Cosmetics

The Fuck is on Your Face? Vol. III: The Tinkerbell Effect

/ Sarah Campbell / 1 Comment

Our third volume of The Fuck is on Your Face?, the feature that is apparently gunning to be renamed Dudes Think Lipstick Turns Us Into Idiots, comes to us from Simon, who has a bone to pick with those of you still hanging on to the nineties. Step away from the butterfly clips and listen up.

From the classic 1996 horror film “Not the Blue Eyeshadow!”

I admit to being utterly baffled by the horrifically large swathe of womanhood that for some reason thinks it’s OK to put glitter on things.

And by things, I mean, inevitably, me. I speak to you as a man labouring under the pain of a mighty dry cleaning bill, a man who is tired of being shiny and glimmery.

You lot are a little more subtle these days; now I just have to avoid Rocky Horror events and Bieber concerts (done and done). I can imagine that the bronzing powder, shimmery eyeliner, eyeshadow, and top toner [Ed. note: what now?] looked like a good idea in the bright and marvellous light of Sephora, but after a night in this dark and murky bar with you pressing your face into my jacket, nobody wants to step outside to discover they look like they have been dry-humping Tinkerbell.

Did you get into the glitter paints again, girl?

Simon spells things funny because he’s from across the pond. When Googling failed us, we had to ask him what the heck “top toner” is. His response: “Something that sounds like makeup but probably isn’t. Whatever it is you brush on. >Buzz phrase< powder or whatever.”

Great, Simon. Thanks for clearing that up. 

HALP! Up All Night

/ Sarah Campbell / 3 Comments

Did you have a little too much fun last night? Did you drink all the things? Or maybe you just stayed up late clicking through all of your ex-boyfriend’s Facebook photos and crying [author has never done either of these things]. Either way, your alarm just went off and you’re scared to look in the mirror, right? Well, you should be. You look like hell. But don’t worry! You can put things on your face to fool people into thinking you’re functional! [Note: I will be providing links to products so that you can buy them. They will probably mostly be to the same site, and that is because I am in an unhealthy one-sided relationship with Sephora. Seriously, baby, why don’t you return my calls?]

Skincare

First off, get in the shower. You smell like cheap champagne and regret.

While you’re in there, take off all your smudged eye makeup with some good eye-friendly cleanser. I like Philosophy’s Purity. I’ve had my $32 16 oz. for over a year now, probably because I only use it in the shower. Solid investment. It’ll getcha squeaky clean in a gentle (chamomile-infused!) fashion, and it wins Best of Sephora every time for a reason.

Now you need to give yourself a good exfoliation to brighten up your complexion, increase circulation, and get rid of all those dead skin cells. Just because I’m obsessed with Kate Somerville’s ridiculously expensive Exfolikate doesn’t mean you have to be (seriously, Kate, $85 for 2 oz.? And can we take a second to talk about how .5 goes for $19, but 2 oz. is $85? Is it possible that you’re worse at math than I am?). It’s undeniably fantastic, with small grains and fruit enzymes that exfoliate chemically as well as physically (it’s supposed to tingle, but if it’s burning, wash it off and try the gentle version). I use it in the shower 2-3x a week. If you can’t part with the cash, good old St. Ives Apricot Scrub ($3) will do you just fine.

After your shower, moisturize immediately. Since alcohol/lack of sleep are drying, you’ll probably want something with even more hydration than usual to plump up your skin. My go-to when I’m feeling parched is Caudalie Pulpe Vitaminée ($58). Immediately quenches, has great antioxidants and natural stress-relieving botanicals, and smells delicious. However, I just started using a sample of Sephora’s (relatively new) Instant Moisturizer, which at $20 for 1.7 is much more wallet-friendly, and you get that same instant “hey look now I’m moisturized” feeling. I’ll probably pick some up when I’m done toothpaste-squeezing my sample.

I hate to be the one to tell you this, but your eyes are puffy. They just are. If you’re looking for a miracle worker, Dior Capture Totale Instant Eye Rescue Treatment ($95) is astonishing. I’ve seen this sucker take out the puffiest of eye bags in under a minute. You squeeze a bit of the magic energizing cream (Dior is pretty vague about product descriptions and ingredients, but I’m pretty sure it involves virgin blood) onto the perpetually-cool palladium tip and press/massage into your suborbital eye area. I swear this stuff is amazing. I’ve never owned it, personally, because I am not independently wealthy and nobody has ever seen fit to give me one for free (weird, right?). If you’re looking for a less expensive option, Clinique’s Depuffing Eye Serum ($28) has a nice little cooling rollerball, and you can even use it over makeup during the day to refresh (I’d say it’s “Like a 3 pm cup of coffee for your eyes!” but I am obviously above such things). Drugstore brands are always coming out with versions of these as well.

By the way, if you absolutely can’t wash your hair, dry shampoo is your best friend. I’m partial to the classic Pssssst!, which doesn’t leave a residue and smells delicious, and my friend Hilary — who has enviable hair and has tried ’em all — swears by Suave. Dry shampoo is also awesome for when you get a little overexcited with your styling lotion and end up being able to see your reflection in your hair.

Cosmetics

I’m not going to go through all the usual makeup steps. You already know about primers, foundation, etc. Here are just a couple of products and some tips that’ll perk you up and make you look more human.

Touche Éclat, YSL ($40). I resisted this one for a long time. “Yeah, yeah, cult product, blah blah,” I thought. “I have a million highlighters, I have a million concealers, what could possibly be so great about this one? Plus, $40? Ouch.” And then I got a sample. Slight digression: I’m going to do a post on sampling services like Birchbox and Beauty Army very soon, but while I’m on the subject, let me just say that samples are your friend. They’ll help you discover products you’d never dreamed of trying, or items that seemed too expensive to bother with but upon sampling are actually your holy grail. They’re also handy for travel. I am also planning a post on how to get the most out of your department store counter experience (and I’ll probably throw some Sephora know-how in there, since I’ve worked for both types of retailers), and it will definitely involve some real talk on samples. Aaaanyway. Touche Éclat, annoyingly, lives up to the hype. It’s creamy yet lightweight, with enough coverage to replace your undereye concealer but not enough weight to call attention to fine lines. Plus it has the added bonus of a bit of artificial light in there to brighten you up. There’s a great selection of shades based on skin tone and undertones (BTW, my biggest advice for concealer is don’t go too light. The reverse raccoon does no one any favors; you may as well hang a sign around your neck that says HAHA NOW YOU CAN’T SEE MY DARK CIRCLES).

Also, guess what. They have one for dudes now, too. Progressive!

Smashbox Eye Beam Double-Ended Brightener ($24) has saved me on a few occasions. One side of the pencil is a highlighter, great for under the brow or in the inner corners of the eyes, but the other side is what’s truly useful — it’s for your inner rim/waterline. Covers the inevitable lack-of-sleep redness while brightening and opening up the whole eye. I also use this if I’ve been having allergies. Just be very, very careful when applying. Don’t do this one in the car.

Right now I’m really into this Crimson Cream Rouge cream blush/lip tint by Besame Cosmetics ($22). Don’t be scared by the color, just tap a tiny bit onto the apple of your cheeks and blend, and do the same for your lips. It’ll brighten you up with a subtle I-just-ate-a-popsicle flush. Cream blush has good staying power, and won’t make you look all powdery. The trick is to find a shade that’s bright enough to give you some pop, and to use it subtly.

Finally, my eye makeup trick. Drag a concealer pencil in your shade (I like Shiseido The Makeup Correcter Pencil, $18, because it’s a small pencil, rare in the mostly-chunky concealer pencil world) right along the bottom of your eye bags where that dark line is. You know the basic rule of shading — put something dark on your face and it’ll cause that area to recede, put something light on your face and it’ll bring it forward, right? Same principle applies here. You want to fill in that dark line of demarcation at the end of the puffiness. In the same vein, grab a brown shadow (Smashbox Waterproof Shadow Liners, $22, are nice and chunky, and live up to their name- you’ll need a real makeup remover to get that shit off. Just make sure you smudge immediately after it touches your skin or you’re stuck with a hard line FOREVER) and smudge it on the area you want to recede: the puffy part (line & smudge along your lashes, too, for balance). This trick is like magic, I swear. Brown tends to look the most natural, but you can switch it up if you like. Match the depth of the shade to your coloring- if you’re really fair, go easy with the espresso shades. If you’re a spaz, powder shadows are much easier to manipulate and more forgiving; use with a small short-bristled shadow brush.

Cheap, easy trick to look dewy and luminous? Pat a tiny bit of Vaseline along the tops of your cheekbones. Don’t forget your eyeliner/mascara/whatever you like to use. Finally, blot away some of your t-zone shine with blotting papers (rather than using powder, which can build up and be drying). My favorite is MAC Blot Film ($15). Toss these in your bag for a quick and easy go-to shine remover. People will look at you funny while you’re blotting, but that’s only because they’re jealous of your foresight.

Now fill up your water bottle and go find the greasiest breakfast in town. Got hangover/perk-me-up tips? Leave ’em in the comments!

The Fuck is on Your Face? Vol. I: That Zombie Allure

/ Sarah Campbell / 1 Comment

Welcome to the first volume of The Fuck is on Your Face?; a feature where I ask my guy friends to talk about makeup. Our first entry comes courtesy of a gentleman who wishes to be referred to as is totally named Trent Melchiorre. Trent, in his typical brief fashion, says:

I have little opinion on makeup. It makes people prettier (PC? fuck you). I’m a little tight that I can’t get in on that. Foundation smells terrible and looks suffocating, and eyeliner is my second favorite thing.

We actually have photographic evidence on hand to support Mr. Melchiorre’s latter claim:

He’s fine.

Which, naturally, prompted our following exchange:

At least we know we’ll be employable during the inevitable zombie apocalypse.

As a dude, I too would be “tight” that it’s not entirely socially acceptable yet to get in on the beautifying properties of makeup. For all its opportunities for entertainment and self-expression, you know you’re gonna get a big zit right before a first date and it sure is nice to know you can just cover that sucker up. Are you a guy who uses concealer? Weigh in in the comments.

Mr. Melchiorre currently resides in New York, where he is a Serious Actor for the love of his craft and not at all because he likes wearing stage makeup. He wouldn’t tell us what his first favorite thing is, so we assume it’s lip gloss. 

Smart chicks don’t care about the mirror

/ Sarah Campbell / 5 Comments

It seems to be a widely held belief that to be an intelligent person (for the sake of the argument, I’m going to specify ‘girl’) is to relinquish all but the most basic of interests in personal appearance. You can shower and brush your hair. Cherry chapstick and maybe mascara, if you want to push it. After all, beauty is only skin deep, right? Smart chicks don’t spend hours looking in the mirror. That would be vain; a waste of time, quelle Narcissus and all that.

There’s an element of truth to this. It shouldn’t be all-consuming. Nobody wants to completely swallow the you’re-not-good-enough media pill. There is an aspect of the beauty industry that’s entirely too preoccupied with “fixing” what doesn’t need fixing. And if someone isn’t interested in cosmetics or doesn’t feel like wearing them, I say more power to them. For me, however, cosmetics are a fun thing. Not some mask with which to hide my insecurities, but an art form. Now, I’ll qualify this by being the first to admit that I’m insecure as hell, but for me, makeup has never been about covering stuff up. It’s freedom, expression, challenge.

Sarah Lawrence, my alma mater, is a wonderful school, one that affords you the freedom to explore intellectual curiosity as deeply as you might care to go. The serious academics I encountered there were worlds away from the music conservatory I transferred from. I found myself struggling to reconcile my own unassailable love for cosmetics and skincare and fragrance and silly girly things with my newfound academia; pursuing intellectual exploits and doing my best to present myself in a professional manner that reflected the inside of my brain more than the products I used every morning.

SRS ACADEMICS. And not an eyeliner in sight. (c) Sarah Lawrence College

A teacher once confided, “When I first met you, I thought you were one of those theater people. You don’t look like a serious intellectual.” There was an unmistakable condescension in his voice. It was meant to be a compliment about my intellectual capacity, but it only furthered my self-consciousness about the whole thing. The “serious girls” in my classes didn’t wear a stitch of makeup. And this lent them more credibility — even to me. Why? As if in the absence of makeup it was written on their faces that they’d spent that time in the library; spent more time pursuing “serious” things.

A New York Times article in October of last year cites a Boston-based study that concluded that women wearing makeup appeared more competent. The study, “Cosmetics as a Feature of the Extended Human Phenotype: Modulation of the Perception of Biologically Important Facial Signals,” (whew) used a pool of almost 300 participants and showed them, in varying lengths of time, photographs of 25 different women in various stages of makeup from bare-faced to “glamorous”. Overwhelmingly, the made-up women scored higher in likability, trustworthiness, and perceived competence. Interestingly, when viewers had to make a snap judgment based on limited exposure, the associations with all levels of makeup were positive. But the longer the more made-up images were shown to participants, the less trustworthy and “warm” they were likely to be rated. This makes sense when you think about how heavily made-up faces can be perceived as a kind of lie. We’ve all seen those Celebrities Without Makeup! shock horror tabloids. We know makeup can be magic.

See? Magic.

The study concluded that “[…] faces with cosmetics engage both fast, reflexive processes, and more deliberative conscious processes. The fast, automatic effects are uniformly strong and positive for all outcomes. In situations where a perceiver is under a high cognitive load or under time pressure, he or she is more likely to rely on such automatic judgments for decision-making. Facial images appear on ballots, job applications, websites and dating sites. Our results underscore the malleability of judgments derived from facial images of a single individual at zero acquaintance, judgments that can be highly consequential. When inferring trustworthiness, likeability, or competence from an image, we are influenced significantly not only by the attractiveness of the inherited phenotype but by the effects of the “extended phenotype,” in this case, makeup.”

Sounds about right. At first glance, someone wearing makeup often looks pulled-together; like they made an effort. But if you think about it too much, it sort of starts to look like they care too much about what they see in the mirror, and that, conventional wisdom says, is Not Good. I still don’t have an answer for how to be taken seriously if you wear makeup. It’s a balance I still walk and think about all the time. So no grand, tidy conclusions at this point, unfortunately.

I think if I were writing for a magazine, here is where I would offer tips on “Natural, barely-there beauty!” but you know what? Wear as much makeup as you freaking want. I tend to like to keep mine on the natural side for work or interviews, but hell, if that’s not you? Shine on, you crazy diamond.

Just blend that shit. Nobody ever went wrong with lots of blending.

Social experiment

/ Sarah Campbell / Leave a comment

I’ve asked a handful of my dude friends to contribute a paragraph or two on their most or least favorite female cosmetics items/habits. Since they are all hilarious, I’m expecting this to be a good feature. Stay tuned.

Do I need to come up with some sort of sign-off? Some sort of textual equivalent of finger-guns? Like, “Stay Glossy, Blogosphere!”

…I’ll work on it.

A slightly inauspicious beginning

/ Sarah Campbell / 1 Comment

Instagram? Me?

I’ve been putting this off for years.

Every few weeks someone says “You know what? You should start a blog.” I’m not entirely sure what gives them that impression. Flippant Facebook status updates I can do. Actually commit myself to full-fledged blog posts on a regular basis? Daunting.

There’s also the matter of everyone and their mother having a blog. This has been my massive hangup for ages now. The excuses write themselves. I can’t, I missed the boat, I should have started one years ago before all the ideas got taken … bullshit. As someone I met at a TechCrunch party recently said, “Saying that blogs are over is like saying that music is over.” (Admittedly, there’s a lot to be said about the changing landscape of the music industry, but I digress. I do that sometimes.) I eventually found inspiration in — of all places — a Jenna Marbles video called Why Girls Hate Each Other. After the bulk of her argument has been discussed, Miss Marbles begins to wrap things up with, “You got something in there that no one else has! And if you just do that instead of what society is telling you to do then we can all just be like hey girl how’s it goin’ […]?”

You’re right, Jenna, I do got something in here that no one else has. And if I wait to figure out what exactly that is, or try to reverse engineer my trajectory to fame and fortune via the unpredictable and often luck-based blog starmaking machine, I’ll never get around to doing it.

I know I want this blog to be about beauty in some fashion (Ha! Fashion! I … I’m sorry.), but I haven’t quite figured out its objective yet. No matter, here are a few thing I want to write about and some things I don’t:

The internet has enough how-tos. If you want to learn to do anything, go look it up on YouTube. You don’t need to see my dumb face telling you how to “Create the Perfect Cat-Eye” or “How to Find the Perfect Red Lipstick!” I mean, fuck, the entire magazine industry is built on these recycled premises. Go sit in a waiting room. You might even pick up some tips on “How to Please Your Man!” (hint: it starts with blow and ends with job).

This is going to be beauty for smart girls (or dudes, we don’t discriminate here). You’re not thirteen years old playing with your mother’s rouge anymore. You’re a grown person (or, y’know, mature), and you can handle the word fuck once in a while (sorry, Grandma). You can also understand multisyllabic words (like multisyllabic!). So let’s stop dumbing down the beauty industry, because that’s the last thing it needs. Which brings me to:

Cosmetics are not just for dumb girls. They are not just for shallow girls. They are not just for girls who have nothing else to offer. They are for anyone who wants to use them. Cosmetics should be egalitarian. I suppose I consider myself a feminist in that I believe that everyone has rights, and one of those rights happens to be that anyone should be able to put whatever silly girly things they want on their face and still be taken seriously. More on this in the future.

I’ve written a novel at this point (hey Mom, I wrote a novel!), so I’ll sign off.

You know what? I do feel more accomplished. Baby steps.