Kehyla Beauty

The Offer Ends Today!

Ad Copy

My daughter-in-law asked me to go easier on my eye makeup at her baby shower. Five months later, she wanted to know exactly what I was wearing on my eyes. Her name is Renee. She married my son Michael three years ago. I've always liked her. Genuinely. But there's been a low hum of something between us since the wedding that I've never quite had words for. When she told us she was pregnant last spring, Michael called me from the car, voice cracking, and I stood in my kitchen holding the phone with both hands listening to my grown son cry happy tears about his own baby. The shower was in September, at Renee's mother's house outside Raleigh. Two and a half hours each way for me. I spent weeks on what I'd wear. A soft green dress. My mother's pearl earrings. And my eyes done the way I've done them for thirty years — liner, two coats of mascara, a little definition. Not dramatic. Just present. I got there early to help set up. Renee hugged me at the door and told me the flowers were perfect. About an hour in, she found me refilling the lemonade in the kitchen. "Can I ask you a favor? I know this is oddly specific." She laughed a little, the way people do right before they say the thing they've been rehearsing. "The photographer's going for this soft, natural look for all the pictures today. Would you mind going a little lighter on your eyes? Yours are just a lot next to everyone else's." A lot. "Oh," I said. "Sure. Of course." I went to the bathroom. Looked in the mirror. My eyes weren't dramatic. They were just visible. The only part of my face that wasn't fading quietly into the wallpaper. I wet a cotton pad and wiped most of it away, until what was left was soft enough, I supposed, for whatever the photographer had in mind. I looked tired. Not soft. Tired. Like I hadn't slept, like something in me had gone flat. I came back out. Ate a cucumber sandwich. Smiled for the photos. Drove home at four and cried for most of the two and a half hours. I didn't wear mascara again for five months. Not to Thanksgiving. Not to Christmas Eve at Michael's. Not the day Ava was born, three weeks early, when I drove straight to the hospital at 2am. Not once. Every so often I'd open my bathroom drawer and see them lined up. I counted them one Sunday afternoon out of boredom, or maybe out of something closer to grief. Twenty-six tubes. Some barely used. Some from years ago that I kept meaning to throw away and never did. I did the math on a scrap of paper that night, mostly to have something to do with my hands. Eighteen years of buying a new one whenever the last one dried out, flaked, or ended up somewhere on my face it had no business being. Call it three a year, twenty dollars each. Twelve hundred dollars, roughly, on something that never once made it through a full day looking the way it looked when I put it on. Twelve hundred dollars of permission for a twenty-nine-year-old to tell me I was "a lot." Michael called in February. Renee's second shower, low-key this time, just family and a few close friends, was coming up in three weeks. "Mom, we really want you there." "Of course, honey." I'd already decided I wasn't putting on mascara. I wasn't doing that again. The Friday before, I had lunch with my friend Sharon. We've known each other since our boys played peewee soccer together. Her son's in Denver now. We're both mostly on our own these days. She had this look about her eyes I couldn't stop noticing. Not smoky, not dramatic. Just clear. Awake. Like she'd slept nine hours and meant every word she said. "Sharon, what are you doing differently?" "With what?" "Your eyes. Something's different." She laughed. "It's a mascara, believe it or not. New one. It's built around peptides, so it's actually feeding the lash instead of just coating it. It doesn't sit flat and black like most of them. It builds up with your own lash color instead of masking it, so it looks like you, just more awake." "How long does it hold up?" She checked her phone. "Put it on at seven this morning. It's one now." Six hours. Through coffee, through half a sandwich, through the tears she'd wiped away twice talking about her granddaughter's first day of kindergarten. "Does it flake into your eyelid by the afternoon?" "That's the part that got me. It hasn't once. My husband actually said something a couple weeks ago. Told me my eyes looked different. I hadn't done anything else." She said it like it was nothing. It was not nothing. I ordered it that night at my kitchen table. Kehyla Lash Enhancing Mascara. I got two, mostly so I'd stop being tempted to skip it if the first one ran out at a bad time. It arrived Tuesday. The shower was Saturday. I tried it Wednesday morning, standing at my bathroom mirror with the same low expectations I'd had for twenty-six tubes before this one. One coat. Waited. My lashes looked longer, a little richer in color, but not heavy. Not a flat black mask. Just more of what was already there. I pressed a tissue gently under my eye, the way I used to check for smudging by ten in the morning. Nothing on the tissue. Saturday, I put it on at seven before the drive to Raleigh. Got there at ten thirty. Renee opened the door. "You look great, Diane." "Thank you." She didn't pull me into the kitchen. She didn't mention the photographer once. I watched her through the whole shower, seven months along this time, tired in the specific way second pregnancies make you tired, but happy. I watched Michael rub her back every time she stood up. I watched Ava, fourteen months now, get passed from lap to lap around the room. Around one in the afternoon, Renee sat down next to me with a plate of fruit. "Can I ask you something?" I braced for it out of old habit. "Of course." "What are you wearing on your eyes? I don't think I've ever seen your eyes look like that." Three years she'd known me. She'd never seen them look like that, because I'd spent most of those three years quietly making myself smaller around her, one wiped-off coat of mascara at a time. "It's called Kehyla," I said. "Lash Enhancing Mascara. It's made for lashes our age. It doesn't just sit there." "It's really pretty on you." "Thank you, Renee." The shower ended around four. I hugged everyone. I drove home. I checked the mirror in my car before I went inside — nine and a half hours since I'd put it on, through a salad, three coffees, and holding my granddaughter for most of an hour. Still exactly where I'd put it that morning. I texted Sharon: "It held all day. Thank you for this." She wrote back: "Told you." Then: "Did she say anything?" Me: "She asked what I was wearing." A long pause. Then: "That's the whole thing, isn't it." It is the whole thing. I ordered a third tube last week. Not because I ran out. Because Ava's baby brother is due in June, and I wanted a backup in my bag before I even needed one. Twelve hundred dollars. Eighteen years. Twenty-six tubes that never once did what they promised. One that actually does. If someone in your life has ever told you to go a little lighter, a little softer, a little less like yourself. If you stopped wearing mascara because of a sentence someone said to you once and never took back. If you've opened your own bathroom drawer and counted how many tubes let you down before this one. Kehyla Lash Enhancing Mascara was built for lashes that have thinned and lids that have softened, with peptides that support the lash instead of just coating it. One coat, about thirty seconds, and a finish that looks like your own eyes, not a mask on top of them. It comes with a 30-day guarantee. No conditions. If it doesn't hold up for you, they refund you. Nobody has asked me to tone anything down since.