"Subtle Wash Of Color," My Foot!
Make-up designers and fashion editors, do you take me for a fool?
Listen up! I am a forty year old woman who has been reading your bloody silly magazines since I was a teenager, and I know that you have to invent new drama around the same old make-up colors and products year after year to keep us buying rouge and mascara and lipstick, but this has just gone too far!!
I have now seen like three feature articles from you guys where you have a fresh-scrubbed model who looks to be about 16 years old in extreme close-up, with something ridiculous on her head like maybe a Dr. Zhivago fur hat, and she's just wearing NO MAKE-UP AT ALL. Okay? She's not wearing a STITCH of make-up, and you go ahead and do a full description of her made-up "look" just the same.
You can't just SAY, hey, we've totally run out of spin about the same old red and pink lipstick and black eyeliner and rosy rouge that we always pimp, so you start lying! You are SO LYING! Do NOT tell me that that bare faced child model is wearing a "sheer nectarine" lip color that's just all the rage, because I have EYES and I can see that she's not wearing ANY lip color whatsoever except maybe Vaseline! Who do you think you're kidding?
And those beauty articles with the girls with the scrambled hair and totally bare faces? Don't go telling me that they're wearing "dewy, subtle washes of color," because they're not wearing ANYTHING! They just got out of bed! They didn't even wash their faces!
Let me just say this. When you're 19 years old and you slick a little Vaseline on your lips and eyelids and cheekbones and some brilliant guy takes your photo under the most flattering lighting money can buy, and then some other guy Photoshops your image so that every pore is flawless and every eyelash is glimmering, bare-faced works great. It's gorgeous.
But when you're a middle-aged woman who just got six hours of sleep because it's obviously Catastrophe Week at your church and you didn't get the memo with the dates, and your have purple rings under your eyes and your hair is flat and greasy because you just didn't think it was worth the fifteen minutes it would take to wash and blow dry it, you don't want your fun, diversionary beauty magazines to just LIE to you and tell you that this fresh-scrubbed "look" is flattering. Or that it's even a "look." Most of all, you don't want these fun, diversionary magazines to LIE EVEN MORE and list fourteen products that, if you purchase them, will help you achieve this "look," when you know very well that all it really requires in real life is a tub of Vaseline, a set of lights, a genius photographer, and a professional art editor.
Personal to Scarlett Johansson: Honey, lose the peachy gloss. I miss your red lipstick!
Listen up! I am a forty year old woman who has been reading your bloody silly magazines since I was a teenager, and I know that you have to invent new drama around the same old make-up colors and products year after year to keep us buying rouge and mascara and lipstick, but this has just gone too far!!
I have now seen like three feature articles from you guys where you have a fresh-scrubbed model who looks to be about 16 years old in extreme close-up, with something ridiculous on her head like maybe a Dr. Zhivago fur hat, and she's just wearing NO MAKE-UP AT ALL. Okay? She's not wearing a STITCH of make-up, and you go ahead and do a full description of her made-up "look" just the same.
You can't just SAY, hey, we've totally run out of spin about the same old red and pink lipstick and black eyeliner and rosy rouge that we always pimp, so you start lying! You are SO LYING! Do NOT tell me that that bare faced child model is wearing a "sheer nectarine" lip color that's just all the rage, because I have EYES and I can see that she's not wearing ANY lip color whatsoever except maybe Vaseline! Who do you think you're kidding?
And those beauty articles with the girls with the scrambled hair and totally bare faces? Don't go telling me that they're wearing "dewy, subtle washes of color," because they're not wearing ANYTHING! They just got out of bed! They didn't even wash their faces!
Let me just say this. When you're 19 years old and you slick a little Vaseline on your lips and eyelids and cheekbones and some brilliant guy takes your photo under the most flattering lighting money can buy, and then some other guy Photoshops your image so that every pore is flawless and every eyelash is glimmering, bare-faced works great. It's gorgeous.
But when you're a middle-aged woman who just got six hours of sleep because it's obviously Catastrophe Week at your church and you didn't get the memo with the dates, and your have purple rings under your eyes and your hair is flat and greasy because you just didn't think it was worth the fifteen minutes it would take to wash and blow dry it, you don't want your fun, diversionary beauty magazines to just LIE to you and tell you that this fresh-scrubbed "look" is flattering. Or that it's even a "look." Most of all, you don't want these fun, diversionary magazines to LIE EVEN MORE and list fourteen products that, if you purchase them, will help you achieve this "look," when you know very well that all it really requires in real life is a tub of Vaseline, a set of lights, a genius photographer, and a professional art editor.
Personal to Scarlett Johansson: Honey, lose the peachy gloss. I miss your red lipstick!
posted by PeaceBang at 9:53 PM
5 Comments:
...sounds like you're having a bad week, PB. You're right - of course, the other piece of fiction is those pictures of "mature" models - Andie MacDowell comes to mind - wearing some magical makeup that supposedly makes all one's wrinkles and pores disappear...
Of course, she's been Botoxed and had plastic surgery. Of course they've airbrushed the photo. Bah.
Although I have a subscription to W, I haven't looked at it in a while. I read the occasional fashion magazine just to keep in touch with what the new colors and general trend of things (though the way I dress could hardly be called trendy), but I skip over almost all the ads and don't read the blatant product pimping articles unless it's an accident. But I long ago stopped paying attention to those things because I found that as a brown skinned woman with short, kinky hair, 90% of their advice couldn't apply to me. Latina magazine does have good makeup and hair advice that's realistic, and they use lots and lots of non models, too.
When you need a dose of reality to offset the fantasy of fashion mags, you can check them out!
thanks, mibi. I'm actually fine, althoug there's more suffering among my congregation that usual, and that's upsetting. When that happens, it's pure fun to rant about something totally inconsequential.
Wait! You mean Andie McD isn't just naturally all luminous and stuff? (pout)
If you want to rant about Scarlett having the opposite problem, you should check out the drugstore displays for a brand of makeup called HiP:High Intensity Pigments.
Either Scarlett or someone who looks a lot like her is in the display ads for those and looking like the beautiful alien chick in a bad 50's sci-fi movie.
Very weird.
CC
PB,
Would love to hear your take on what to wear to the congregation's upcoming pool party. My inclination? Linen blouse, linen capris, sandals, NO swimsuit. Should a minister ever show up in a swimsuit? WWPBD?
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