THE LIP-GLOSS FALLACY
By
Lexie Strumor
Several months ago, my make-up artist friend,
Allison, informed me that my application of charcoal eye shadow
made me look like a porn star and that my lip color was, ahem….
“not current.” Ouch. Not current?! What about her
Hello Kitty watch? Was that supposed to be cutting edge?! Not
current? Me?? Impossible!
All right, all right, maybe she had a point…about the
eye shadow, that is. I made a mental note: the smoldering look
is not appropriate for brunch; instead opt for clean mahogany
lines drawn close to the lashes and a little black mascara.
Fine. Got it.
But what was this about my lip color being so blatantly passé,
excuse me, so blatantly not-current??
“Well,” she said sweetly, “nobody does that
heavy lip-liner thing anymore; it’s really eighties…you
should really just use a little gloss.”
Really eighties? WHAT?! Did I unknowingly walk out of the house
looking like a creature out of a Bob Fosse musical??
“No, you’re fine. Honey, just tell me how you’ve
been doing your lips.”
“Okay, well I just used that MAC pencil everyone loves-Spice,
and then I used a little raspberry lip gloss on top… for
color.”
“Well, nobody’s used that spice pencil for years,
and your um- who makes that gloss you’re wearing?”
“ALMAY.” I said.
“Well, your ALMAY gloss isn’t raspberry, it’s
fuchsia.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s fuchsia. It looks really dated. Here, do like
my gloss?? It’s Shu Uemura in Apricot, it’s really
natural looking.”
Yeah, yeah, natural apricot, great...Fuchsia?! How on earth
could I be wearing fuchsia?
I was mystified. I was stunned. It was time for me and my prom-queen
lip color to go home. There, I locked myself in the bathroom
to face the truth. Yet when I looked in the mirror, I saw no
freak show, I saw no aging prom queen staring back at me and
the curious thing was, was that my lips looked…pretty.
What was the problem then? Did I have a bizarre form of color
blindness? Could I not see fluorescents? I could have sworn
it was raspberry. And how was it that Allison’s “natural
looking” apricot gloss seemed to be painted over beige
lipstick? I had some research to do. I had to see if there was
any truth to what I beginning to think was not only a lip-gloss
lie, but a lip-gloss fallacy.
A jar of cold cream and 7 or 8 back issues of VOGUE later, I
had come to some conclusions. You’ve probably noticed
the small section, usually somewhere very close to the front
cover, where the make-up artist tells you EXACTLY what he or
she used to create the look of the cover model.
The luminous Catherine Zeta, Kate Hudson, Julianne Moore, and
Gwyneth Paltrow kept me company as I learned how their fabulous
faces were done. The glamour spectrum seemed to range from “Just
out of bed” to “Very, very glamorous”, yet
the make-up artists were somehow all saying the same thing:
“I
dusted her face with some sheer loose powder and then I used
a dab of lip gloss…. that’s it!”
Really. Are you sure you believe that? I don’t. I think
that make-up artists, in the interest of self-preservation,
have become adept at convincing us that they did far less
than they actually did. They cleverly omit key steps in effort
to pull off a more stunning accomplishment In this case, the
old “just use a little gloss” tip misleads you
into thinking that all you have to do to re-create Gwyneth
Paltrow’s angelic look is to just use a little gloss.
Why not just tell us to use Carmax? Blistex?! I love Gwyneth,
but don’t tell me I can achieve silky ingénue
status by smearing on some nude colored salve.
There is a problem here. How can we truthfully say that we
are getting sound beauty advice when we’re only getting
a fraction of the information?? I don’t blame the actresses.
I think they actually believe that they’re only wearing
a little gloss, when there is obviously a nude lip liner and
a cream base color involved.
And by the way, our clever make-up artists did just use a
little gloss, but only after they lined, contoured, shaded
and plumped. You see my friends, it’s all a matter of
semantics. It’s how you describe the make-up you’re
wearing, not what you actually have on.
Listen, I’ve been playing in my mother’s Lancôme
since I was eight, I took Calculus, I read Nietzsche. I know
when I’m being fooled. And for the record, no amount
of Chapstick, Blistex, Carmax, Kiehls, Burt’s Bees,
Rachel Perry, or homemade herbal salve will ever materialize
as a rich plum stain, sorry!
One night, a few weeks later, when I had calmed down, a curious
thing happened. It was the traditional Friday night out with
girls and Allison had come over early for a few cocktails.
She immediately commented on my make-up and how fresh and
pretty my lips looked.
Okay…that was nice, but I actually hadn’t changed
a thing since the fuchsia disaster of a few weeks earlier.
Was “really eighties” back in style again? The
rest of the girls began to arrive and were mixing martinis
in the kitchen. Allison pulled me aside and asked me to borrow
a brown liner…but why? Did she need to touch up her
brows? Write a note?
“No, I’m going to use it to line my lips.”
“You’re WHAT?!”
She was going to use it to line her lips, by golly, and that’s
exactly what she did. I watched the entire thing frame by
frame, in slow motion. It was horrible and it was liberating.
I realize now how Agent Kujan felt at the end of The Usual
Suspects, when all the missing pieces came together in that
colorful montage.
I watched Allison line her lips, innocently and thoroughly.
Then to my surprise, she pulled out a lipstick. It Paula Dorf;
it was…beige!! I knew it! How strange, I thought her
kind would never set foot near a traditional lipstick.
Last, she produced the infamous Apricot gloss from her make-up
case. Things were beginning to make sense.
“Hey, there’s that gloss again…Shu Uemura,
right?”
“Yeah I love it. It’s really nice; it almost looks
like you’re not wearing anything at all.”
Almost.
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