The man who invented modern makeup also invented doing it wrong. In the 1930s, Max Factor picked up one of his brand-new tubes of rouge and drew a Daliesque pout over the naturally little lips of Miss Joan Crawford, transforming her from flapper to unflappable femme. He called his method, playfully, 'the smear.'
Over the years, the smear appeared on film whenever an actress, usually playing another actress, needed to look, well, actressy. In 'Opening Night,' Gena Rowlands disintegrates under a fine black veil and applies her signature rose lip in slippery circles. In a similar, eerie still in 'The Marriage of Maria Braun,' Hanna Schygulla's lipstick is a blotto red mess that recalls Tallulah Bankhead in the ultra-shlocky 'Die! Die! My Darling!' Halfway through the 1990s, Courtney Love's permanent slip dress and sloppy moue - a cross between Crawford's and a clown's - was, and is again, widely imitated; I'm thinking of New York's beauty/junkie queen, Cat Marnell, who applies her YSL Rouge #17 to look as if she has recently escaped a kidnapping. At Vivienne Westwood's fall show, the models wore what the makeup artist Val Garland called 'a Marilyn Monroe mucky lip, like she's had a few drinks.' Call it 'the new smear,' call it 'the smudge.' The wearer is clear: She's a woman undone, but on purpose.
'Undone' is the enemy of 'not done,' which is also known as the au courant 'no-makeup look.' As nudity is distinct from nakedness, so the 'no-makeup look' is separated from the 'no-makeup reality' by, in order of application, three layers of finely spackled creams, four brow-enhancing products, several individually positioned, almost-black lashes, two shades of blush, a fine dusting of powder to 'set' everything and, finally, the subtlest, sheerest lip gloss, painted with a tiny brush. The whole thing takes two hours. I know because I recently underwent this treatment myself for a photo shoot (they wanted me 'natural' and 'fresh'). I felt about as plain as a Vermeer. Afterward, I rubbed a Kleenex all over my face, used a cheap, wine-colored lipstick to stain my mouth and cheeks and applied the kind of lush, wet mascara that always creases in my eyelids, but I like it, so there I was, again my unnatural, pretty self by the time I got home in a cab.
And, as it turns out, an accidental example of a trend. Those also prone to putting on makeup in taxis, on subways and/or on one too many Ativans, will be pleasantly bemused to know that 'imperfect beauty,' as it's called in fashion circles, is a bona fide thing, as shown on the fall runways. At Lanvin's fall 2014 show, Pat McGrath dabbed inky shadow, markerlike, above the lashline, while at Anthony Vaccarello, Tom Pecheux used dental floss to apply red and black squiggles that barely, just barely, resembled eyeliner. Mascara was caked on at Prada, buried in glitter at Altuzarra and left off altogether at Céline, where wet hair and taupe-ringed eyes evoked a fortnight-long bender just ended. In the usual close-ups of models' faces taken backstage, the hand of the makeup artist was almost disconcertingly visible. You could see fingerprints on eyelids, even mouths. Again at Céline, nails were not only polish-free but uneven, certainly unmanicured. (Of course, youth permits all manner of beauty sins. If you're not a 19-year-old model, you should try one 'mistake' at a time. Rihanna got away with going to the 2013 American Music Awards with obvious tan lines and doobie-wrapped hair not only because she's Rihanna, but because her makeup, nails and diamonds were neo-Hollywood flawless.)
Maybe the 'undone' or 'hand-done' trend is a way of saying 'no thank you' to airbrushing in Photoshop, just as the recent vogue for rough ceramics and crafty abstraction in the art world is in part a rejoinder to artists like Jeff Koons who reproduce, en masse, the mass-produced. Or maybe it's a simple acknowledgment that we're most of us too busy to bother with the 26 precision tools a no-makeup look requires, and not hydrated, well-slept or content enough for a no-makeup reality.
Either way, where I used to begin each day with a canvaslike mask of foundation, I now apply an uneven layer of tinted moisturizer. And sometimes I leave the permanent, bluish half-moons under my eyes untouched. I like to think this is my own interpretation of the novelist Junichiro Tanizaki's 'In Praise of Shadows,' an essay that discussed the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi that the design writer Leonard Koren later defined as beauty 'coaxed out of ugliness.' And once in a while I feel emboldened to color outside the lines. I want to leave in more mistakes, to leave an impression more provocative than good. A face made up in a rush is also done for the rush of making it up, and for the childlike pleasure of showing that you've made it. As the American painter Cy Twombly said to the critic David Sylvester, 'Paint in a sense is a certain infantile thing . . . I start out using a brush, but then I can't take the time because the idea doesn't correspond, it gets stuck when the brush goes out of paint . . . So I take my hand and I do it.'
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