Other People’s Makeup: Susan Giordano

By Meli | Published: June 18, 2013

susan_giordanoI’d call my look ‘easy glamour’. I like glamour, but with a minimum of fuss. I can do an everyday glamorous face in five minutes. And I can show others how to do it too!”

 

Susan Giordano was an early student of glamour: “My aunt was an Avon Lady, and she used to let me play with her kit. All of the women in my family were glamour pusses – they were always all dolled up.”

 

As a professional makeup artist for over twenty years, (now with her own product line and storefront in Hastings, New York), Susan has tricks for every woman. But what’s in her bag?

 

“The main bag is for my everyday face. I always say “I want my everyday face in one place”. There’s a lot of my favorites – you can see how tiny some of the pencils are! I have another bag for lashes and other special items. I love little brushes – I have these favorites from Duane Reade, I don’t know what I’d do without them.”

 

“I started sneaking in makeup when I was about 13 – remember Cosmetique? Those boxes of makeup they’d send? I had a pearl white cream from them, I thought it was natural enough to fool the nuns at school – I was wrong!” she laughs.

 

And like many of us, Susan hates to part with old favorites: “I have a sickness – I cannot throw makeup away. I even teach other women how to clean out their makeup bags, but I have shadows from maybe even the early eighties.” And for her professional kit she has favorites, too: “I don’t trust makeup artists who have all new stuff – if you’ve been working, you have some tricks in there. It’s not all about the new.”
She’s also a fan of getting the right product at the right price: “The bottom line is: does it work? Some things work for sixty dollars, others you can get for three dollars. Do you look good at the end of it all? Yeah, I think I do!”

 

And how does this translate into having her own line and store? “I knew I always wanted to create a makeup line, but I didn’t know how I would do it. I moved up here a few years ago, and found this space. I designed colors based on the colors I mix on the back of my hand. What’s great about having a store is that I wanted to recreated the glamour of beauty shopping, but make it accessible as well. And you’ve got me – an accredited makeup expert – there as well, which is unusual – I mean, when you call Bobbi Brown Cosmetics up, she doesn’t answer the phone!”

 

Here’s more of Susan’s interview, in Wild Beauty’s first original video piece:

 

Susan Giordano – Other People’s Makeup Interview for Wild Beauty from Wild Beauty on Vimeo.

 

 

Be sure to visit Susan’s site, Giordano Beauty, or her store in Hastings, New York!

 

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Child Fashion Model Law Passed Unanimously in New York

By Meli | Published: June 13, 2013

Brooke_Shields_Richard_Avedon_American_Vogue_July_1978-Women_ManagementLots of girls dream of becoming fashion models – who wouldn’t want to be young, beautiful, glamorous and rich – all at the same time?

 

Well, behind the pictures, there’s often a different story. The clothes and jewelry are all borrowed, the hair and makeup take hours, and are done to someone else’s liking, not yours. The hours can be grueling, and there are so many bookings that pay nothing. That’s right, they pay nothing – but they’re highly visible, so they could make your career.

 

And you have to start young. There are a few girls (and they’re always called girls) who get scouted while in college, but the vast majority of models start working in their teens, with over half starting work between ages thirteen and sixteen. And while my sixteen-year-old self would have much rather been modelling than working the gyro stand at the mall, there are potential problems with this.

 

Fashion models weren’t always so young. When designers first started showing dress collections on live women, the women were usually shop assistants, or their own customers. A young socialite made an excellent model for a local couture house – it was something to talk about with their friends (who would coincidentally be hearing more about the brand). You could say they were early influencers. But in the era of mass media, beauty and youth eclipsed family connections as selling points, and the arms race to find the most beautiful women to sell clothes and makeup was on. Now talent scouts look for girls as young as twelve who might become the next Kate (who was scouted at fourteen).

 

Behind the scenes, we see the more successful ones: the girls who leave school at fourteen or fifteen and rise to the top. And we see their drama too: everyone loves them, but love in the fashion industry is highly conditional, and a fifteen-year-old can tell. There’s a lot of isolation, and a lot of not really nice people.

 

And no protection. Somehow, while child actors, dancers and musicians have been steadily gaining legal protection against danger, fraud, and lack of schooling, fashion models are not covered by those laws. So most of the teenagers who work as fashion models never finish high school, work long hours under sometimes dangerous conditions, and have no right to financial transparency from the adults who manage them.

 

But this is set to change. Thanks in large part to the efforts of The Model Alliance, the New York State Senate and Assembly voted unanimously to recognize fashion models under eighteen years old as child performers, a distinction that affords them legal rights to schooling, financial trusts for their future well being, and even a responsible adult on set when they work (which is asking a lot from some photo crews!).

 

Labor rights won’t solve every problem facing a young model, but the requirement for financial trusts and tutors will help a lot of girls coming into the industry, at least in New York. And maybe…it won’t just be Brooke who can go to Princeton when she’s done modelling for Vogue.

 

Model Alliance: Legal Rights for Child Models vs Other Child Performers.

 

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Beautiful People: Way Bandy

By Meli | Published: June 5, 2013
Way Bandy

Way Bandy, the first Superstar Makeup Artist

To call him a beauty pioneer is no overstatement: Way Bandy was the first superstar makeup artist. And for photographic makeup techniques, you could say he started it all…

 

 

When fashion photography first became a thing, models mostly did their own hair and makeup, or maybe they stopped by a salon to get a new “do” (or a wig). But as the industry developed, beauty pros started working in the studios, and making images became an increasingly team art form.

 

 

And that’s where Way Bandy came in. Professional makeup techniques were usually borrowed from the theater, but Way was trained as a portrait painter, so when he went through Christine Valmy’s makeup school in 1967, he was likely thinking in more subtle terms. At least that’s what he brought to the photoshoots he worked on: makeup somehow became simultaneously softer and more glamorous in his hands, and his faces always looked as though the glow was from within. Even when the model was as troubled as Gia Carangi:

gia_carangi_way_bandy

 

 

He worked with everybody: Avedon, Demarchelier, Elgort, and most famously, Scavullo. Just about every Cosmo cover from the seventies and early eighties features Way Bandy’s makeup, as do an astonishing number of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar covers. He was part of making some of the most iconic images of the era as well, working on faces ranging from Farrah Fawcett to Iman to Sophia Loren to a very young Madonna.

 

 

Way Bandy was also a teacher to every other makeup artist who came after him, including me. He wrote and illustrated two books on his techniques, Designing Your Face and Styling Your Face. Way broke makeup down to it’s simplest terms: a few colors and the planes of the face. He even eschewed naming brands of cosmetics, talking of cream and clear liquid colors. Which he may have mixed up himself, since no one was selling those mixtures at the time.

way_bandy_natural_face

The Natural Face, from Styling Your Face

 

 

Commercially available makeup was pretty ghastly in its formulation then, and Way pioneered the blending of shades with a little moisturizer or toner to get the color and texture just right. He also was an early promoter of a beige skin tone at a time when almost all foundation shades were much pinker than real skin. Somehow pink was considered “a glow of youth” color in makeup, but it was fast becoming completely inappropriate, especially since models of diverse ethnic backgrounds were showing up for work.

 

 

Coming up with beige and tawny colors enabled a more natural look in fashion photography, but that’s not all Way did: most of those those oh-so-glamorous Cosmo covers were done by him as well. He explained the glamorous look in his book, but for full effect, you’d really have to be there. Which is why we’re lucky that this video exists:

 

 

 

 

In life as well as work, Way was on the cutting edge: he had reinvented himself in New York, and would not divulge his real name or real birth date. He got into health food and pure living to the extent that he was well known for never getting sick. Which made it all the more shocking when he got very sick very quickly. He and his friends had known about AIDS, and although being gay was stigma enough then, he made sure that his cause of death would be publicly known, to reduce the mystery surrounding the then-new epidemic. There was even a bit of a kerfuffle in his native Birmingham, Alabama, when the man whose name was really Way Bandy kept hearing about the death of “Way Bandy” from AIDS. But as sad as his death was, Way’s fame allowed people to talk about AIDS more openly, and to push through the politics slowing its research.

 

 

As for me, I was heartbroken to hear about Way Bandy’s death: during the summer of 1986 so many of my fashion heroes died from this terrible new disease. But Way was special to me: through his books he was my first makeup teacher, and since we were both Birmingham renegades, he gave me hope that life doing makeup could be bigger than the counter at the local mall. Even though I never met him, I felt I knew him well.

 

 

But in a way, Way Bandy isn’t dead at all: his creative DNA is in every decent makeup tutorial out there. Most if not all professional makeup artists study his techniques, and it’s now a given that makeup artists should know to blend colors to match diverse skin tones. Anyone who puts on makeup well at all owes much of what they know to him, whether they’ve heard of him or not. The beauty and subtlety of Way’s makeup raised the bar for how beautiful a person could look, in a photo or in real life.

 

 

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Beauty Inventions: The Hair Dryer

By Meli | Published: May 29, 2013

vintage_hair_dryerWhat would life be like if we couldn’t dry our hair at will? In the 21st century, we take our clean, styled-if-we-want-it hair for granted – the speed of modern blow dryers means that we can fit gym time into our day and still look good for work (or cocktails).

 

 

It’s not as though people didn’t want hair dryers – creating a proper coifuure can be a days-long process, and since the dawn of electricity inventors have been working to combine wind and heat to speed things up. Before commercial hair dryers were sold, enterprising people were already using vacuum cleaners to dry their hair.

 

 

In 1890 a Frenchman named Alexander Godefroy invented a hair dryer for use in his salon. This dryer was a sit-down dryer with a large metal hood – similar to the ones we see in hair salons today.

 

 

hand_dryer_patentBut in 1911, Armenian-American inventor Gabriel Kazanjian received the first patent for a hand-held hair dryer. And he wasn’t the only one working on hair-drying technology – from the 1920′s on, there was a rush of inventors working on improving the hair dryer. Lots of these were working with the proven salon power dryer -  patents were awarded to designs for adding a magazine stand/ashtray combo, and for putting speakers into the dryer so clients could listen to music while they waited for their hair to dry.

 

 

But the promised convenience of having a portable hand-held dryer was too great, and inventors clamored to improve the workings. At first, portable hair dryers were as much a nuisance as anything else – their small size meant they couldn’t be nearly as powerful as a salon hair dryer, and the user could easily be electrocuted. They were also heavy, weighing in at around two pounds. So maybe it was better to go to the salon for a while, right? Unless you were ready for this:

 

hair_dryer_concert

 

Over time, plastic housings were developed, motors were made lighter and more powerful, and safety circuit interrupters were invented and incorporated. (That annoying cut-off switch on your modern blow dryer? It keeps electrocutions from hair dryers to about four a year, down from the hundreds before safety switches were invented and required.)

 

 

By the 1970′s, hairdryers were safe and powerful enough to be successfully mass marketed, and hairstylists were also using them, inventing new hairstyles to take advantage of the “new” technology. Combining the casual freedom of the 60′s with the hedonistic 70′s into a signature hairstyle was easy with the blow dryer, and women got swept away by the tousled “wings” of the era.

 

 

And who wore 1970′s hair better than Charlie’s Angels? As a bonus, I just saw this last night (I swear it’s a coincidence!) Yes, it’s bad TV at its finest, but the Angel’s sexploitation adventures in a nascent women’s football league are right on cue. And the Angels aren’t just great detectives – they also overrule the natural laws of  hair care, by having freshly blown-dry hair both during and after football practice. Especially Kelly at about 1:20:

 

 

 

 

We can’t defy the laws of hair nature like Charlie’s Angels (and their team of stylists) can, but we take gym culture for granted now, and if we have a hairstyle that allows it, we can pretty much go work up a sweat whenever we’re up to it. For most of us, we can fit hairstyling around the rest of our life, not the other way around, as was expected from our grandmothers. Hair drying technology has given us a wider range of choices in how we look and how we live. Now…if I can just figure out how to get my hair to look like Kelly’s….

 

Sources:

US Patent no. 994259 at Google Patents.

Hair Dryer at Wikipedia.

 

 

 

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Creating Characters for Epic The Movie: Why Perfection is Overrated (Even in Hollywood!)

By Meli | Published: May 22, 2013
Mary Katherine from Epic

Mary Katherine from Epic

One of the more fun and surprising things about blogging is getting invited to swag-erific events. Not very many – Wild Beauty isn’t up there in the numbers, nor is it particularly “PR Friendly” (which is another term for “will write for lip gloss”). And I get anxious when I’m invited – will there be an angle I want to write about? Or am I just going to drink the prosecco and run?

 

So when Independent Fashion Bloggers invited me to a behind-the-scenes costume event for Epic The Movie, I suspected I’d be drinking and dashing. Still, curiosity got the best of me – the art director would be there giving a presentation on the costume design process, and as an indie film veteran (and process nerd) I had to to go, right?

 

The film’s art director, Michael Knapp, didn’t disappoint: the process of designing animated costumes from zero to fabulous is as involved as you might think, and more so. Changes in perspective, magnification, plant and insect fibers, Mandelbrot fractals, Fibonacci sequences – the studio may be in Connecticut, but the process is Big Hollywood Creative.

 

After the presentation, I talked with Knapp about the characters and their development – the studio had three and a half years to grow these characters from basic ideas to full blown imaginary people, so there was a lot of bouncing around between writers, the director, and the art department. Which is when he mentioned one thing: that they’re always looking to create imperfections in their characters. They’re always looking for the quirks.

 

In some ways, this is no surprise – after all, animators are starting with the simple geometric shapes and making them into more complex entities. And if you follow the Mandelbrot link above, the professor not only mentions that nature has roughness, but that animators use his equations to make their worlds more lifelike. But it’s interesting to hear someone from the movie side of entertainment tell you “it’s not about airbrushed perfection”. Because that’s what we assume is the Hollywood machine’s ideal, right? But it’s not. Not even for movie stars. And here’s why:

 

Ever hear of the Uncanny Valley? It’s a term coined by Masahiro Mori, a Japanese robotics professor. We humans like our robots to resemble us up to a certain point – but when they get too lifelike, we freak out. Roboticists use this phenomenon to design robots that we will think are cute, and Hollywood storytellers use it as well: to come up with either cute WALL-E’s or totally frightening Terminators.

 

This uncanny valley phenomenon can work both ways – when we flesh-and-blood lifeforms get too smooth and airbrushed, things get creepy. Which is probably why celebrity faces with too many peels and surgery procedures weird us out – too much smoothness is strange, especially when we’re biologically conditioned to expect a certain amount of visual roughness, at least from our elders.

 

Admittedly,we flesh and blood humans have more quirks than we can comfortably handle, and unlike animated characters we’re not given only those quirks that will make people love us more. But before we rush into smoothing all of our rough edges with available technology, maybe we should look more closely into how they define us as human. Maybe some of those rough edges are what makes us special.

 

Epic The Movie opens in theaters nationwide on May 24, 2013.

 

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A Week Without Mirrors, Plus a Giveaway of Kjerstin Gruys’ New Book

By Meli | Published: May 9, 2013

In support of Kjerstin Gruys’ new memoir detailing her year without mirrors, a call was put out for beauty bloggers to take a day off from looking at our reflections. Inspired by both Kjerstin’s book Autumn Whitefield-Madrano’s month long mirror fasts, I decided to take a week without mirrors. And here’s what I found:

 

1. I missed looking at myself in the mirror. It’s not that the voices in my head are always rah-rah-rah; they run the full range from “Wine is a bad friend” to “Hello gorgeous” to “That hair has been growing for that long? Ugh!” But I like that monkey in the mirror – it’s me, and after a dozen years of yoga, I like me. (And for more on those voices – Autumn did a great post and selfie diary of internal voices for her own challenge this year.)

 

2. I did notice a distinct lessening of self bodysnarking. I’m not the most athletic, get-up-and-go-to-the-gym active person ever (I’m not even in the running), so some of my workout activity is pure “will it lift my butt and get rid of that lump there?”. I know it’s ridiculous, but after this kind of workout, I’ll look in the mirror, as if the results will be there right afterwards. Not being able to do that encouraged (maybe forced) me to think about how I felt rather than how I looked. And even if I hate barre exercises while I’m doing them, I had to admit that I felt pretty good afterwards.

 

3. Public appearance is performance. And it’s weird to go out without an internal frame of reference, as in how I look today. It doesn’t really seem to matter to anyone else – one of my neighborhood store guys even told me I was looking especially pretty one day. But while planning a visit to see a dance performance, it occurred to me that it’s really weird to head out “on stage” without rehearsing first. Maybe thinking of it that way instead of obsessing over minute flaws is a more accurate – and enjoyable – way to think of the mirror?

 

4. Trying a new outfit resulted in second-guessing, not third or fourth-guessing. I’m kind of a “uniform” person, so I didn’t get into trying tons of new clothes without the mirror’s assistance. I did want to dress nicely to go out one evening, and instead of going back and forth about whether this really looked good or not, asked my husband and just went with it. No one was harmed, no one stared at my craziness or ill-fittedness, so I assume it went well. The old adage that other people are not paying nearly as much attention to my flaws as I am probably holds true here, especially since I was going to BAM and not the Met Gala.

 

5. Increased technology really does enable elaboration. Kjerstin points out in her book that the rise of the pimple cream industry coincided with the widespread appearance of bathroom mirrors. For me this isn’t just a mirror thing; in the past year, through building construction and hurricane Sandy, I’ve at times involuntarily gone without electricity, running water, and most recently, cooking gas (plus an extra half day of no electricity during the fast). All of these modern conveniences make our lives simpler – I for one am very glad to not fetch water from the Hudson River every morning – but having our cooking fuel delivered into our homes also means that peas porridge and hard biscuits won’t do it – my husband and I both expect ourselves to be able to cook pretty well. Without the help of mirrors, my beauty routine was simplified – it’s not really feasible to try out a new eyeshadow palette without them. But it was more “how do I get what I need done without them?” more than “I don’t need to do any of this. I do expect a higher level of grooming than I would without them. This phenomenon has been examined by feminists – usually as a conspiracy to get women to be minutiae-obsessed consumers rather than full humans. But like the bloating of paperwork that coincides with the rise of ever more powerful word processing software, maybe some of this is less conspiracy and more unintended consequence of technology?

 

6. I enjoyed reading about Kjerstin’s mirror fast more than I enjoyed my own. Well, how could I not? She went for a year, while planning her wedding as well (and working on her Ph.D thesis – yeah). Navigating the Bridezilla minefield of wedding planning is hard enough, with its constant reminders that it’s “your special day” and its often ridiculous suggestions to make that day the Most Ultimate Princess Day Ever. Her adventures in trying new looks – hair, makeup and clothing – without really knowing what she looks like (and her fiance’s reactions when the experiments go awry) are really funny. Learning to go beyond what the mirror “demands”, and to trust her family and friends to love her and assist her through the chaos, Kjerstin manages to organize an amazing and fun wedding, and when the photos come back? Well, I’m not going to spoil the ending for you….

 

But I will give away a copy of her new book, Mirror, Mirror Off the Wall: How I Learned to Love My Body by Not Looking at It for a Year, next Saturday morning, May 18th. You have three ways to win:

1. You can follow Wild Beauty on Facebook.

2. You can have a friend follow Wild Beauty on Facebook & tell who sent them – both you and they will get a chance to win. And you can get more chances if you get more than one friend to follow.

3. You can leave a comment below: what do you think of this mirror fasting idea? Would you try it? For how long?

Enter by midnight Friday night (the 17th of May). A winner will be chosen by a random generator.

 

Good luck! I know you will enjoy reading the book as much as I did!

 

Resources on mirror fasting:

Mirror, Mirror Off the Wall: How I Learned to Love My Body by Not Looking at It for a Year by Kjerstin Gruys.

A Year Without Mirrors – in real time (blog).

A Month Without Mirrors at The Beheld

Mirrors: A Short History at Wild Beauty.

 

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A Week Without Mirrors: My Space vs Their Space

By Meli | Published: May 5, 2013
Making Her Toilet by Chase William Merritt, 1889

Making Her Toilet, by Chase William Merritt, 1889

Less than three days into my week without mirrors (inspired by Kjerstin Gruys’ Year Without Mirrors, I noticed that I was feeling really annoyed… I was enjoying reading about Kjerstin’s journey without mirrors, but I was not enjoying my own.

 

It wasn’t just the inconvenience of putting my contacts in with a tiny speck of reflection, nor was it not having a visual frame of reference before I go out into the world.

 

I had the feeling that I was working on a job for a celebrity – one with a really stiff rider that states that no one is allowed to look her in the eyes. And that diva was me.

 

Am I a diva? Am I so into looking at myself in the mirror that its absence is such a deprivation? I thought about that a bit, and the truth is more complicated than that.

 

Many who’ve done mirror fasts recount the voices they hear criticizing what they see. Whether it’s the pimple, the weight, the bed head – the mirror is, first and foremost, a place for criticism.

 

I don’t fully have that experience. Sure, I do see what could be fixed (and what can’t). But mirrors for me have always been a quiet place in a noisy world. Growing up as the fourth of five noisy children, it’s not surprising that I would value a space of my own, one where I can hear myself think. And, possibly, see myself think as well.

 

As a teenager who was unsure of her place in the world, I found myself, among other things, playing with makeup. What I saw in the mirror, and what I wanted to do about it, were as related to craftiness as they were to insecurity, and as a creative and gifted craftsperson with good bone structure, I was able to get good results. Good enough to lead me into my work as a a makeup artist.

 

But there’s another factor at play here…In the mirror at least, my younger self was mostly looking at what CAN change, and easily – the paint and powder parts of the equation. I was lucky enough to have good skin, and even if my diet wasn’t healthy, I was thin enough to have never worried about being fat. Having the process in front of the mirror come down to what can be done – adjusting a scarf, making an eyeliner line exactly how I want it – leads to results – the small sense of satisfaction from improving something is there.

 

That’s not to say I don’t have other voices speaking….I’m well into my forties, so there are there are new lumps and bumps which are not responding to reasonable diet and exercise. And gravity is doing its thing in general. Pausing to check in with how I feel, rather than how I look, is a good thing – not automatically looking for results after a workout is even better.

 

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t look at myself in the mirror much at work*. When I’m spending all day working at a specific aesthetic (Boticelli pastel? 70′s disco glam?) it’s distracting to see my own sweaty working self, whose early morning lash-curl-and-mascara is not being touched up every 20 minutes. But at the end of the day, when the kit’s packed up, I have a little ritual of putting my lipstick on before I leave. It’s a way of setting a boundary between work beauty and personal beauty, between them and me – between the noisy, sometimes chaotic work space and my personal space.

 

At home, I do get to be the diva – if the makeup’s coming out, it’s me who’s going to be the beneficiary of the effort. And being married to a man who loves me and appreciates my looks doesn’t hurt. I’d worry that it’s a little Evil Queen, except that I don’t worry about the beauty of the models at work – they have their thing, and I have mine.

 

Am I still doing the week? Yes, though I have been tempted to trash it, especially after going to the pool – somehow not drying my hair and tending to my own self (even if it’s just q-tipping the water out of my ears) felt like being in one of those teen movies where the girl has her lunch in the bathroom – I just felt excluded. I should mention that my gym is really mellow – there’s usually at least one person napping by the pool, and I’ve never seen anyone participate in vocal body shaming – of themselves or others.

 

So I’m still at it – and there are a few other interesting thing I will note. (I’m just getting to the clothing part.) And it’s only two days from now, so I can manage that.

 

(*An aside on the not looking at mirrors at work thing – Alfred Hitchcock famously admitted that after looking at Cary Grant on the set all day, it was a severe disappointment to go home and see himself in the mirror. )

Mirror, Mirror Off the Wall: How I Learned to Love My Body by Not Looking at It for a Year by Kjerstin Gruys.

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A Week Without Mirrors

By Meli | Published: April 30, 2013
Venus at her Mirror by Rubens, 1612-1615

Venus at her Mirror by Rubens, 1612-1615

What would a day be like without looking at ourselves in a mirror? The idea of seeing our own reflections – first thing in the morning, or anytime we want to check something out – is so easy and automatic that we don’t even think of it. Mirrors surround us – in our bathrooms, our bedrooms, and even on the street if we live in a city. The ubiquity of mirrors in our lives mean that we are constantly checking ourselves out – something that could be good or bad, depending on who you ask.

 

Yet plentiful mirrors are an artifact of modern life – they used to be so expensive and rare that only the wealthiest people had access to clear ones – and even they didn’t have very many (even 17th century Venus, left, with her earthly and heavenly “help”, has a fairly small mirror). So what does that mean for us moderns? Much has been said about the constant barrage of perfect faces and bodies in mass advertising, but what of our ability to compare ourselves? If we took a break from our own reflections, would that change the ongoing monologues inside our heads? Or maybe just give us a chance to hear the voices for what they are?

 

These questions are the basis of a year-long personal experiment done by Kjerstin Gruys. As a bride-to-be, Kjerstin was going through the craziness of wedding dress shopping, and having struggled with eating disorders in the past, found the inner Bridezilla monologue especially crazy-inducing. So she hatched a plan – maybe taking a year away from the mirror would help? It was an ambitious project, and undertaking it while planning a wedding (and working on her PhD thesis) provided amusing anecdotes for her blog readers, and has now yielded a memoir, Mirror, Mirror Off the Wall: How I Learned to Love My Body by Not Looking at It for a Year.

 

Kjerstin has invited other beauty bloggers to spend a Day Without Mirrors, on May 2nd, in concert with her book release. I’ve been fascinated by the concept of mirror fasting since I read about it on The Beheld, though Autumn’s month-long fast is a little long for me. I’ve written about the history of mirrors in the past, but “doing without” is not generally my thing. So I’ve decided to go a week without mirrors, and see what happens.

 

Is it 100% no mirrors? I’ve covered the bathroom mirrors with paper, but there’s a flap to expose a 2×4″ area so I can get my contacts in and do makeup/grooming. This isn’t a week without grooming (or seeing clearly) – it’s more a way of removing the reflexive “checking myself out” that happens every time I’m in the bathroom. As for the outside world, I’ll just have to consciously avoid looking at my own reflection, which could be weird. If I’m working a studio job (so far everything’s on location), I’ll really be avoiding myself – though I have a habit of not really looking at myself in the mirror at work anyway, since I’m concentrating on making the models look the way they need to. It’ll be weirder at the gym, where the mirrors are huge and yes, I do spend my fair share of time looking into them. We shall see.

 

What inner voices about my appearance have been threading through my brain that I’m not aware of? Does my face still exist if I don’t see it every day? What is my dependence on this modern technology? And what will I experience if I’m not using it? These are questions I can think of now, though more will come up as I embark on this mini-journey (and read Kjerstin’s book while doing so.)

 

I’ll be sharing periodically during the week, and if you’re joining in the Day Without Mirrors, please feel free to share your experiences in the comments.

 

Resources on mirror fasting:

Mirror, Mirror Off the Wall: How I Learned to Love My Body by Not Looking at It for a Year by Kjerstin Gruys.

A Year Without Mirrors – in real time (blog).

A Month Without Mirrors at The Beheld

Mirrors: A Short History at Wild Beauty.

 

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Beauty Bytes: April 26, 2013

By Meli | Published: April 26, 2013

miss_korea_contestant_sideBeauty pageant contestants have long been accused of all looking alike. After all, their competition involves reaching towards an “ideal” standard of beauty. But the convergence of beauty ideals plus the ready access to cosmetic surgery may have taken the phenomenon to a new place: contestants in the Miss Korea pageant have been accused of all looking exactly alike. And no, it’s not just Westerners saying it either: in a country where one in five people go under the knife, the facial ideal of wide, rounded eyes and pointed chin is easier to attain than ever (as the photos of the contestants running alongside today’s roundup attest.) Still, some of the shock may still be cultural – both Jezebel and Gawker include galleries of Western celebrities, who, thanks to ideals, surgery, and styling, also look a lot alike. Jezebel. Gawker.

 

 

Speaking of beauty ideals, what’s this about chins? I need to be worried about my chin? Maybe if you’re in a Korean beauty pageant you do (though that chin is more of a jaw reshaping). But anthropologists at Dartmouth compared 180 different fossil chins from different regions and came to the conclusion that there isn’t one global ideal for chins (yet). PLOS One. Smithsonian.

 

 

Forget judges at beauty contests – why not ask the Internet if we’re beautiful? Teens are participating in Instagram “beauty contests”, asking, “am I hot or not?” Of course, asking total strangers to rate one’s looks isn’t the healthiest form of reassurance, and given that teen girls’ Internet popularity is mostly judged by the skimpiness of their tank tops, and that these “pageants” are usually done without their parents’ knowledge, the implications are disturbing.  ABC News.

 

 

Another way to crowdsource a beauty pageant: Hawaiian Tropic has discontinued their “Miss Hawaiian Tropic” swimsuit pageant in favor of a neck-up contest, looking for a woman who embodies “beauty, confidence, style, enjoying the sun and keeping skin healthy.” The contest, which begins May 6, will be held on Facebook, with the winner chosen by fans of the brand. Which could go really well, or could be taken over à la People Magazine‘s 1998 Most Beautiful, when Howard Stern fans voted Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf most beautiful by 17 times more votes than Leonardo DiCaprio. The New York Times.

 

 

People Magazine has rectified the Most Beautiful situation, keeping their choices well within media and publicist control. To the point that most of us don’t even register it, except that I ran across Kjerstin Gruys’ post describing how Gwyneth Paltrow was her thinspo during her eating disordered teen years. Even those of us who haven’t suffered from eating disorders know what it’s like to wish we had someone else’s life as teenagers, though not many celebrities’ entire lifestyles are laid out for us to “emulate” as Gwyneth’s. But can you break up a friendship with someone you don’t even know? Yes, you can. Read the letter here: Mirror, Mirror, Off The Wall.

 

 

Pretty is as pretty does. Or not: After graduated from Parsons School of Design, Rina Bovrisse worked her way up the luxury retail ladder, first at Chanel and then at Prada, where she was moved to Japan and appointed  senior retail operations manager. But if overseeing 500 Prada employees wasn’t working hard enough, senior management were also getting on her about her own looks, telling her, “the CEO is ashamed of your ugliness and will not introduce you to any visitors from Milan.” After her complaints to management resulted in the demotion and transfer of about a dozen employees – many of them top salespeople – for being too fat or old, Bovrisse sued in Japanese court. The court ruled against her, stating that such discrimination was “acceptable for a luxury fashion label.”  Now, Prada is countersuing Bovrisse for “damaging the Prada brand”. NY Daily News.

 

I’m not the biggest fan of Dove’s latest installment of the “Real Beauty” campaign. But here’s an awesome list I came across this week of “Six People Changing the Face of Beauty Better than Dove”, from Narcissista. Narcissista.me.

 

 

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Peggy Olson at Work? Cosmetics ads from 1968

By Meli | Published: April 24, 2013
"This is No Amateur Blonde" - Helene Curtis

“This is No Amateur Blonde” – Helene Curtis

In Mad Men, we’ve recently seen Peggy Olson going after the Heinz Ketchup business. Women in advertising were often in charge of accounts catering to women – dishwashing liquid, hosiery, and cosmetics.

 

Looking through the advertising in issues of Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and Mademoiselle from 1968, it’s fun to imagine who these magazines imagined their readers to be. Vogue, with its mix of jewelry, fashion, and travel ads obviously caters to the wealthy society set (who are also featured in its editorial spreads). Mademoiselle is fully a college magazine, with its Breck Girls and slumber party facials. And Cosmopolitan, with as many liquor ads as those for cosmetics and hosiery, lives up to its party reputation.

 

1968 was fully into the swinging sixties (even Vogue and Mademoiselle ran articles about drug use and counterculture), and the Pop Art sensibility in some of these ads contrasts with the the innocence in others. Two of these ads feature the same product – one with wild 60′s Pop zing, and another with collegiate slumber-party innocence. But they’re all pretty fun – some of the looks could pass muster with the current beauty police, even if the copy wouldn’t.

 

Here’s a gallery of several cosmetics ads from 1968:

 

 

 

 

So what’s your 1968 makeup personality? If I were time-travelled back to 1968, I think I’d like to be a Cosmo girl, Pop Art, lashes and all.

 

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