Mascara

Mascara, like all cosmetics, is forbidden to Handmaids under Gilead's sumptuary laws. The regime considers such items vanities, part of a broader effort to strip women of individuality and sexual allure. Handmaids are not permitted hand lotion or face cream, and mirrors have been removed from their bathrooms, replaced by oblongs of dull metal. The outside of a Handmaid's body is deliberately allowed to become hard and wrinkled, as the regime cares only for the insides—the reproductive capacity. This prohibition is a decree of the Wives, who do not want the Handmaids to look attractive. Against this backdrop, any cosmetic becomes a potent symbol of the forbidden past and a tool of dangerous disguise.

The Commander's Gift and the Act of Application

The mascara appears during Offred's evening with the Commander at Jezebel's, the secret club where high-ranking officials and foreign delegations consort with women dressed in salvaged pre-Gilead finery. The Commander provides Offred with a costume of mauve and pink feathers and purple sequins, and then produces a small cache of makeup: an old, runny lipstick that smells of artificial grapes, some eyeliner, and mascara. Offred's first attempt with the eyeliner leaves her with a smudged black lid, as if she has been in a fight, and she must wipe it off using the vegetable-oil hand lotion the Commander had previously given her. She then tries again, rubbing some of the lipstick along her cheekbones for color. The mascara is applied in this makeshift, furtive ritual, with the Commander holding Serena Joy's silver-backed hand mirror for her. The act is clumsy and uncertain, a re-learning of a forgotten skill, and it transforms Offred into a figure she barely recognizes.

Disguise and Exposure

Once applied, the mascara, along with the rest of the makeup, becomes part of Offred's disguise. The Commander gives her a light blue cloak, the color of a Wife, to hide her costume and painted face as they pass through checkpoints. Inside Jezebel's, the makeup makes her look lurid in the fluorescent light, her eyes too dark and shimmering, her mouth too red and wet. She feels like a fool, a travesty in bad makeup and someone else's clothes. The mascara does not grant her freedom or power; it marks her as a temporary truant, a performer in a degrading spectacle. Later, in the hotel room, she looks at herself in the mirror and sees a wreck: the mascara has smudged again, the purplish lipstick has bled, and her hair trails aimlessly. The makeup, meant to transform, only underscores her vulnerability and the artificiality of the entire charade.

Removal and Return to the Regulated Self

After the Commander's failed attempt at intimacy in the hotel room, Offred returns to her room in the Commander's house. She scrapes off the lipstick with toilet paper and hopes nothing shows, that she does not smell of the makeup or of him. The removal of the mascara is an act of erasure, a necessary step to re-enter the regulated, unadorned existence of a Handmaid. The brief, illicit use of cosmetics is a memory she must suppress, a physical trace she must eliminate to avoid detection. The mascara, like the feather costume and the blue cloak, is a prop in a dangerous game, and its removal signals the end of the night's transgression and the return to the stark, colorless reality of her daily life. The regime's prohibition on such items is thus shown to be not merely about modesty, but about the absolute control of identity and the suppression of any individual expression that might hint at a self beyond the prescribed role of a two-legged womb.