GUEST SPEAKER
AFTER AN ACCIDENT DAMAGED HER FACE, AUTHOR JOANNA CANNON SPENT DECADES TRYING TO BLEND IN – UNTIL A LIPSTICK CHANGED HER MIND
I’ve always been a fan of beige, and I spent my youth enjoying a makeup palette of various shades of taupe. I would wear beige lipstick because I enjoyed wearing it, not because I felt I had to. When I was 22, though, something happened that changed the way I saw myself – and changed my choices – for the rest of my life.
One clear, warm evening, I was involved in a car accident. I didn’t know it at the time, but the impact had thrown me with such force, I’d broken the steering wheel with my face (it was the days before airbags). Strangely, my face didn’t hurt; the lacerations were so deep, there were no nerve endings left to convey pain. But I understood how severe my injuries were from the reactions of the doctors in the resuscitation room. In a matter of seconds, I’d turned into someone to be pitied.
The lower part of my face was no longer attached to my skull, so despite the surgeon’s best efforts (I was in theatre for four hours), I was never going to look the same. The first time I saw myself after surgery, in an unforgiving mirror in a hospital bathroom, I took a step back, because I thought someone else had entered the room.
For the first few months, I ate liquid meals through a straw and felt lucky to be alive. As the wounds healed, and life slowly returned to the way it had been, I realised I’d have to get used to my ‘new face’. The scars, the lack of symmetry, the broken nose. Whenever I left the house, people stared. I learned to keep my head down and not risk eye contact. Makeup lost its joy; now I wore it not for fun, but out of necessity, because I didn’t want to subject anyone to how I looked without it. As well as a lot of other damage, the accident messed up the outline of my lips, so they are covered in little scars where broken plastic tore into my skin. My beige lipstick was no longer a statement, it was a way of blending into the background, of being unnoticed. There are no photographs of me from the time I had my accident until my debut novel was published 24 years later. The only picture I have is a mandatory shot taken in a photo booth for an ID card. On the very rare occasions I socialised, I would (quite literally) hide in the toilets if anyone produced a camera. Over the years, I’d stare with envy at women who wore red lipstick. Of course, I realise now it wasn’t the lipstick I was envious of, it was the
