The Naked Face: Makeup and Vulnerability on Camera

Note: I went to start writing about my recent adventures and found that this post had been sitting as a nearly finished draft for a long time. I kept getting distracted from it! So, I’ve finished it. This post is slightly off topic and the latter half of it includes sexual themes and images of clothed female masturbation.

I’m not going to lie: I love wearing makeup. I don’t dislike the way that I look without it on. There’s something coy and girlish about my “working from home” look, which usually consists of me just dressed in a pair of panties and a t-shirt, working on my laptop. I don’t wear makeup when I’m not leaving the house or having someone over: I have a tendency to break out, and letting my skin “breathe” when I don’t need to be fancy helps that.

That said, I definitely prefer to wear a smattering of cosmetics. It’s a skill I’ve only recently really developed. I try to go for a natural look, but I do enjoy having doll like attributes, too. There’s nothing like being told that my skin looks like a porcelain doll, especially when just two years ago, despite my best efforts, I pretty much always looked ruddy and spotty in the face.

Still, I’m definitely not the type of girl who never leaves home without my makeup on. If I’m not in the mood for it, then I’m not in the mood for it. If I want to feel pretty and fancy, then it’s something fun to do that I can enjoy. It’s the same difference between picking out an outfit that makes me feel cute, or not caring if I look cute or not and just heading out in leggings and an oversized sweater. Both are perfectly legitimate options for me, depending on how I’m feeling that day. But there is one time when I feel like I’m *always* in the mood for makeup: when there’s a camera running.

Even in my early days of blogging and modeling, where I felt a lot more comfortable posting pictures where I wasn’t wearing any makeup and was highlighting my very bad skin (hey, at least acne made me look authentically adolescent, right?) on this site, I always did my best with my makeup when I was on camera. The fact that I wasn’t very good at it made me feeling less confident than I could have at times.

Once I learned how to do makeup a bit more, though, I started to feel more confident about the way that I looked in pictures and on video, and people seemed to respond better to my images, too. The fancier my makeup, the more confident I feel, too. While I once felt out of place and out of my element when I dressed up, I’ve started to revel in it, realizing that I didn’t have to act any differently just because I looked different.

(A handful of selfies from a day when a makeup artist did my look, and I felt particularly cute)

Unfortunately, in a certain way, somewhere along the way, I crossed a Rubicon in this department. The confidence that I gain when I primp and powder became dependent on these this preparation in order to show up. The days when I would take and post a selfie to showcase a point simply wearing whatever I happened to have on, with my blotchy, unmade-up face on plain display are long gone. I post the occasional unmade-up pre-bedtime photo, but it’s rare.

I don’t really understand it, because I don’t feel uncute without makeup. If I’m willing to walk around the mall like this, why am I not willing to put it on the internet? Somewhere along the line, perhaps around the time when I began doing more explicit videos, intimacy began to be assigned differently. My naked body became something that everyone has seen. But, at least for the past few years, my naked face is something that’s been reserved for people who have spent real life, casual time around me. It’s the face that Paul looks at when we wake up in the morning. It’s the face that greets Rafa when I wander into his apartment so we can cuddle on the couch and watch movies. It’s the face that my girlfriend runs a loving finger across while we soak in bath together. It’s the face that Erica and Spankcake see when I’m feeling frazzled and I need them: the kind of days when one of us silently moves across the table to pull the other into a hug.

Make up free wombat hugs!

Thinking about these kinds of moments, those tender, vulnerable, intimate moments, I realized that I usually do feel quite cute and pretty in those times. I feel clean and innocent, and yes, I feel sexy. Any kind of nudity can be enjoyable.

Thinking about this a while ago, I decided that I wanted to try doing a video without any makeup on. I wanted to try being nakedly myself on film, just to see how it felt. I decided that I wanted to film something in my most natural state.

~~~

Last fall, Paul and I went on our first road trip together. We drove from Los Angeles to Green River Utah, where we spent a night before heading to Denver. We stayed for a few days there while I worked and we visited with Amoni, and then we got back in the car and drove to Iowa, through the corn fields and plains of the area where I used to live. We spent two nights there, and I did a day long shoot with a local bondage producer. From there, we continued on to Chicago, where we then attended the October Crimson Moon Party. It was a blast, and I didn’t feel too tired from all of the travel yet.

On the way back, we drove straight through to Denver in one go, and by then, I was starting to feel a bit worn by the trip, but it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Being in a car with someone for that long is very vulnerable: there’s no hiding any aspect of yourself in those close quarters, and you have to be patient with one and other. Fortunately, there was no tension between us. The trip went by harmoniously.

We visited a wild animal sanctuary outside of Denver, then we had an early night at a hotel. The next morning, I was going to go shoot for Real Spankings and RSI again, so I needed my rest.

The shoot the next day was one of my favorites that I ever did with them, but it was definitely hard. It started off with strapping, followed by a caning, and then a hard school paddling. I got a break to be a background character in one of Jordan’s scenes, and then she had to go home. When it was time to do the last scene, Michael Masterson told me that we could do whatever I wanted to.

I’d had a long week and a half of adventuring. I had been spanked countless times, in multiple cities and states, including plenty of hard scenes. But there was something special about this last scene I was going to do: it was the final thing that I had planned. I didn’t have to hold anything back for later. This could be a final expenditure of energy for me.

So, I didn’t hold anything back. I went into the “implement room” and came back with a Vermont Country Store bath brush and I asked for a long, hard, OTK spanking with it, one that would push me. I’ve done a lot of hard scenes with Michael in the past, and I trust him both to bring me to a place I want to go and not to bring me too far from where I should be. We negotiated my safety signal (since this works better for me than a safeword) and the scene started.

It was super hard, and super fast: I struggled and wailed and cried out as Michael pinned my hand behind my back. It was everything I wanted it to be. I felt sore and exhausted when it was done, but happy and satisfied with myself.

When the shoot was over and I had finished fussing over the Real Spankings cats, I met up with Paul and we had to hit the road: we wanted to drive as far as Utah that night. I dropped a little bit at one point, but Paul boosted me back up, and seeing big horn sheep in the mountains made me stay alert. We drove until we reached Green River again, then checked into the same motel where we had stayed on the way there.

That night, I slept very soundly, although I must admit that I slept on my tummy. My bottom was still very sore to the touch, and I was exhausted.

I woke up the next morning still feeling sore, but as is often the case, feeling horny as well. It was a particular kind of horniness that I get sometimes, usually after I’ve been doing a lot of shoots: exhibitionist horniness. Paul was already up and dressed, so when he came back in from having been outside looking at the Utah landscape (something quite alien to anything you’ll see in the UK) I told him that I wanted to film a video.

Honestly, I think I decided that I wanted to do a no makeup video that morning because I was too lazy to really get put together, but still wanted to film. Besides, I felt cozy and contented. I had gone to sleep in my favorite old, soft t-shirt and pair of panties, without bothering to take off my tall socks from the day before. Paul set up the camera and I didn’t do anything more to get ready than run my fingers through my hair.

So, I started to masturbate, the way I would if there was no camera there, mixing fingering myself through my panties with some pillow humping. I felt a flush of invigoration, knowing that I was being observed in this natural state. I didn’t worry about being judged, or not looking the way that I “should.” I just existed, vulnerable and fine with that.

Later, I looked at the stills that we had taken after the video and it felt a little odd to see, now that I was out of that moment. I had pulled the gaudy, motel bedspread and the sheets out of place in my passion, and my bottom was a mixture of bruises, cane welts and lines from where I’d slept. My hair was a mess, and without makeup, my face really showed how flushed I become with arousal.

I wasn’t used to seeing myself look this way in an image online, instead of the mirror as I sleepily got ready for the day. I felt a bit shy to share this, but it also felt like something special. Like, despite the fact that I never undressed in the video, I was truly being naked on the internet again.

I’m not going to make a habit of doing this sort of thing, but it was a fun boundary to push. That’s not to say that I’ll never do it again. Want to see me at my most vulnerable? You can get the video here.