Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

Hmmm, I think it's pretty good for evening out skin tone generally.
  

    
You must not have my nose.
  

    
Jess:

A place to rock out is your toes -- I get wild with my toe nail
polish, especially in the winter when I can "test drive" some pretty
rock and roll colors. I know you're a laywer and that you, by the
nature of how conservative most law firms can be, cannot be extravagant
in your makeup or dress, but there are many ways to be subversive and
still maintain decorum. I have a friend who is a very well-paid lawyer,
pin-striped suits and tie-bow blouses and the whole nine yards. She
wears garter belts and stockings and increidbly filmy undergarments
which makes her feel like a girly-girl/woman instead of a
female-to-male-in-attitude transsexual.

Ways to rock out? Hummmmm.

I know you love deeply colored lipstick and have the curly red hair
and the flair to carry it. As long as what you do is not uncomfortalbe
to  YOU, then anything you'd like to do, you cancarry off. It's all
attitude. If you FEEL like your'e alittle girl palying with her
mother's makeup kit, then that's how your'e gonig to act. But if you
feel confident and quite chic, styolish and  put together in red lips
and a graet eye, then do it. Nobody is gonna think your'e the Whore of
Babylon unles that's the attitude you project.

Now: your second point: Drug store makeup as opposed to paying for the
packaging and the designer name in department /specialty store
cosmetic counters. I get asked this all the time. I once sat next to
Christy Turlington at a party and we talked for an hour about
Maybelline which she represented for such a long time. It is owned by
L'Oreal which also owns Lancome. And Maybellin gets the same benefit
from the L'Oreal labs as does Lancome. Or as Nars is getting from the
Shiseido lab (and did you know that Shiseido's main line is a drug
store line in Japan?).

Point is: if the company is big and reputable like L'Oreal, Revlon,
Cover Girl, Maybelline and Almay, then there are going to be
inexpenisve high-fashion colors that will last one season that could be
thrown away with no guilt. There is quite a difference between  buyign
a trendy lipstick at Chanel ($22.50) and the same exact color at
L'Oreal ($5.99). Drug store lines may not have the same cutting edge
technologies, although Lipfinity and Outlast certainly are more avant
garde than Dior Addict, but if your'e on a budget or just want to
experiment with a color, the cash outlay is easier to handle than
buying a $23 lipstick that you'll never use.

Splurging? Definitely on state-of-the-art products like foudnation
although as we all know: Sonia Kashak's Target-lined foundations are
terrific at $9.99 and quite a lot of bang for the buck.

As for the 3-in-1 swivel stick foudnation: a good concealer used OVER
that foundation will even out all the discoloration spots. 

I like that makeup a lot but if you've got oily skin, it sort of
disappears right away.
  

    
It's so easy to make your nose look like putty if you put enough makeup on
it.  Is there a way around that?
  

    

Cynthia you have a whole section on artificial tanning products, the forms
they come in and how to apply them.  Whenever I think about these things,
I picture the streaky orange messes we made of ourselves back in junior
high school.  And I am trying desperately to remember the names of the
most popular ones...seems like there was one with a Q in it...?

Anyway, have these things improved in the last thirty years, or is the
secret in how you apply it?
  

    

(I once tanned my palms a nice rich brown. It took over a week of very
vigorous semi-obsessive-compulsive handwashings to get them back to
normal.)
  

    
Vard: you can cure the orange palm syndrome by applying self-tanner
with surgical gloves on (or even yellow kitchen gloes) and saving the
backs of your  hands for last -- which means putting tanner on the back
of one hand and rubbing it on the back of the other. It's clumsy but
it works.

Anyhow: Man Tan and QT were very very orange. These new tanners
aren't. It's just finding the one that works with your skin tone that
can be so damned expensive. And there is no easy way around it. You
gotta buy these things and experiment.

My favorite this last year was a transparant spray from Guerlain
called Terracotta. It went on evenly, didn't smell bad and brought up a
really deep, golden Mexican-type tan. I even used it on my face
although that's not advisible because some of the body products will
occlude pores and they're not dermatalogically suited for facial use.
Or: the company has put one out for the face and it'll cost you that
little extra bit for the special stuff. Hard to tell which is the
truth.

Artifical tanners last 3-4 days; you can always reapply. To get it to
work well, you should use a body scrub or polish and exfoliate,
especially around your ankles, knees (bendable joints where the skin is
thinner and where you have creases). 

The stuff should go on from the bottom up, ie: so you won't be folding
your body and smearing the tanner if you start from the top down.

Set up a place where you can dry (about 15 minutes to a half hour
depending upon the product) like towels on your bed) and be sure to
slather on enough of it and get it on evenly. Like apply it and spread
it up and down and then cross ways. Maybe you can do this with your SO
or a friend to get the hard-to-reach spot in the middle of the back.

Don't be stingy. And if it comes out too light, you can always
reapply. When it starts to fade (and it will exfoliate or slough off
with your skin cells), you can reapply without having  to exfoliate
again.

I kept the Terracotta stuff on my legs all summer with sandals because
I get hardly any sun any more. I think I went through two bottles.

What the tanner is is a derivative of beet sugar which combines with
your skin sort of like nicotine stain. Seriously, while it isn't
officially a vegetable dye, it is. And from what dermatologists tell
me, totally harmless. Compared to getting enough sun to turn you those
colors, it's worth the price. 

Caution, though: these products are cosmetic only. And provide
absoutely NO sun protection whatsoever. They are not bringing up any
melanin (the skin's protective coloration) in the skin at all but are
staying on top of it. You need to use sunblock or sunscreen if you use
them and go out in the sun. 
  

    
Martha: as for makeup that looks like putty on your nose. The nose is
like everything else on your face: you just want to even out skin tone.
And if you have a nose that tends to get red in cold weather, there's
not much you can do about it. 

Skins that tend to redness or rosecea should be tended to by
dermatologists or skin care specialists who can recommend products that
wil cut the redness or equal out skin tone. there are a few conealer
packages that come with green, blue or lavender creams to apply to
different discoloration areas. Excessive red, I believe gets a little
green on it (Chanel used to make a terrific greenish concealer which
you would wear under your makeup); Lancome has a concealer compact as
does Chanel and Laura Mercier. You just have to experiment and have
someone show you how to use the stuff correctly.

Which reemphasizes what I believe: enlist the help of these so-called
"experts," by telling them exactly what you need, what your skill
levels are and how much time you have to accomplish these things. It's
one thing to buy the stuff, but you have to know how to use it
effectively, else it's money and time wasted. 
  

    

Drugstore vs. department store question: last year I broke down and bought
some of that Guerlain "Les Meteorites" powder with all the different
pastel-ly colors that blend into a nice neutral shade. I see that
Physicians Formula sells something at Walgreens that looks just about
exactly the same (contents-wise; of course the packaging doesn't hold a
candle to the Guerlain). The Physicians Formula is about 10% as expensive
as the Guerlain. What do you think?

P.S. I *love* the Guerlain stuff!
  

    
I also love Guerlain, Vard. It think it's a very high quailty product
with a lot of bang for the buck. The texture on the Meteorites is much
easier to use than the Physician's Formula. Also: I think that they
would stay easy to apply longer.

What happens with some drug store products is that they hae more
additives in them abecause they have to stay o nthe shelves longer.
With companies like Guerlain, Chanel, Lancome and Lauder, the companies
refresh their old stock unless they are smaller companies which sell
their product to the retailer directly. 

Point is: when you get a product like Meteorites, you get the benefit
of their high tech delivery systems which can make soeting as powdery
seeming as those little pebbles very creamy to the touch. They will
stay that way a lot longer than the cheaper product and will give you
the sheer, radiant effect you want. I think the Meteorites are a better
buy.
  

    
I think tanning products are a weird idea. I can't get my mind around them.
To me, they're like the strange foundation colors that Cynthia described
above, and I don't quite understand why one would want to alter the color of
one's skin to that extent. Is it to give the world the impression that one
is a lady of leisure, with lots of time to lie on the beach? I honestly
don't get it.
  

    

Sometimes it's just to make legs look less fat and pasty.

signed, the Voice of Experience
  

    
Laura:

personally, I think that a tan is quite attractive but that sun damage
is too dangerous to contemplate. 

In the summer time, bare legs in sandals are really pretty with some
kind of color on them and since the dreaded Martha
Stewart-hose-with-sandals look is so outre, putting a little Leg Makeup
for the Millennium on your legs is kinda nice. 

Sun tans started out in the 30s (thank you, Coco Chanel) as a sign
that you had the m oney and the time to take a vacation in a tropical
clime whilst everyone else was slogging through the muck and slush of a
Paris winter. I think Coco inadvertently caused more skin cancer than
she'd ever dreamed.

So, yes, sun tans were the sign of the leisured class. Now that you
can fake it, you can have that healthy, outdoors look any time you
want. 

But if I remember rightly, Laura, your skin is very very pale and
there is a fabulous beauty to that, so why would you of all people want
to be tan anyhow when it really isn't your look?
  

    

Since my legs haven't seen the sun in 20 years, they're deathly white. My
arms and face get a little bit of exposure, through sunscreen of course,
just the unavoidable from the car to the door etc., but it's enough to turn
that part of a slightly more golden color. Certainly not tan. But the
contrast between that part of me and the corpse-white legs is too weirs, so
in summer, when tiny parts of my ankles or calves are exposed to the world,
I like to wear some color on them. But a bizarre thing happens: the tan-in-
a-bottle stuff seems to stick to my freckles more than the skin around them.
So rather than a nice smooth golden leg, I get a bunch of drak dark brown
melanomish splotches against an ecru background. Lovely. I would never dream
of putting it on my arms or face or anything. Just legs, and that's weird
enough. Besides, it's too outrageously expensive.
  

    

Cynthia also says that there are spas that will apply it for you, so
that's something to consider, although I don't know how many of that sort
of spa might be found in your neck of Louisiana.

While we are contemplating that particular market niche, let's move on the
section on makeup.  I know that we've covered a lot of that already, but
there's a great anecdote in the book that I'm hoping Cynthia will relate
to us about her mother and red lipstick.
  

    
My mother was a very proper woman. She never left the house without
her white kid gloves, stockings and a big old Queen Elizabeth purse.
(This was the 50s, of course). There was this girl whose name was L.
(forgive me, she may still be living somewhere) who had a terrible
reputation and who wore slutty red lipstick and tight skirts. My mother
kept telling me that I would end up just like L. with a bad rep if I
wore that "whorish" color. It was probably Cherries in the Snow or Love
That Red or something from Revlon.

Well, I wore something that was even more subversive: Milkmaid
lipstick from Tussy, I belive. It came in a white enamel case with pink
flowers on it and it was dead pinkish white. I traded my Tangee
natural for that and for what my mother insisted on buying me: Lauder's
Persian Melon, a coral pink and one of the most lady-like colors
extant. I think I probably wore it until I went to college, at which
point, I started wearing Chanel reds. 

I think that our color sense comes from either positive or negative
conditioning from our mothers and our peers. How many y0ung girls will
troll the cosmetic aisles at Walgreen and all buy the same noxious
shade of lipstick. It's a badge of belonging to wear some kind of mauve
or brown tone with the same eyeshadow. Peer pressure is a uniting
force. 

So, if your mother was qutie strict about color and now as an adult
you rock out with red lips and heavily-made up eyes or you've gone Goth
or plucked your eyebrows down like Jean Harlow or whatever, it could
be a reaction to the strictures put on you by your mom. Or: you
listened to her and are sort of a mom-clone about makeup. 

My love of red lipstick has everything to do with how negative my mom
felt about it. It's my statement that: I am NOT my mother. 
  

    

Great story! I came of age in the late 60s and early 70s when everybody was
either a hippie or a revolutionary or a radical feminist or off serving in
the Peace Corps in Bangladesh, and any kind of lipstick was looked down upon
as frivilous, bourgeois, or a sign of slavery. To make matters worse, my
poor mother was almost 40 when I was born, so she was almost two generations
removed from me. What few beauty clues she might have tried to pass on were
so hopelessly dated, they didn't stand a chance against the politics of the
day. So somehow, I just never learned anything.

And I managed to get away with my ignorance for several decades by living in
Berkeley.

But I remember my grandmother telling me that when her husband was alive
(her husband was my grandfather--my grandmother married my grandfather! What
a southern thing to do!) he wouldn't allow her to wear makeup. He said it
was trashy and only cheap women wore it. He died suddenly in his late
forties (in 1949), and my grandmother, who loved him dearly and grieved
deeply, nevertheless wore bright red lipstick to his funeral. To her, it was
a symbol of liberation.

Anyway, I think it's interesting, how loaded the whole subject of cosmetics
is, how many different meanings makeup can take on for different people in
different times and different places. It can be liberating or oppressive;
creative or enslaving; sophisticated or silly. Sometimes I wonder if I
shouldn't spend a decade or so in pshychoanalysis before I even start trying
to learn how to apply lipliner.
  

    
I find it amazing that I can remember the brand and name of every lipstick I
have worn regularly in my life, and I can even remember several of my
mother's.  Reading Cynthia's story made me realize that I'm not alone in
that.
  

    
Persian Melon! What a memory flash.
  

    

Tangee Natural!
  

    
Leroy, when I started researching the book (Oh, yes, girls and boys, I
did a LOT of research), I got half way through a couple of very
polemic books and decided that poltiics and feminist rants had no place
in a practical, how-to, workbook format, so I stayed as far away from
it as I could. I am not going to get into that rant. It is fraught with
traps. 

But anyone who has read my posts for the past 7-8 years or so,
understands who I am, where I'm coming from and how I feel about
cosmetics -- I personally think they're a whole lot of fun, not serious
and certainly not laden with the heavy baggage of enslavement,
servitude, agism, lookism or anything else that seems to toxic if you
nitpick enough.

Yes, if you were a good Movement woman (and who could forget the
rallying cry of the brave young draft card burner: "chicks up front")
wearing lipstick with your work shirts, Frye boots and elephant bells
was verboten, but how do you explain patchouli oil or the Body Shop's
China Rain? Examine the other side of the 60s coin and you had  Edie
Sedgewick and Twiggy with their skinny little legs and their white lips
and their painted on-under lashes and their two pairs of fakes and
their spikey frosted hair.

The 70s, meanwhile, when the Vietnam War was raging, was one of the
most decadent makeup decades going: disco shadow, eyebrows carved down
to fly-away commas and skinny tadpole shapes; more fake eyelashes,
uppers AND lowers; bodysuits and hiphuggers; platform shoes (how many
of us fell off our Cherokees?) and ironed hair down to the the boobs. 

The Feminine Mystique came out in 1973, I believe -- but that didn't
stop the disco ball, did it?

oops, Vard slipped. Yup, honey. Tangee Natural. Orange in the tube,
slick on the lips. 
  

    

I missed all the fun, but I'm going to makeup for it.
  

    
I still remember the very first lipstick I ever wore regularly:  Clinique
Mauve Crystal. I think they still make it. It was a very light frosty pink,
barely noticable, and it was the first one I didn't think made me look like
a clown.
  

    
So Laura, how did you get to be such a red lipstick person?
  

    

I like your description of the look of the 50's, particularly the eyeliner
with the little wing extending out at the outside corner.  I actually miss
those!  My eyes are too close together, and those little wings draw the
eye to the outer corner, thus creating the illusion that my eyes were
farther apart than they really are.  As it is, I wear glasses now, and I
have to be careful, when choosing glasses frames, to choose a clear
bridge, so it doesn't call attention to the middle of my face and those
too-close-together eyes, and frame with some sort of activity at the
temples to again draw the eye of the beholder to the outer edge of the
face and away from those too-close-together eyes.

Enough about my facial challenges!  Tell us about what a signature look
is, and how to get one.