The Makeup Mole

Marian Newman is one of the world’s top manicurists – her work can be regularly seen in major campaigns like Dior and Lancome, and she is officially the manicurist with the most Vogue covers to her credit – 41 at last count! She has been working as an editorial manicurist since 1987, switching from her previous career as a forensic scientist (sorry, but how cool is that?) to tend to the digits of the most beautiful people of our era.

 She is the manicurist called on by Nick Knight, the photographer responsible for most of British Vogue’s magic cover moments of the last five years, and works regularly with other fashion greats such as Patrick Demarchalier and Mario Testino. Her celebrity client roster is no less illustrious, including Nicole Kidman, Gwen Stefani, Gwyneth Paltrow, Keira Knightley and Cate Blanchett, amongst many others.

 In short, Marion Newman is the business.

 But what makes Marion even more special is her brand new and completely innovative product line, called the Inks. Pure pigments, packaged as pens (so they are super-lightweight, a God-send when you have an already overloaded kit!) that are designed to be painted on nails and sealed with a special sealer. What this means is that you can whack the polish on, and even if it goes all around the nail as well as on it, it just washes off the skin because once that sealer is on, the nail color ain’t coming off! The other amazing thing about them is how fast they dry – 20 seconds to touch dry, 60 seconds to smudge proof, and 90 seconds to rock hard. Now I don’t know about you guys, but nails are not my forte (probably why I am a makeup artist and not a manicurist), so anything that makes my routine easier is a winner for me.

 The Inks come in 15 colors with a sealer and a cute little disposable removal towel, and are the first in a line of Marian Newman Nails products coming out.

PS The gold color is possibly the best gold I have ever seen, and Victoria Beckham has been rocking the gorgeous grey called Pewter recently. And Marian told me last week that the black is called Black Beth because Beth ditto of Gossip fame loves it so!

 Marian Newman Nails are available in the UK through Selfridges and select Charles Worthington salons and international orders through the website at www.mariannewmannails.com

When the weather warms up in a capital city like New York or London, there’s lots to think about – like am I going to asphyxiate under someone’s armpit on the Tube/subway during my commute to work? Have I got time to shave and fake tan my legs before I go out so people don’t think a hairy celery stick is walking down the road if I wear a skirt? Will my massive man-hole sunglasses from last year be acceptable this season, or do they make me look like a tragic Victoria Beckham wanna-be?

What you don’t want to be worrying about is “will my foundation turn into a soupy mess with the heat?” Enter my new favourite for summer, Chantecaille Future Skin.

Chantecaille is a lovely brand created by a French mother and daughter team (unsurprisingly their surname is “Chantecaille”) which is based on plant botanicals. Their skincare is gorgeous as are their blushes, both cream and powder, but they are on the more expensive side of things (as in, ask the price before you pay as you may pass out at the till). However their products are divine and last ages, so it’s up to you whether you’re scrimping or saving on foundation – for me it’s always an item worth spending on, as glowing gorgeous looking skin really is the base of your beauty.

Future Skin is a lovely rich foundation that provides good coverage but as it is gel based and oil free it never looks heavy, even in bright sunlight. For the foundation boffins out there apparently it has 60% charged water (whatever that is), seaweed extracts, and light-reflective pigments to ease flaws. Great, I’m there!

I apply it with a foundation brush (an Armani one to be exact, which I’m loving) and simply applying it to any red areas and patting in with my fingers. It takes five minutes and it stays all day, giving you a lovely glow that has more to do with good genes than heat induced sweatiness. And what I like most? It looks like your skin, only better.

Major LA makeup artist Patti Dubroff loves it and uses it on all her A-list clientele (and if it’s good enough for Gwyneth Paltrow, Naomi Watts and Kate Bosworth, it’s good enough for me!) One drawback– it’s better for our fairer skin sisters as although it comes in 8 shades, it’s definitely on the lighter side of the spectrum. In an upcoming post I’ll be looking at the best foundations for women of color. So hold on to your makeup sponges girls! There’s lots more makeup fun to come.

Chantecaille Future Skin is available at Space N.K in the UK and Neiman Marcus in the US.

Can I be really honest? I had misgivings about this line when I first heard about it – the fact that Charlotte Tilbury, one of the world’s biggest makeup artists known for her high-octane glamour shoots with fashion darlings, photographers Mert and Marcus, was launching a budget – BUDGET I tell you! – makeup line to be sold in Boots, well it just didn’t seem quite right. I am not generally keen on drugstore brands at the best of times because I think life is too short to have inferior pigment, nasty why bother sponge applicators and over-inflated ideas of a product’s abilities due to how gorgeous Kate Moss looks in the advertising (cough cough, RIMMEL), but as they say in the classics there is a time and a place for everything.

So in the interests of fairness I decided I had to give it a try, starting with a pale pink lippie called Vintage Lace. The range itself is quite a clever idea, dissecting the line into Fair, Medium and Dark skin tones, and has been well parlayed into very user-friendly colors. I hated the packaging though, all based around the whiteness and shape of an Ipod (it’s working on the blushes because they are actually shaped like an Ipod. On the lipsticks? Not so much. They are white plastic with clear lids like some nasty Avon tester from the 70’s).

However – the Vintage Lace color is the perfect nude, just a notch down from your own lip color to give you the illusion of supermodel lips, and although the texture is not super creamy (like, say, Estée Lauder), it does have good pigment to it which I like. It’s dense and matte and can either be dabbed on with a finger (my preferred method), or applied with a lipbrush.

It’s not what I expected Ms Tilbury to be putting her name to, but this lipstick has me sufficiently intrigued that I’ll probably try some other things. Tune in for more updates. Below you can find a video of her version of the myface.cosmetics 5 Minute Face.

We are lucky enough to have a makeup breakdown for the original belle of the Met ball, Selma Blair, actress and muse for designer Marc Jacobs.

Selma Blair at the 2009 Met Ball in New York

Skincare
Bobbi Brown Vitamin Enriched Face Base to create a youthful glow

Foundation
Chanel Vitalumiere in 30, Cendre

Concealer
Chanel Estompe Eclat Concealer in 30

Powder
Laura Mercier Translucent Loose Powder on T-zone only

Blush
Chanel Powder Blush in Be-Bop

Eyes

Lips
Wanted to keep Selma’s ‘underground’ chic so plumped them up slightly with Bobbi Browm Blush lipliner and MAC Clear Lipglass

Makeup by Kay Montano

Oh how do I love thee, let me count the ways:

 1.    Your fat, squidgy brush snuggles against my lashline and oh so gently follows the curve of the lashes until, hark! All the lashes are evenly distributed with a dense, perfect pigment, and not in any way spiky, clumpy or Liza Minelli-esque. The brush itself is like Chanel Inimitable on steroids – it solves the problems of that brush by adding in an extra layer of bristles so you don’t get spiky prongs for lashes.

 2.    You don’t flake, smear or end up needing to be repaired halfway through a shoot (or a long day at work since I love you so much you are also in my personal makeup bag, which I might add is gradually improving since I shamed myself in a previous post with the sadness of my personal makeup collection).

 3.    You can be layered, for multiple coats that give full, glam lashes and not the crunchy ones that you can’t drag the wand through. (That is nasty!)

 4.    As well as brown and black you come in gorgeous colors with a hint of color, like Smoky Violine and my favourite, Smoky Marine which is amazing on blue eyes.  It’s not obvious that it’s a deep navy, it just makes blue eyes pop (fear not those who think this might be straying into Lady Di territory, it’s a deep, rich cobalt, not an electric Duran Duran turquoise).

 5.    Your packaging is exactly what we would expect in one of the greatest fashion brands ever – sleek, slick and iconic, and makes you feel like a rock star every time you pull it out.

 6.    Apparently it is an “intense volume and curl mascara”, which makes sense as thick, gorgeous lashes is what we’re all craving – it’s hard to bat your eyes seductively with a fringe that is stick straight and stumpy.

 7.    The ad, which can be viewed below is gorgeous enough to make me do pretty much anything this mascara asks. (Except maybe volunteer to talk to a clown at the circus, because I’m really scared of them).

 You really are Exceptionnel (Chanel that is)

Yes, it’s back. How do I know that it’s really back and not some Alzheimeresque glitch in the brains of oldsters like myself who were around for this travesty the first time?

 Because the women currently wearing it were clanking alphabet blocks together in kindergarten in the mid-1990’s, which means they’ve never seen it except in pictures, and are reincarnating it for a reason – presumably because they think it looks good. (They are wrong).

 I’m not talking about normal nude-colored lip liner which you can’t see (if it’s done properly), I’m talking about dark brown pencil overdrawn with a pale centre. Back in the day Naomi Campbell, Pamela Anderson and Vanessa Paradis all went there, and it is still quite the staple lip look for the Playboy crowd. Presumably the idea is that overdrawing your mouth in chocolate crayon makes your lips look bigger, and hopefully, (perhaps for the sight impaired?) more Bardot-like. That was the 90’s theory anyway.  But no guy in the world is going to fall for the fiction that your lips are three times their actual size due to the fact that they are etched in with sludge brown.

 The first sighting was about two weeks ago on a 15 year old on a bus who had the aforementioned lip look that I thought I would never see again – and damn didn’t it take me back! To a time when CJ Parker was queen of the beach on Baywatch, Vanilla Ice was considered to be a sex symbol and Heather Locklear was out-bitching all the inhabitants of Melrose Place.

 I’m deeply ashamed to say that I not only participated in this trend for a while, I actively embraced it. Behold a fair skinned, blue-eyed blonde who used a PURPLE BROWN Maybelline eyeliner to out line my whole mouth, then filled in with MAC Faux, a Pepto Bismol pinky grey.  How ghetto is that?? Perhaps it’s for makeup sins like these that I became a makeup artist? If so I’m going to be doing penance for a looong time. Luckily there are no photos still in existence of this look which can only be described as One Hot Mess.

 Even though, clearly, I have a pretty good idea of how to recreate this look at home, I’m not giving you any hints on how to rock this particular trend – if you’re into it you can channel your inner Baywatch Bunny and sort it out yourself.

 The scariest thing of all is it’s going from the street to high fashion since major makeup artist Peter Phillips used a hardcore visible chocolate lip liner on Lara Stone in this month’s W. This means, like a tsunami, you can run but you can’t hide. It’s coming to get you. Be very afraid!

Kate Moss's iconic Calvin Klein ad

When your first job was a Face cover with Ray Petri, legendary creator of the Buffalo style, and you’re only 16 and you’ve never done a makeup job before, well where do you go from there? That’s easy, by the age of 18 you’ve racked up your first British Vogue cover and shows for John Galliano and Jasper Conran (and in those days, there were no assistants – just 15 models needing makeup, and you!) Then you’re doing Kate Moss for the iconic Calvin Klein Obsession ads, after moving to New York for the birth of grunge. You stay there for eight years, working for every major publication, fashion house and photographer, including Mario Testino, Mario Sorrenti, Bruce Weber, Steven Meisel, Patrick Demarchalier and Helmut Newton.

At the same time you start working with the world’s biggest celebrities, preparing them for red-carpet events and magazine features, including Salma Hayek, Penelope Cruz and Nicole Kidman. Moving back to London you become the new consultant to Chanel and combine your red carpet work with Kylie Minogue, Thandie Newton, Keira Knightley, Sienna Miller and Gwyneth Paltrow with major campaigns for Chanel and continuing to shoot for British, French and Italian Vogue.

Sound like a crazy dream? Well if you’re Kay Montano, that’s your life. Twenty five years of experience as a makeup artist has made Kay one of the most revered members of the industry, and today we’ve got an interview with her.

1. Favourite makeup job ever?

Toss up between American Vogue in Vietnam with Kate Moss and Bruce Weber, a Prince video (also had the divine Argentinean actress Mia Maestro whose eyes I covered in purple as an homage to Prince) and the two Calvin Klein ads  (Kate Moss in Virgin Islands, Amber Valetta in Panama) I did on paradisiacal beaches.

2. Worst makeup job ever?

Let’s just say there are a lot of people in fashion who need to do a lot of work on themselves, who are not given boundaries because others benefit too much from overlooking their dysfunction.

Daria, Kate Moss and Lara Stone by Bruce Weber

3. Top 5 products?

Chanel Vitalumiere foundation, Chanel eye pencil in Ambre, Bobbi Brown Black Gel Eyeliner, Shu Uemura eyelash curler, M Lab moisturiser.

4. If you could tell women to do one thing differently with their makeup, what would it be?

Stop over-plucking your eyebrows, you look really weird. Strictly makeup only? Experiment & have fun for chrissakes!

5. How did you get started in the business?

Via clubbing and meeting pop stars.

6. How is fashion different to when you started out?

It is totally mainstream with none of the sophisticated sub-culture that I was fortunate enough to grow up marinating in. It is also completely cross-referenced now. Before, there were always VERY distinct tribes with distinct differences.

7. Which work are you most proud of?

Strangely, seeing as I’ve done a lot of prestigious and edgy editorial, it’s actually the most classically beautiful work like the covers and my red carpet work as this is where skill, effort and experience come into play and where I feel I can make the biggest difference, the biggest impact.

8. What do you love doing in your spare time?

I love to practice yoga, walk in the park, go to my local and spend time with my new puppy Quincy Jones.

Is there anything else that you’d like to talk about?

I want to bring back subculture and not have everyone feel ‘style-ruled’ by the fashion press. Ignore us! Do your own thing & dance to your own drum.

Super-cool manicurist Sophy Robson, manicurist to the stars, is the lady responsible for the gorgeous red shiny nails that Kate Moss was sporting recently with her futuristic Balmain dress. The color? Essie’s aptly named After Sex. Kate loved it so much she kept in on for over a week, which in model time let’s face it is FOREVER.

Check out Sophy’s website at www.sophyrobson.com