Born with a birthmark and nowhere to hide

Soon after college, a friend introduced me to a cute guy named Andrew, and we talked until I lost my voice. On our fourth date, he told me he’d once unknowingly dated a married woman, then mumbled something about deception. My first thought was, Oh, God, I need to be honest about my face.

Later that night, back at my place, I interrupted a long kiss. “There’s something I need to tell you. I have a birthmark on my chin, cheek and neck,” I said, waiting anxiously for his reply, which came quickly. “I tweeze my eyebrows,” he confessed.

After that, we got serious. But although I let Andrew see my body, I never let him see my naked face: I slept in makeup, applying new over the stale. Until one day, when he came into the bathroom while I was showering and I impulsively pulled back the curtain, exposing my birthmark for the first time. I raised my hands up as if to say, “Well, here I am.” He gave me a kiss and smiled.

Andrew accepted me, but there were reminders of my freakishness. After he and I moved in together, I stayed home one day to let in the cable guy. “What’s wrong with your face?” he asked.

I gave my pat answer. “It’s a birthmark. I was born with it.”

“Do you normally wear makeup to cover it?” he continued.

My cheeks burned. “Sometimes. But not always, because it’s important for ignorant people like you to see it!” Just like that, the hidden, stained part of me was finding her voice.

Throughout my 20s and early 30s, I shifted between two distinct personas: At work and out on the town, I was Shmance—short for “fancy pants.” The nickname was bestowed by friends because the foundation I used erased the color from my face, which meant I had to paint each shade back in with lip and eyeliner, blush and eyebrow pencil, a result that didn’t exactly go well with sweatpants. So my clothes had to be equally done up, preferably ’70s disco dresses with strappy sandals. That perfectly coiffed girl was Shmance.

Seeing the sum of me
My other half was a bare-faced nameless girl who preferred overalls to dresses. Pressing her cheek against someone else’s seemed like a gift, as did the feeling of sun and wind on her skin. I loved her for that. Shmance, on the other hand, exhausted me. She drank a lot and was always saucy and social, but she rarely connected to anyone deeply. It was time to put her to rest.

Except that merely thinking about going to my magazine job with no makeup made me cry; I was terrified of letting go of the power of beauty. Then, one night, I came home to find that my makeup mirror, which I’d left on the dining room table, had caught a ray of sun, scorching a hole through the fabric of a chair. Had the mirror been tilted higher, it would have hit a nearby pile of papers, possibly destroying our home. The message was clear: My vanity was destructive.

I started seeing a therapist, who told me, “You have a presence beyond your face.” I worked hard to see that, looking at pictures of myself without makeup and gazing at my face in the mirror. I needed to see the sum of me instead of the parts. The first morning I ventured out with bare skin, I cried all the way to the subway. On the train, I noticed two teenagers giggling, whispering and looking at me. I gave them a fierce stare, but they moved closer to each other, still whispering.

When I got to work, I hid in my office until someone finally knocked. When my colleague came in, we talked about a story; he didn’t seem appalled by my appearance. With each interaction, I felt a bit more confident.

Now, three years later, my old compacts sit in a dusty pile in the closet. My makeup bag holds little more than mascara, a brow pencil and lip balm. Andrew and I are married, and we have a 2-year-old daughter. I don’t want her to ever see me ashamed. I’d like her to learn that being real is never wrong. And even though people still stare at me from time to time, these days I hardly notice them. I no longer think of my face as stained. I prefer to think of it as…memorable.

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