Day Fiftyseven

Make-up is good for a very limited number of things. I can think of only one, and that is to even out skin tone. And maybe to provide texture - like some make-up have a powdery matte finish and some dewy. Dewy make-up was completely wrong for me. I just looked sweaty.

I realised over time that make-up looks good only on perfect, smooth, hydrated skin. Bumps are visible under 99% of light angles regardless of presence of make-up. Dry skin flakes horribly under make-up, and I don't know which awful person used the name of a delicious dessert to describe the flaky clumpy stuff. If pores are too big, make-up emphasises them.

So then you have your primers and powders and mousses to try to overcome all of this but I'm never comfortable with piling too many consecutive things on my face. They make my pores sad.

Since I stopped wearing make-up a week ago, my skin has cleared up significantly. I've stopped wearing eyeliner too, which is a big big thing for me. A few days ago I didn't have time to apply it before seeing Jez. The way he told me my eyes were pretty without make-up kept my MAC Powerpoint at the bottom of my cosmetics bag.

Jez was sick today and stayed home. I came over in the morning and played Warhammer on his account. I left in the middle of the day for dispensing exam, for which I thought I was moderately prepared. Except there was one important thing I didn't check.

The formulation went like this:

Paracetamol - 400 mg
Compound tragacanth powder - QS
Red syrup - 1 mL
Concentrated hydroxybenzoate solution - 0.1 mL
Purified water - to 10 mL

The instruction was to make 70 mL of the suspension. The amount of tragacanth to be used was "QS", which meant we had to look it up in the manual and calculate it according to the volume of our suspension. I flipped through the manual and found "compound tragacanth powder: 2-3%". I panicked. Tragacanth was a suspending agent, which meant it was mixed with the paracetamol to help it with suspension in the vehicle. 2-3% of what then, the paracetamol alone or the whole thing? I wrote numbers and crossed them out, and wrote new ones and crossed those out too. Romano yelled out "half an hour to go" and I still hadn't weight out my tragacanth or figured out how much tragacanth to weigh out. And if you were wondering, weighing tragacanth was the second of my 16 steps.

Eventually I guessed that 2-3% of 70 mL would be the more logical answer. I peeked at Hatice's paper while pretending to fetch a fresh pair of gloves which were conveniently stored on the top of the bench directly above her workspace. Her calculations corresponded with mine. I started making my suspension at killer speed, sure that I was being sloppy but surprised when my suspension poured through the gauze, perfectly fluid and pink and leaving not a single trace of clump. Of course, even if I had made a Nobel-worthy suspension of paracetamol, I'd still fail if I forgot to tick the little box at the bottom of my dispensing record that said "check bottle for leaking".