The Cosmetic Avengers

[Jin-hwan "Jen" Park]

If the mall was Jin-hwan Park’s natural habitat—and one would be hard pressed to contend otherwise—then Sephora might well have been his personal exhibit, the most convenient place from which to observe him as he truly was. Under the harsh white lighting, against the backdrop of sleek black shelves and a breathtaking panoply of luxury cosmetics, he was graceful and perfectly at ease.

He was eighteen years old, but was frequently mistaken for a fresh-faced twenty-something, and he wasn’t in the habit of correcting that particular mistake. He was dressed in black from head to toe: thick black glasses frames, sans lenses; a shirt made of soft black cotton jersey, which draped in gentle waves down his front and had been chosen for its movement; tight black pants that accentuated the delicate thinness of his legs, which he had long considered his best physical feature and always sought to emphasize. Currently, he was emphasizing them in front of the Urban Decay section, where he had been standing in silence for some four minutes with a subtly disgusted look on his face.

Four minutes was far too long; he couldn’t take it anymore.

“Do you ever wonder what possesses people to do things like this?” he asked the person beside him, who was nothing more than a shadow in his periphery. He gestured to an open eyeshadow palette that had been supplied for color testing, although every single powder had been shattered in its pan, and the resulting shimmer was smeared on every surface in a two foot radius.

He turned his head toward his comrade-in-cosmetics, who happened to be a petite young woman with beautiful sun-kissed brown skin and dark brown eyes and hair. With his boots on, he was a staggering eight inches taller than her. He looked back to the eyeshadow, then, and spoke pensively.

“It’s so strange—I’ve never seen anyone doing it, and it isn’t like there’s a multitude of children running around wreaking havoc, but it has to happen sometime, doesn’t it? I just picture one determined, destructive enemy of happiness, running through all the aisles and smashing things and eating the bullets out of all the lipsticks.”

He sighed.

“It’s the sort of thing that keeps me up at night. Whenever I imagine someone that stupid, I don’t want to live on this planet anymore. I love your hair, by the way. It’s gorgeous.”

He reached out to press the pad of his ring finger into one of the ruined eyeshadows before rubbing his fingertips together, judging the texture.

[Deleted]

Imagine Aerina’s excitement upon learning that there was a Sephora store nearby. Here, in the small, out of the way area that was Pilot Ridge, of all places. Mumbai was a large, bustling city, streets packed with citizens, and was the center of everything Bollywood…and yet it didn’t have a store as spectacular as Sephora located anywhere near it, much less within the city limits. No, the closest location was a whole world away, it seemed, in the heart of Delhi, a place which Aerina had never the opportunity to visit, even with her father’s position in the education system. In fact, Aerina had rarely left the small corner of her neighborhood, the furthest being the private school she had to walk several miles to if she happened to miss the shuttle-bus that ran through their town’s central street.

Transportation here in America was much more available, she’d discovered over the several weeks since she’d arrived. She often heard complaints about it from one person to the next, but Aerina didn’t understand a one of them. It was no matter. The bus got her from point-A to point-B effectively enough. It was through that means that the Indian girl found herself at the Pilot Ridge mall today, searching through the colorful make-up displays of the much-coveted store called Sephora.

Aerina was like a kid in a candy store there, wanting to try near everything that was set out with a “tester” label. She wanted a consultation with one of the attendants, but they were booked for the day, which was fine. The 15-year-old would return on another day, after making an appointment. Hopefully, she could get one in before the semester started at the university, because once it did, she feared having no more time to spare in ‘frivolous’ things like this, as her father would say.

Rina was scrutinizing a line of lipsticks, uncapping one, testing it on her wrist, then recapping it to move onto the next once, leaving behind several parallel lines of various colors on her skin which had her stumped as to which would look best. There was a gorgeous person standing next to her. Aerina couldn’t quite determine whether this person was a girl or a boy, but she thought they were beautiful all the same. When the person spoke to her, suddenly, the petite girl turned up her gaze to fall upon the taller individual, confused for a moment as to what they were referring to.

She still had a stick of lip-color in one hand about to streak over her wrist once more. Upon careful inspection, one might see that each line was thick and saturated with color, and spread over her skin more like a cream than a subtle tint of color. The perfect tip of the new stick was no more than a millimeter away from her forearm as she prepared to swipe it across. Though Aerina wasn’t paying attention to that. A gorgeous person had just complimented her hair, and for that, Aerina was beaming and giddy.

“Hee hee, thank you very much,” she said in response to his(?) kind words. To the rest of what he said….Rina didn’t know how to respond. She didn’t see it as a problem like he did, after all. Aerina returned to testing the lipsticks, pressing the one she held hard against her skin, spreading it like butter until it clumped along the rim. Nope, not that color either. She recapped it and pulled out the next one.