Fall 2008 face all about lips
By Nadine Kam
Along with clothing trends, New York’s fall shows hint at color trends in makeup as well. Makeup artists work with designers as the collections are being created and try to communicate the designers’ vision through makeup colors, textures and application techniques.
M.A.C created looks for 70 designers this season and the company uses the word “dramatic” to define Fall 2008’s aesthetic, with color emphasis on the lips. Here are a few of the looks from M.A.C’s Autumn/Winter 2008 Trend Report:
Illustrations courtesy of M.A.C
Luca Luca: If there’s one lesson that never changes in beauty it’s this: Pick one feature to emphasize and underplay the others. Tom Pecheux put gold and eyelids, with lips done in transparent coral. To balance the shiny eye, she has matte skin.
Ruffian: James Kaliardos smeared the eyes with a pale grey mixed with violet, topped with gloss for a hollowed wood nymph effect. But the lips were the focus, colored with a semi-matte combination of red and purple that added up to fuchsia that could be seen from a mile away. Without mascara, liner or cheek definition, lips stand out.
Preen: The groovy insider English label brings back paisley and James Kaliardos created a face just as colorful. Start with a dove gray taupe rounded eye and add a red mouth for contrast. The “all new red mouth” is described as “not scarlet, not Russian, not crimson, not even blood red. It’s a blue red that is closer to fuchsia, and it has a hint of gold pearlescence in it. Blended with a bit of purple gloss, it got even more complex.”
Baby Phat: Kimora Lee Simmons’ darling is always an exception to every glamour rule, but with the 1920s theme of her collection, M.A.C’s Christopher Ardoff went for a Clara Bow/Josephine Baker/Billie Holliday effect, slightly blocking out the brows with nude pencil (not tweezing them out and drawing them back in). On lighter models, he used fine, gray crystallized glitter in a rounded crescent shape for a big, round strong eye, combined with a red orange-stained mouth. On the darker skin tones, mouths went deep burgundy brown matte, and eyes were deepened with burgundy glitter. Hint: “Do your base makeup after you do these eyes,” Ardoff said, “because the glitter gets all over you and you don’t want it in your base – you want a nice, soft contrasting skin that does not reflect, so that only the eyes pop.”
