Don’t Overdo a Make-Up Trend: Spring Pastels

I am STILL sick, pigeons, which is bad news since we all know what day it is. It is One Day Before Sunday, and although I think my energy will allow me to prepare the service for tomorrow, the fact that I’m still running a high fever at night and cannot talk without wheezing and bursting into fits of rattling coughs means that I ought to stay away from church tomorrow. I have only missed one service before due to illness and I’m upset.

And now I’m coughing again.

So let me get this out fast.

The beauty magazines, or your friendly overzealous make-up sales clerk at Sephora or Macy’s or wherever, may tell you that THIS or THAT is the LATEST THING in cosmetics, and that’s fine. It’s their job. They should know the latest trends and they should know how to sell product. Can’t blame ’em. However, it is your job to be savvy enough to know that although make-up is a good thing and you shouldn’t hesitate to purchase some now and then (more often than every five years, seriously), you should not feel obligated to do up your whole face in one look or trend. BAD idea. Here’s actress Jena Malone with an over-do of the “soft pastels for spring” thing:

This would be okay on a magazine cover, as an editorial statement on PASTEL MADNESS. On Jena, however (who was so atrociously bad as the younger nun when I saw her on Broadway in “Doubt” that my mother and I kept clutching each other’s knees and making Secret Horror Movie Faces at each other every time she opened her mouth), it just looks like someone threw a Monet painting at her face. I can’t imagine that shade of blue eyeshadow applied that heavily looking good on anyone. Pastels should be sheer in 2011, unless you’re going to a 60’s Dress Like Twiggy party or trying to re-live 8th grade when you didn’t know any better.

The lipstick is… okay. It’s fine.

The make-up foundation is TOO BLOODY HEAVY. There’s too much coverage of this young actress’s face, there is no light reflecting from it, there’s too much powder cover, and the end result is that she looks like a Pastel Vampire. If I was Jena’s make-up artist I would have applied a light-reflecting base only where she needed it, dotted her cheekbones with an illuminator like High Beam from Benefit and used a sheer cheek stain like this one by Tarte. I would have used a pinky gloss instead of a matte lipstick, and I would have applied that eyeshadow with a much lighter hand (& NOT all over the lid up into the brow bone!) and given her some false lashes at the outside of her eyes (rather than the entire strip, as she has here) to emphasize the vintage doe eyed factor.

The main problem is that she looks dried out and powdered to death. The effect with pastels should be fresh, not mortuary.

You have to choose your colors in accordance with your own coloring, of course. I wouldn’t generalize and say that pinks look good on white girls and golds on black girls or anything like that, because rules are meant to be broken and I want you to go experiment!

Here, The Make-Up Blogette sports a pretty violet color:

Very nice for daytime. Not that she doesn’t just abandon her face and lips (a huge mistake when wearing pastels – the skin has to look polished) but underplays them. Here, she totally does too much lip:

But she’s young and she knows what she’s doing for her own look, which isn’t ministerial. Clarins is apparently selling a beautiful line of pastels (oh, excuse me NEO PASTELS!) right now, in case you want to get a gander. I find that it’s not worth it to buy pastels in the drugstore because they’re so lightly pigmented it’s like buying a tube or jar of nothing.

For my money, pastel colors are best for a special event and I do them more like this (Chanel 2011):

Yea, I wear a mask of Natalia Vodianova’s face.