Monday, February 06, 2012
Weekend vanity notes: Hulk Primer and Instant Pouffe. I am sick of my horrible pink skin. I wish I had beautiful pale porcelain skin but I am cursed with the kind of ruddy complexion that I imagine ought to belong to a tweedy English minor aristocrat named Bunny. I never wear blusher because my face is already so pink.
I was going to a wedding on Saturday and I was like, "How can I get rid of my stupid pink skin?" I was looking on a website called – embarrassingly enough – How To Be A Redhead, which advocated a stunning transformation from near-death alcoholic to Christina Hendricks using green-tinted makeup.
Having read women's magazines as a teenager, I am au fait with the theory of colour-wheel concealer – that is, using concealers in complementary colours to the thing you want to conceal. You use yellow to cover up purple circles under your eyes, and green to get rid of redness.
Years ago I dressed up for Halloween as the Incredible Hulk (that is where the Incredible Melk began) and I still have a tube of green face-paint. So I figured I would mix a tiny amount of this with my tinted moisturiser and see if I looked any less pink than usual.
In my hand the colour was mint-green but when I first dabbed it on my face it looked offputtingly greyish. I was like, "Oh my god, I am going to look like a corpse/Shrek/Elphaba/She-Hulk!" But once I smoothed it out it looked all right, and then I used my mineral foundation on top and it looked… better than usual.
This is what I looked like when I got home after roughly six hours of drinking wine and folk-dancing. (I have never before attended a wedding that involved everyone skipping around in circles and do-si-doing to the 'Colonel Bogey March'. That's right, the song about Hitler's goolies.)
I took this photo in my bathroom to get better lighting than elsewhere in the house. I am pretty happy with the results of my Hulk Primer. When I took my makeup off my face was very pink underneath, so I count it as a success. Also, in this pic I have mostly eaten and drunk my lipstick off, but it is my Journalism Power Lipstick (which I bought myself as a treat in the post-Christmas sales) – Revlon Blasé Apricot, as worn by Ita Buttrose.
Also, I had already taken my hair down; I had done Award Ceremony Hair, decorated with a black fabric flower with a diamante brooch pinned in the centre. So now to my second vanity note: the use of a bun hairclip to create a voluminous chignon.
The clip I used looks almost exactly like this. I stole it from my mother a few weeks ago when I was at my parents' house and wanted to put up my hair because it was so hot. But she has her hair in a bob these days so she said I could keep it.
Today I put my hair up in a high ponytail, flipped it forward, fastened the clip just above the hair elastic, then flipped the ponytail back over the top and pinned the ends in. Whala! Instant Pouffe.
I was going to a wedding on Saturday and I was like, "How can I get rid of my stupid pink skin?" I was looking on a website called – embarrassingly enough – How To Be A Redhead, which advocated a stunning transformation from near-death alcoholic to Christina Hendricks using green-tinted makeup.
Having read women's magazines as a teenager, I am au fait with the theory of colour-wheel concealer – that is, using concealers in complementary colours to the thing you want to conceal. You use yellow to cover up purple circles under your eyes, and green to get rid of redness.
Years ago I dressed up for Halloween as the Incredible Hulk (that is where the Incredible Melk began) and I still have a tube of green face-paint. So I figured I would mix a tiny amount of this with my tinted moisturiser and see if I looked any less pink than usual.
In my hand the colour was mint-green but when I first dabbed it on my face it looked offputtingly greyish. I was like, "Oh my god, I am going to look like a corpse/Shrek/Elphaba/She-Hulk!" But once I smoothed it out it looked all right, and then I used my mineral foundation on top and it looked… better than usual.
This is what I looked like when I got home after roughly six hours of drinking wine and folk-dancing. (I have never before attended a wedding that involved everyone skipping around in circles and do-si-doing to the 'Colonel Bogey March'. That's right, the song about Hitler's goolies.)
I took this photo in my bathroom to get better lighting than elsewhere in the house. I am pretty happy with the results of my Hulk Primer. When I took my makeup off my face was very pink underneath, so I count it as a success. Also, in this pic I have mostly eaten and drunk my lipstick off, but it is my Journalism Power Lipstick (which I bought myself as a treat in the post-Christmas sales) – Revlon Blasé Apricot, as worn by Ita Buttrose.
Also, I had already taken my hair down; I had done Award Ceremony Hair, decorated with a black fabric flower with a diamante brooch pinned in the centre. So now to my second vanity note: the use of a bun hairclip to create a voluminous chignon.
The clip I used looks almost exactly like this. I stole it from my mother a few weeks ago when I was at my parents' house and wanted to put up my hair because it was so hot. But she has her hair in a bob these days so she said I could keep it.
Today I put my hair up in a high ponytail, flipped it forward, fastened the clip just above the hair elastic, then flipped the ponytail back over the top and pinned the ends in. Whala! Instant Pouffe.
