Skin Deep

The Times' Natasha Singer has written a funny piece about fall makeup.
You can read it here:

Skin Deep
No, I Haven’t Been Mugged. Why Do You Ask?
By NATASHA SINGER
August 23, 2007

YOU know fall is upon us when beauty companies start pushing femme fatale makeup.

Ideally, theatrical colors — mulberry lips, scarlet-fever blusher, black-widow eyeliner — should conjure a glamorous diva. But, in reality, a face anchored by a dark matte mouth and penumbral eyelids could easily qualify for the pages of Glamour Don’t.

“Look! It’s Grandpa from ‘The Munsters,’ ” exclaimed a colleague when I returned to the office last week wearing the latest fall makeup, freshly applied by a beauty adviser at a department store.

How to wear autumn makeup shades without looking as exaggerated as a female impersonator is an annual problem.

Every spring, cosmetics companies bring out new pink, pastel and terra cotta tones, marketing them with terms like “fresh,” “healthy” and “glowing.”

Come fall, the same beauty brands inevitably introduce deeper-hued jewel and berry shades, with slogans like “a return to glamour,” a marketing scheme intended to induce women who may have pared down their summer grooming routines to a bit of bronzer and a dash of lip gloss to reinvest in foundations and lipsticks.

Every year there are new names for this heavy-lipped, heavy-lidded look. Estée Lauder’s fall makeup collection is called After Hours. Prescriptives has The Seducers. Department stores are advertising Smokin’ Hot from Yves Saint Laurent Beauté.

But that is just rebranding. The look was old when Gloria Swanson wore it in 1950 in “Sunset Boulevard.” The practice of using color pigments to play up the seductive quality of eyes and lips predates even Cleopatra (the consort of Caesar and Mark Antony, not the movie in which Elizabeth Taylor disports with Richard Burton).

The question is whether a retro look befitting Norma Desmond or an Egyptian mummy could work on a contemporary woman who spends her working day not in a West Hollywood swimming pool or on a Nile barge but in a Midtown office.

I decided to sample the fall collections to find out.

PRESCRIPTIVES, MACY’S

Products used (11): concealer, foundation, liquid eyeliner, four eye shadows, eyelash primer, mascara, blush, lipstick.

Total cost of products used for makeover: $200.

Time spent: one hour.

The makeover started well enough.

A beauty adviser primed my face with a little concealer and foundation. Then she set about creating what she called “the fall eye.”

Using a black liquid eyeliner, she drew a thin line from the inner corner of my eye, widening it into a graphic block at the outer corner, which turned up into a 45-degree angle.

“It’s called the cat’s eye, or the Egyptian eye,” she said.

In combination with pale primed skin and nude lips, the thick eyeliner recalled Brigitte Bardot circa 1960. It looked intense, but it worked.

Then came the overkill: The adviser layered on white, black, purple and lilac eye shadows patted on thickly both above, and a bit below, my eyes. My eyelids looked like I had gone a few rounds with the heavyweight boxer Wladimir Klitschko.

Next, she chose a lipstick called Purple Prose, which she applied above my lip line, halfway to my nose.

“It looks strong to you now because it is still summer,” the beauty adviser said. “But when the weather is cooler and you are wearing fall clothes, the makeup will fit right in.”

Somehow I doubted it.

I bought just the eyeliner.

YVES SAINT LAURENT BEAUTé, SAKS FIFTH AVENUE

Products used (14): exfoliating cream, face serum, eye cream, age-defying cream, concealer, liquid foundation, loose face powder, eye shadow compact (four colors), eyeliner, mascara, two blushes, lipstick, lip gloss.

Cost of products used in makeover: $941.

Time spent: 40 minutes.

“Feel your skin!” commanded the beauty adviser, taking my hand and running it along my face. “It’s so uneven. You have dry patches and your pores are clogged!”

Apparently the old negative reinforcement technique still moves products.

She remedied the situation by applying a $300 face serum and several other skin-care products to provide a smooth canvas, the better to show off the makeup, she said.

To create fall’s smoky eye, she used a new eye compact called Palette Esprit Couture. She started with a nude eye shadow as a base coat. Then came purple along the eye socket. And then a deep brown, patted all over the eyelids. She brushed on several coats of mascara and then used a blue eyeliner, drawing it along the lash line.

“See how much wider your eyes are!” she pronounced.

It looked good — if I were Avril Lavigne got up for a semiformal dinner at the captain’s table on a Bahamas cruise.

“Well, this is a nighttime look,” she conceded. “You can take it up or take it down.”

Tone it down, I suggested. She obliged with a lot of beige eye shadow under my brows, blending it into the dark brown to lighten it and cancel out the mauve.

To top it off, she chose a deep scarlet lipstick, using it liberally to enlarge the size of my mouth.

It was a look John le Carré described as “a fat lipstick mouth drawn over the little thin one underneath.” Not something to emulate.

Upon request, the adviser toned down my lips as well, applying concealer to the lipstick that had overrun my lips and adding a neutral lip gloss to mute the bright pigment.

At dinner that night, a friend said: “It’s not you, but it looks beautiful.”

I am going to use the eye shadows, remembering to skip the mauve and to go easy on the brown.

SEPHORA

Products: 1 lipstick.

Time spent: 10

minutes.

Cost: $10.

Lipstick sales have declined in the last decade while lip gloss sales have increased almost tenfold, according to NPD Beauty, a market research firm.

But don’t tell that to Sephora.

Earlier this month, Sephora installed signs in some stores trumpeting the idea that “Lipstick Is Back!” To bolster this notion, saleswomen, referred to in-house as “cast members,” said they had been encouraged to swap their glosses for lipsticks.

At the Times Square store, I installed myself at a long red table topped with lighted vanity mirrors and asked a beauty adviser to help me choose a fall lipstick.

“Do you want a classic red red or a deeper red?” she asked. “The pinkier red is easier to wear, but the classic red makes more of a statement.”

We chose Sephora Cream Lipstick 94, a take-no-prisoners matte tomato of a color described as “fierce” in the company’s fall catalog. Indeed, it was so fierce that I wondered whether I should wear foundation and eye shadow or at least a lip liner, some kind of cosmetic diversion to distract people from looking at it.

“You don’t need to wear makeup with that. You can wear it as a stand-alone,” said the woman, clearly a graduate of the soft-sell school of beauty advising. “Why, do you want a lip liner?”

She applied the red lipstick to my mouth, miraculously staying within the lines. The result was vaudevillian.

“It looks great,” she said. “You can pull that off.”

There are some women who can pull off cherry-popsicle lipstick. Madonna, say, in “Who’s That Girl?” Paloma Picasso. Gwen Stefani. But it was too bright for me.

Still, I have to admit I liked it. Even if it was too fierce, the lipstick served a purpose, providing an instant and welcome change, like a new haircut. It made me want to wear deeper lipstick shades this fall, albeit in sheerer formulas.

Reader, I bought it.