When I launched Allure, I had to get my picture taken for the press whoredom of it all. I felt sure I could manage my own makeup, given my day job. Besides, how hard could it be? I learned exactly how hard when the photos appeared; I looked like a ghost. The bigwigs at Condé Nast noticed, too, and offered to cover all future makeup and hair expenses. So thoughtful. That’s how I ended up in my Milan hotel room with a man who usually worked with models at fashion shows and was now trying to contend with my distinctly non-model face. He kept loading on the foundation and sighing. Beads of sweat formed on his brow. When he finished, I stood in front of the mirror and gasped. I could’ve been a dancer at the Moulin Rouge. The foundation was perfect, seamless, like a waxy death mask. I suspected my skin was under there somewhere.
Makeup for real life is not makeup for a fashion show, photo shoot, or Dancing with the Stars.Social media, by the way, is also not real life. And it, too, has messed with our minds in many ways, but especially in how we think about beauty. It presents a level of flawlessness that almost seems achievable but is just out of reach. “Everything you see on Instagram, you have to take with a grain of salt,” says Quinn Murphy, a makeup artist based in New York whose clients include Cate Blanchett, Kristen Bell, Kate Hudson, and people whose names you don’t know. “It’s probably filtered and Photoshopped, and maybe a hundred photos were taken to get that one moment.”
