Making It Up As I Go Along Read Online Free PDF Page B

nail varnish or indeed any beauty product. Item 3) I
am in the pay of no one. If I rave on to you about a product I love, it’s because I really
do. What I’m trying to say is that you can trust me.
    mariankeyes.com ,
April 2013.

My Chanel Nail Varnish Museum
    Let me tell you about my Chanel nail varnish
museum. For as long as I can remember I’ve had a thing for Chanel – not the suits
and the couture gowns, I hasten to add; sadly I’ll never be that woman – but the
cosmetics. Even in my twenties (as I’ve already told you), when I was totally skint, my
lipstick was always Chanel. Something about the sleek cylinder with the iconic interlocking Cs
elevated my life beyond its shabby reality, where I spent my rent money on wine, my wardrobe was
missing a door and every night at 2 a.m. my upstairs neighbour strapped woks to his feet and
tap-danced loudly enough to wake the dead.
    Eventually my circumstances improved and I was
able to embrace other products from the Chanel oeuvre, particularly the foundations, but their
nail varnishes didn’t feature on my radar because of my very disappointing nails. (Short,
weak and a bizarre selection of shapes, as I mentioned in the previous piece.)
    However, one November I was in Henri
Bendel’s in New York, in the throes of a bout of MITHness (mad in the head-ness), where
the world seemed like a smoking, post-apocalyptic landscape.
    Suddenly I saw something so exquisite I thought
my eyes would burst – it was a nail varnish. It stood alone on a plinth, radiating a
greeny-blue beauty powerful enough to light up the planet.
    You know when people use the
phrase ‘I fell on it’ to imply that they were extremely keen to get the thing? Well,
I
literally
fell on it. I threw my body over it, like I was shielding a baby from
gunfire, because I was so afraid that someone else might get there before me.
    A chat with the salesperson established that it
was a limited edition Chanel nail varnish called Nouvelle Vague, and Himself was so relieved to
see me excited about something that he bought it for me. And right away I was in the grip of
another addiction.
    I’ve no end of addictions: alcohol, sugar,
Twitter, sleep, box sets, spending money … I could probably get addicted to paper bags if
I put a bit of effort into it (white? Manila? Patterned? With handles? Without? Flat? Or with a
fold-out base?).
    Addiction is often called the disease of More
– because when we experience something pleasurable our brain produces dopamine (‘the
happy hormone’). So if you’re an addict like me and you find something you like,
you’ll keep replicating the experience in the hope of generating fresh hits of delightful
dopamine.
    The long and the short of it was, I needed more
Chanel varnishes, and mercifully family and friends helped out. Each little bottle marked an
occasion: my mammy gave me Vendetta as reimbursement for paying her milkman while she was in
hospital with pneumonia; Rita-Anne handed over Azure as thanks for minding the Redzers; and
Caitríona bought me Atmosphere in Rome airport because she was flying back to New York and
I was going home to Dublin and who knew when we’d see each other again?
    I spent (and still do) an unholy amount of time
on eBay, yearning after discontinued limited editions as rare as gold dust. However, I was badly
bruised by my first – and only – auction, where I battled for Skyline (from the Bleu
Illusion collection, buthey, you probably knew that). I live-tweeted the
bidding and frankly I thought I had it in the bag – but I was outbid at the very last
second (and it was literally the very last second: people explained to me later about Sniper and
other such fiendish jiggery-pokery). So I limped away and now I simply hint heavily to my loved
ones about which discontinued varnishes I crave.
    Of course, there are always the new ones arriving
‘on counter’. And something incredibly amazing happened to me in May 2015. I’d
been doing a beauty column