If I had to describe the last week on the Internet in one word, it would be schadenfreude. If I had to come up with a supplementary adjective for that, it would be delicious. I saw Instagram’s little notification about their upcoming purge early on and paid it no mind; I didn’t really care that they were deleting spam bots and inactive accounts. I thought it would be better for the community on the whole, actually. Goodbye, annoying Instagram shops that post unwelcome comments on my photos, inviting me and whoever’s browsing to buy this or that. Goodbye forever! All those left behind would be (ideally) real people who were genuinely interested in either my iPhone photography or my rather mundane life. All the engagement and interaction would be genuine.
And when the follower counts started to drop, I watched the drama unfold on my timeline with a sort of glee. “The Instagram Purge is turning us into Mean Girls,” said The Cut, and I have to agree, it was a little mean to find so much amusement in the thousand-follower losses of other people (tens of thousands, in some cases), some of whom were heavily reliant on their so-called social media pull to make bank. But I felt — I feel — that we could all do with a reality check: it’s the Internet. It’s not all real. And The Purge was just one way of stripping a layer of falsehood off everybody, in a world that feels so full of falsehood.
Face forward
I sometimes wish I could do that to people’s faces. Funny, coming from a self-professed beauty girl who can have a full game face on in 15 minutes tops, but I’ve always been very transparent about my process. When someone says I have nice skin, or that I look fresh, or that I never get hulas, and it’s a day that I have foundation on, I’ll say flat-out that I’m just wearing great foundation. I hate pretenses; we have more than enough insecurities to contend with. I think it’s important to emphasize that whether it’s online or in person, there’s a lot of work that goes into looking good; the trick is that we’ve just learned to make it look easy.
I went to Beijing a couple of months ago to attend P&G Beauty’s Vision House, an almost annual beauty summit of sorts where P&G presents the latest innovations in their beauty science, explaining complicated concepts in ways that normal human beings like myself are capable of comprehending. It’s a few days of really interesting seminars and workshops about skincare and haircare; absolutely fascinating for a beauty nerd. But my favorite aspect of Vision House is that every year, they invite international beauty professionals to talk shop. In London a few years ago, I got to talk one-on-one with Sam McKnight, the hairstylist responsible for Lady Gaga’s locks and some of the most avant garde looks on the runways. Two years ago, in Bangkok, I sat with Eugene Souleiman and Josh Wood, who create some of the best cuts and colors on the catwalk.
This year, it was my chat with celebrity makeup artist Bruce Grayson that really made an impact, because what we talked about was something that I felt was actually very relevant in this day and age: detransforming yourself.
We’re wearing more and more makeup these days; perhaps it’s about time we pared it down. Maybe we need to try to look a little more real.
Bathed in the beauty lights of the makeup mirror in front of him, Grayson, who does red carpet makeup for Hollywood A-Listers and is the go-to makeup artist of the Democratic Party’s greats, is setting up his kit to demonstrate a no- makeup look.
“The detransformational makeup look: I like that term because we’re all watching YouTube more than ever before, and we love to watch makeup transformation, but sometimes makeup transformation takes a lot of makeup,” he says. Suddenly I recall that Makeup Transformation meme that took Instagram by storm a few months ago, parodying this very phenomenon (the Paolo Ballesteroses of the world, basically) and chuckle to myself.
“I say this very kindly, but with amateurs, sometimes it can take more makeup because they use such broad strokes to show their viewers that there is a serious difference; it’s almost like you’re playing a character. And I’ve seen, because of the Kim Kardashians of the world, that what is ‘natural makeup’ now has become a lot of makeup. I get paid a lot of money to do ‘natural makeup’ which, as you know, can be sculpting, shading, highlighting, brows, and blush, and now, unless you’ve got a light following around you everywhere…well, it looks good on your YouTube channel, but what does it look like in real life? Let’s be honest. It doesn’t look like skin. It looks like something else,” he stresses, and again, this rings true. How many people have I run into in clubs who literally look like their faces were painted on; every angle sculpted, walking chiaroscuro?
Skin deep
The first thing we all need to start doing: show more skin. “The detransformational makeup is really about skin. I want skin, which has always been, in makeup, the foundation of every great artist. Beauty makeup is always skin. If I see freckles, that is the beauty of who you are individually.”
The second: hydrate, and stay hydrated. Makeup goes best on a damp canvas, so it’s key to moisturize. “The relationship with the skin begins with using your toner first, and a moisturizer. If your skin has a little bit of dampness, you know you’re hydrated. When you press your palm to your skin, it pulls at your hands: that is when you want to use your CC cream.” And Grayson strongly suggests using a CC cream, for the skincare benefits it provides, and the sheer coverage it gives. There’s no need to use heavy foundation if your skin doesn’t require that level of coverage. And the application? “I use my fingers sometimes, I use my brush, but what I always do is, I use a little moisture on my hands because it helps blend makeup and reintroduces moisture to the skin. If I use a brush, I mist the brush. If I use a sponge, I mist the sponge.”
Hydration is just one factor in good skincare. If there’s one beauty resolution you really need to make in the coming year, though, it’s to take your skin seriously. It’s easy for us to brush skincare off — I know I do — because we’re Asian and we don’t appear to be aging, but the aging is happening underneath and will eventually come to the surface…when it’s too late for you to do anything about it. Sun damage and other environmental damage are the biggest players. “You guys are doing some good things. I do see a lot more kids understanding that they’re going to get sun damage, that pollution’s going to mess with their skin. It baffles me that people aren’t talking about the damage that pollution can do. Do you think it’s a coincidence that people in polluted environments have an itchiness and dryness to their skin? There’s a reason for that,” says Grayson.
“The skin can only take so much; it gets stressed out and you have to take care of it. I’m a big believer in protecting the moisture barrier. I can look at somebody’s skin and go, “Oh, that person has a break in their moisture barrier!” You see that little spot that’s irritated, and it has nothing to do with acne, it’s environmental pollution. So, as a makeup artist, I’ve been doing this for so long that I see people and know what they need to use. Use an SPF, please. If it’s not in your makeup, it needs to be in your skincare. When you walk outside to pick up your mail. When you’re driving in your car. I’ve seen discoloration on just the right side of a face, ‘This guy drives to work every day for an hour and he never applied SPF.’ It’s just completely obvious to me. So that’s really, really important, too.” Sunscreen and moisturizer are the basics, and they’re absolutely essential.
Ace of base
What’s not essential: heavy base. It’s difficult to strip down our existing makeup processes, but when it comes to covering your face in products, the ruling principle really needs to be less is more. “I don’t use concealer unless I have to. Again, it’s another layer of makeup. I go in there, I see how much discoloration I can eliminate with a CC cream. Then, I decide whether I should move on to a secondary foundation or not. And it works well for me, because as you know, in a closeup, when you see a ton of foundation, you see a ton of foundation. You’re not fooling anybody.”
And it’s important to adapt to a no-makeup look that actually involves minimal makeup. In a social media-fueled world where we now feel the need to look good online and off (because who wants to be the girl who looks hot in pictures but meh in person?), what looks good in photographs can easily look like a mask in real life. “That’s one of the main problems with being so married to a makeup-based no-makeup look. If your neck and your décolletage look different from your face, it’s because your foundation has a big T.O. (titanium oxide) count,” explains Grayson. “It’s a measure of how much coverage you get. If you’re using something with a T.O. count of eight and above, it will look like you’re wearing a mask. If the count is less than five, your skin’s going to look normal. Your skin will look much more natural with a tinted moisturizer in digital photography.” (The CC cream Grayson is demonstrating, Olay’s Total Effects Pore Minimizing CC Cream, has a T.O. count of less than five.)
“I think the no-makeup look is a zero point. It provides you with a step to the next makeup, rather than having you start with a ton of makeup. You can never make a lot of makeup look good in a touch-up later,” Grayson explains. But you can build on that base of no-makeup to create a more complicated look. You can start with no-makeup in the daytime and slowly progress to a more evening-appropriate look over the course of the day. (A great trick Grayson shares: allow the CC cream to serve as an eyelid primer. Don’t use powder, because the slip the cream creates can give eye makeup a great effect. “I like to look at smoky eyes as a stew; you’re stirring and stirring, and something happens because of all those textures flowing together. You’ll never be able to do it twice.”)
Maybe next year will be the year that we all finally start to strip it down and get real. I can hope.