and that's the corner I've been posting from, and that's the corner that gets DMs from people who say: oh thank god, someone who gets it.
So here's my story, because it's not a neutral one, and I think knowing the context matters.
I grew up in an evangelical household where makeup was, at minimum, complicated. Not fully banned. My mom wore a little, tasteful, natural-looking stuff that could plausibly be described as "just enhancing what God gave you." But anything beyond that was edging toward territory that some of the women in our church would have called vanity, or worldliness, or "drawing attention to yourself." Bold colors, dark lips, dramatic eyes, that was the kind of thing that communicated (subtly or not so subtly) that you cared too much about how you looked, which was a spiritual problem, which said something about your character, which made men think things that were apparently your fault.
I absorbed all of that. Deeply and involuntarily, the way you absorb things in childhood when you don't yet have the critical distance to evaluate them. For years, wearing makeup felt like a statement I wasn't sure I was allowed to make. And "not sure I'm allowed to make this" is exactly the kind of feeling that makes you not explore something that might have been genuinely fun and genuinely yours.
The Deconstructing Moment
The thing that cracked it open for me (and I mean this) was seeing stage makeup up close for the first time. I was at a show, a small venue, and the performer had this incredible eye look: dark, graphic, dramatic, completely intentional. And I remember thinking: that's armor. that's not "drawing attention to yourself" in the passive, guilty sense I'd been taught. That's a deliberate visual statement. That's saying: I am here, I know who I am tonight, and I have put this on like a suit of clothes that means something.
That reframe changed everything. Because "vanity" is about performing yourself for the validation of others, trying to look better to get approval. But what I was seeing had nothing to do with approval. It was about identity. About craft. About the way visual presentation is a language, and some people choose to speak it fluently and loudly, and that's not vanity. That's expression.
I'm now doing exactly that with the HEATHEN HYMNS rollout. Every photo, every video, every show, I have a visual look that I put on deliberately. It is war paint in the truest sense. It says something about who Vixen Rae is before she opens her mouth. And I love it. I love the ritual of it. I love what it means.
Starting Late: What I Actually Learned
If you're coming to makeup later and feeling behind: you're not. You might actually be ahead in some ways, because you're coming to it from a place of genuine curiosity rather than social pressure. You're choosing this. That makes the learning different.
Here's what I've actually figured out, starting from almost zero a couple years ago.
Skin first, everything else second. This is the advice that gets said a lot and I resisted it because I wanted to start with the dramatic stuff (the eyes, the color) and my skin didn't always cooperate. But skin prep genuinely changes what everything else does. A moisturizer that works for you, sunscreen, not sleeping in whatever you put on that day, the expensive dramatic products look dramatically better on skin that's been taken care of. You don't need a twelve-step routine. You need to not skip the basics and give them time to work.
One thing well is better than everything mediocre. I spent the first several months trying to learn everything at once (foundation, contour, eyeshadow, liner, lashes) and my face was confused and so was I. The shift that worked was picking one element and actually getting good at it before adding more. For me, that was eye liner. Once I could do a consistent wing, everything else was easier, partly because I'd learned patience and precision that transferred to other applications.
The 47-step routine is not the goal. I promise you it's not. The people who do those routines and make it look effortless have years of practice and often specific reasons (photography, performance, personal interest) that make the investment of time worth it for them. For most people, five products you know how to use confidently will do more than twenty products you're still guessing with. Build a short list. Master it. Expand only if you actually want to.
The Products That Actually Changed Things For Me
I'm not a beauty influencer and I'm not going to do a top ten haul list. But I'll tell you what actually moved the needle, because specificity is more useful than generality.
A good eyeliner that glides rather than drags. The difference between a liner that goes on smoothly and one that tugs was revelatory. I went through several before finding one that worked for me, and the learning curve dropped sharply once I had the right tool. Don't blame yourself if it's not working. sometimes it's genuinely the product.
A tinted moisturizer rather than foundation, at least to start. Full-coverage foundation is a skill. It requires blending tools and technique and an understanding of your undertones. Tinted moisturizer is more forgiving and it gives you a version of what foundation does without the unforgiving quality of a heavy formula on someone still learning. I wore tinted moisturizer for about a year before I felt ready to try actual foundation.
One lipstick that feels like yourself. Not the one you think you should like, not the one that's trending. The one that when you put it on you look in the mirror and think: yes, that's right. That feeling is the whole point. For me it was a dark plum-leaning red. Everybody else's "yours" is going to be something different, and that's the right answer.
Decent brushes for eyes. This is the thing I skipped for too long. Fingers work for some things. They don't work for building and blending eyeshadow. A set of basic eye brushes (nothing expensive, a decent drugstore set) changed what I could do with the same shadows I'd already had for months.
What I'd Tell Past Me
If I could go back and talk to the version of me who absorbed all those messages about vanity and drawing attention and what it meant about your character: none of that was about you. It was a control mechanism. It was about keeping women small and modest and manageable by making self-expression morally weighted. The makeup was just the proxy. The real target was your autonomy over how you presented yourself in the world.
Taking back that autonomy doesn't mean going dramatic if dramatic isn't you. Some people get into makeup and discover they love a clean barely-there look. That's completely valid. The point isn't to perform femininity loudly. The point is to make choices from a place of actual preference rather than fear. What do YOU want to look like today? What does YOUR face feel like it wants? Those are the right questions. They were always the right questions.
I genuinely love getting ready for shows now. It is one of the more meditative parts of my day, something with texture and color and physical result, a counterweight to the abstract invisible work of writing and tracking and mixing. I put on the face and the face says: tonight we're showing up. And that feels like mine, in a way that was a long time coming.
To everyone else getting into this later and feeling like they missed something: you didn't miss it. It was waiting for you to come collect it when you were ready. Go collect it.
The Money Part (Because Nobody Talks About It)
One more thing before I wrap this up, because I started down a practical road and I want to actually be useful: makeup can get expensive incredibly fast if you're not paying attention. The beauty industry has a bottomless appetite for selling you the next thing and the thing after that, and if you start clicking through haul videos or recommendation algorithms, you can very quickly find yourself with a hundred dollars of stuff you don't really need and don't know how to use.
The antidote is intentionality about the order of operations. Before you buy anything new: use what you have completely. Before you try a new category: master the category you're in. The internet will always have a new "holy grail" recommendation. Most holy grails are not better than what you have. They're just newer, and newer isn't better in makeup any more than it is anywhere else.
Drugstore products are genuinely good now. The gap between luxury and accessible makeup has closed substantially over the last decade (not entirely, but substantially). I own some expensive things and some cheap things and the cheap things do not perform meaningfully worse for my actual needs. The expensive things are mostly in the skincare category, where formulation and ingredients genuinely make a difference. In color cosmetics, a $10 eyeliner can be better than a $40 eyeliner if it happens to suit your lid chemistry. Test before you commit to the premium version.
Also: returns are your friend. Most beauty retailers have return policies for makeup even after it's been opened, because they understand that you can't always tell from the packaging whether the color or formula is going to work for you. Use those policies. Don't keep something that doesn't work for you out of guilt about having spent the money. The sunk cost is already sunk. Keeping a product you hate in your collection is not recovering the sunk cost, it's just adding clutter to the drawer.
Okay. I've been getting ready for this rollout era for a while now and I am here for every bit of it. If you want to see the actual looks I've been doing for shows, they're on my Instagram and TikTok. Imperfect, evolving, very much mine. Come find me there.