Dressing formulaically and/or in a way that swiftly diverts attention away from you is an understandable temptation, especially as February frigidity rears its ugly head and midterms loom large. Despite this, there’s something to be said for doing like Iris Apfel, 95-year-old businesswoman and fashion icon, and not giving a hoot how many heads you happen to turn as you prance between midterms. As the notoriously avant-garde Apfel, a walking repository of shocking trinkets and textures, says: “When you don’t dress like everybody else, you don’t have to think like everybody else.” Although this may be a wee bit reductionist, I think it holds a lot of truth for the burgeoning young Fashionista/o. Makeup, especially, is a medium through which one’s aesthetic can be explored in a particularly experimental way due to its malleability and impermanence.
Luckily for those of us hungering for makeup artists’ insider secrets, this Fashionisto and practicing makeup artist guides us through his process from the ground up, starting with his favourite skin products. These include WellSkin Glaxal Base Moisturizing Lotion with Vitamin E, Maybelline Master Prime #300: Blur + Redness control, and Laura Mercier Tinted Moisturizer in Nude. For easy dewy skin, blend the moisturizer, primer and tinted moisturizer into your skin. This skin regime will help create a contemporary, polished glow to modernize the heavy period eye look that follows.
To achieve this Fashionisto’s striking mod look popularized by Twiggy in the 1960s, use the shades M-536, M-530, M-620, and M-100 from the Makeup Forever Artist Shadow Palette 9. Begin your eyes by mixing the pressed shadows in a light brown transition shade and a cream bone shade, washing this mixture across your entire lid up to your brow bone with a flat brush to prep the lid for the look. At this point, take the tip of the same brush, dipped into a charcoal shade and sketch out the shape of your crease following the bone structure of your eye socket. After sketching the rough shape, define it further with a black shadow and then with a black kohl liner like Mac eye Kohl in Smolder. For the wing shape of the eye on the upper lash line, take your standard black liquid eyeliner and follow the shape of your eye. Leaving a small gap underneath the lower lash line, trace the shape of your eye out into a wing mirroring the top lid and then take the same liquid liner and draw lines downwards to mimic lashes.
For classic glamour lips with an overdrawn Marilyn Monroe shape, use a warm brown lip liner to overdraw your outline and fill in your entire lips with your base color. This Fashionisto uses MAC’s lip pencil in the shade Strip Down, and Shade 6 from the NYX Pro Lip Cream Palette The Pinks. After this, apply a warm orange-pink lipstick with your fingers, topped off with a slightly cooler pink lipstick as a frosty finish, applied directly from the bullet.
