THE NEW NORMAL
Once the domain of subcultures, daring beauty gestures like pastel hair and dark lips are finding a place in the mainstream. By FIORELLA VALDESOLO
CRAYOLA-COLOURED HAIR
browsing at Bergdorfs. Intricate faux tattoos making their way down the red carpet. While years ago even gothic dark-hued nails were considered boundary pushing, now beauty norms are being challenged in a new and beautiful way. There’s a seismic shift in our collective beauty conscience and it’s being adopted by the masses.
The first whiffs of change in our beauty perception were displayed on the runway—historically a breeding ground for hyper-creative beauty ideas. But much of what we’d seen in recent seasons had become almost… basic. That is until the Fall 2015 shows. “The season was a makeup artist’s dream,” says M.A.C senior artist Melissa Gibson. There were the precisely placed face bijoux and shellacked kiss curls at Givenchy; the pitch-black matte pouts at Giles; the scribbly constellations of tattoos at Giamba; and, of course, the model with pastel pink hair at Louis Vuitton. “It’s interesting that people are riffing on things that are more experimental,” says makeup artist James Kaliardos, a frequent backstage presence. “Things that would have been super punk before can now be done in a more beautiful way. Now there’s this balance between beauty and this kind of oddness.”
And while runway looks are often diluted when they reach the general population, many people have already wholeheartedly embraced this more extreme brand of beauty. “The younger women I know feel rebellious; they don’t want to look like Jessica Rabbit,” says Kaliardos. And it’s not just the young ones who are rejecting that hyper-sexualized, overglamorized image. “Fun hair colours have gone from being a younger adult thing to something that spans all age groups,” says colourist Aura Friedman, who has been taking celebrity hair over the proverbial rainbow since the early aughts, when she started experimenting with peach and pinky tones. Now, her client list runs the gamut—she is responsible for Lady Gaga and M.I.A.’s pinking—as do her colours (she’s doing a lot of greys and greens). “I have women from 30 to 50-something doing it…. People are just way more open now to trying things and they aren’t afraid to express themselves anymore.”
But attitude isn’t all that’s changed. Pantone-palette hair, face crystals and goth lipstick were all present in the ’90s, but what we see now is nuanced. “Salons are doing more luxurious versions of crazy coloured hair that looks expensive and pretty, and that’s very different than the ’90s, when we were just slapping Manic Panic on our heads without mixing it,” says Friedman. The same holds true for makeup. We’ve seen eye crystals and eyebrow rings before, but never elevated as they were in Kaliardos’s hands for two seasons of Rodarte. “Even though these are rebellious sorts of looks, when they are done with a more classic hand, they are beautiful,” he adds. Classic can mean restrained. Gibson suggests that what keeps it modern is choosing one avant-garde beauty moment and putting it against the backdrop of great skin. “A black lipstick or clumpy lashes or an extreme liner paired with a really nude face looks modern and gorgeous,” she says.
The other factor affecting beauty’s embrace of the counterculture could be the workplace. Mores about what’s »