What’s today? Dishwater Tuesday. The Voxfrockers are slumped in their Uggs, Dear Reader, listless as sloths in a sauna and not a single syllable to show among them. Time to plumb the Voxvault and, as our scheduled topic was “Make-up Trends for Lips n’ Lashes”, we thought a timeless rumination on the arts by voxeditor, Janice Breen Burns would be timely. Photographs (all current) mostly feature our pick of the richest, lushest, loveliest lip, lash and brow looks around now. (Main photo, top, David Downton‘s iconic portrait of Dita Von Teese, 2012.)
WE rubbed Nugget boot polish onto our eyelids when we were 15, us girls; delicately, with the tip of a Johnson‘s cotton bud. We drew the fuzzy black line carefully along the lashes of the top lid, pressing into each follicle and then out and up with a little flick towards the ear; “Like Nefertiti but smudgier.” Then, we’d take a mascara brush, steeped first in boiling water to soften and release the caked goop from last time, and rolled it back and forth, digging gently into the waxy surface of the Nugget.
PHOTO: Bernard Gueit
MAKEUP: Sue Marshall
HAIR: Carl Reeves
MODEL: Paris@londonmanagement
JEWEL: Keiko Uno ring
What you needed was a good, thick coating you could twirl onto your bottom, then your top lashes. Mascara a la Nugget. Very chic. Twirl, flick. Twirl flick. It made your eyes like saucers with wings and your mother go ballistic. “Wipe that muck off your face this instant, young madam!” Remarkable, how a lick of boot-black could so deeply offend. But to be honest, there was lipstick to worry her too: a blend of Vaseline and powdery scrapings from a horse-pill of paint-box pink. We mixed it in a jar top and applied it – lips like so; ‘Ooooooooo’ – with Mr Pointers elegantly extended. Niiiice.
What were we doing? It’s not a trick question. When my own daughter dabbled in face-making (using the real stuff at $16 a lip gloss pot and $23 a mascara), I twigged; That’s it! We had been drawing on NEW faces with stronger, blacker lines and redder lips. We’d outgrown our pinky pretty baby face. Get that muck off indeed. Our mothers’ reactions weren’t so puzzling, either. If they had only added; ‘It’s too soon, young madam!’ we might have agreed. We were 15 after all, laying it on, trowel-like, hooker-style.
It made your eyes like saucers with wings and your mother go ballistic. “Wipe that muck off your face this instant, young madam!”
As a veteran of the Nugget n’ paint-box school of cosmetology, I have an abiding respect for professional make-up artists, have even coaxed the odd one to tell me exactly – and I mean exactly – what they’re doing. “Weird, isn’t it?” I’d shuffle around the model’s stool with them before a fashion shoot. “When you think about it? Painting faces on?” One of few, not convinced I was deranged, rhapsodised, in his own, mildly deranged manner, about lines. “See? I shade here, darken here; make it look like she’s got good bones. Bones define the lines. Then I do the eyes; lines to make them bigger. Then the lips: lines to make them thicker, then I colour them in.” Or words to that effect.
Backstage at the Melbourne Fashion Festival 2015. Photo: Monty Coles
He added something later that haunts me still: “If you put on weight, the lines get fuzzier, your bones get buried in the fat and it’s harder to see them, and to draw them back on. Your strong lines kind of disappear.” (Could this be one root of our primeval suspicion of the obese? Because we can’t see them clearly? Hmmm.)
Another make-up artist succinctly explained a mother’s point of view: “There is definitely a ‘too soon’ time for make-up.” The example she cited – relevant at the time because a bloke in Thailand had just confessed, as it turned out, wrongly, to her murder – was American child beauty pageant queen, JonBenet Ramsay. “Those chubby cheeks, that ski-jump nose, all that mascara and lipstick, blusher and big hair, was so strange because it was so expertly done: an old, old face on a baby body. It wasn’t a messy face, like a little kid playing grown-ups.”
There’s a “too late” time for face-making too, that coincides with the moment many women feel their strongest urge to trowel it on, inking their “lines of beauty” back in, extra-Texta-thick. “It’s when they get older, they lose colour in their skin, cheeks, lips and hair. Everything seems to shrink and sink in, or maybe, get thicker and heavier and fill out.”
“If you put on weight, the lines get fuzzier, your bones get buried in the fat and it’s harder to see them, and to draw them back on. Your strong lines kind of disappear…”
A make-up professional’s advice is to hang back, relearn the arts. A “disappearing face” needs more subtle shading and highlighting to re-draw its bone structure and strengthen its features. “Too much and you look like a clown. Not enough and you just look blugh and the wrong products and colours will just sit on your skin like house paint.”
Get the face-making right however and there are few spectacles more intriguing than an old woman, well turned out, with a pretty face, lightly drawn. “The ones I pity are the blokes. They lose their lips as they get older and can’t do much about it at all. Imagine what they could do with a pot of lip gloss in a parallel universe.”
Terry Carruthers, info@voxfrock.com.au
