måndag, april 21

The 60s: Marilyn Monroe

 

 
For my 60s look I picked Marilyn Monroe in the film "Something's Gotta Give". I haven't seen it, but the colours are so beautiful in the stills. It's Monroe's iconic look, but perhaps a bit softened compared to the 50s, and with orange/coral lips instead of red/pink. I was in a hurry going out and only had time to take a few quick photos at arm's length, no really good ones, so sorry about that. If you want to do a more advanced Monroe makeup with lots of sculpting, here's a great video tutorial by Lisa Eldridge.
 
Face: Apparently, Monroe achieved her almost glow-in-the-dark pale skin by applying a thick layer of vaseline with white powder sort of floating on top of it. Don't ask me how exactly she achieved this - I tried it on a different occasion and the vaseline sheen really emphasised the unevenness of my skin. I then had to pack on so much powder to combat the greasiness that it caked and emphasised the fine lines even more. I suppose it might work if you have perfectly smooth but dry skin, but if you already have smooth skin why bother covering it? I'll experiment som more though, since I like the idea of a "dewy" look that's not based on shimmer products that look awful in daylight.
For the photo above, I just used my palest foundation though. I sculpted my face a little bit, adding shadows under the cheekbones, along the hairline in the forehead and all the way under the jawline, and some highlighter on top of the cheekbones, on the jawbone, on the upper lip and on the T-zone.
 
Blusher: The blusher I used was the orange one from Sleek's "Lace" trio, which I applied quite generously both under and on top of my cheekbones. I then added a little bit of the shimmery blusher from the same trio along the cheekbones.
 
Eyebrows: I used a brown pencil to fill in my eyebrows, but not too sharply. Most brown or blond eyebrow pencils are way too reddish, but I have a great grey-brown one from Lumene which looks much more natural. If you have dark brows I don't think you need to paint them at all for this look. One thing you could do which I didn't do is to alter their shape slightly and paint points of the archs further out towards the temples to give the illusion of a wider forehead and a more heart-shaped face.
 
Eyes: The eyelids are divided into two zones along the globeline, which is drawn in a slightly "sad" shape, that is, with the highest point above the inner half of the eye instead of in the middle. The area above this line is filled in with nude/coral eyeshadow, blended towards the eyebrows and leaving a little space just underneath the eyebrows for highlighter. The lids all the way up to the globeline are covered with matte white eyeshadow.
The black eyeliner has that iconic cat's eye shape with a quite long and curved wing. I used pencil but liquid eyeliner would work just as well. There's an additional eyeliner line underneath the eyes, a little softer so this one has to be pencil. This line starts a little way from the corner of the eye and doesn't connect to the one on the upper lid. An important trick to the Monroe makeup is to draw a sort of wing shape under the eyes too, going down and out from the lashline to mimic the shadow of heavy lashes. Speaking of heavy lashes, a set of really long and thick fake eyelashes would be necessary to complete the Monroe look, but I just curled mine and put on black mascara.
 
Lips: Monroe's lips were never a simple red but always sculpted using several different products. In a simplied version of this I used a red-orange lip pencil to draw my lips slightly fuller and rounder than they naturally are, and then a lighter orange lipstick inside the line. I think it's really difficult to get away with darker lip liner as it tends to look clownish and too obviously "made up". Monroe's lips never looked like this, in fact, they tend to look more like they only have lipstick on the outer half of them while the inner half is left bare with only clear gloss. You can see this if you look closely at her mouth in the films! It might be interesting to experiment with a Monroe-inspired ombre lip using 2-3 hues of lipstick instead of the simplified  lip liner plus lipstick version I did here.
The lipstick I used is Face Stockholm "Unexpected", which I thought would work since it's a little lighter than most orange lipsticks with almost a hint of pastel. (I've inherited an old coral-orange Shantung lipstick that my grandma used to wear in the 60s and the colour of Unexpected is very close.) It's still too neon and not pastel enough though. A less red and more yellow orange like Lime Crime "My Beautiful Rocket" might be a better match but probably still too neon. I think maybe a muted, earthy coral/orange would work best for this look, something like Nyx "Strawberry Daiquiri" perhaps?
 

 

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