Ol’ Blue Eyes
Why does it seem like every woman I know labors under the illusion that blue eye shadow was a curse peculiar to her own slice of teen history? The truth is, blue eye shadow has been an adolescent rite of passage since the 1950s, when Helena Rubinstein and Max Factor responded to the advent of technicolor with what now seems an excess of zeal. If you grew up in the ‘60s, you wore thick black eyeliner with your robin’s egg lids, just the way Ann Margret did, and if you grew up in the ‘70s you remember the Maybelline logo that the company now refers to with abashed humor as the “Big Blue Eye.” In the ‘80s, it was blue mascara. My own blue folly is immortalized, along with a very bad perm, in the only family photograph that captures my mom, my grandmother, my great-grandmother and me together.
“I think blue eye shadow is all about coming of age,” says my friend Jane, who associates it with her ‘50s childhood (a former Wall Street Journal editor, Jane is too sharp to have worn blue eye shadow at all). “When the Berlin Wall came down, don’t you remember seeing all those Eastern European women in their blue eye shadow, and how shocking that was? It seemed to reveal how far they had to go, culturally.” Blue eye shadow is the badge of adolescence, a rite of passage all growing girls, and all maturing cultures, must endure. But in no era have women of style and maturity worn blue on their faces.
Well, this is about to change. I say this with authority, not because the faces at the Oscars were more colorful than a baboon’s bottom, and not because Cameron Diaz wears blue eye shadow, and she can do no wrong. No, my certainty that blue eye shadow is about to go respectable comes from the fact that I recently found myself fixated on a pot of M.A.C Satin Eye in a fantastic sci-fi color called Electric Eel, the sight of which had me instantly hypnotized, rooted, riveted. I was lucky that the thing I was staring at in that gripping, alarming, siren blue was only a pot of eye shadow and not a car, because whatever it was, I had to have it.
Alone at home, I began to experiment with my Electric Eel and found that the color I had purchased was as slippery as its namesake. Blue eye shadow, while lighthearted, even glib, is very tricky to apply. It was time to call in a professional.
“Blue is a play color,” cautions Lutz, a German-born makeup artist who quotes Goethe from time to time, but also loves blue eye shadow. What he means is, don’t ever, ever wear it to work, whether you’re a bus driver or a Municipal Court judge.
“I do a lot of celebrities, and most of the time they have a heart attack when I pull out the blue,” Lutz says. “They think I’m going to make them look like that lady on ‘The Drew Carey Show.’ ” But he always manages to banish the screaming Mimis. “I love blue with orange,” he adds. “I make the face tan and shiny. A sparkly blue eyelid with beige lips and orangy cheeks. There are three or four great, glittery colors from I Nuovi. I used them on Denise Richards, and she went out and bought some.” He likes to put a bright blue on the lid, with a dab of icy blue on the highest point in the middle, finished with a black liner.
Bata, another mono-named makeup artist who ought to know his brights since he often works on Elton John, says that the best way to make blue modern is by wearing it in “one wash of color. I wouldn’t do any liner, just mascara and some violet or lilac gloss. My favorite is to wash the entire lid, smudging all the way up to the brow. With a light blue, especially on Asian skin, it’s spectacular. And blue with lilac is spectacular on green eyes.”
But the first challenge in attempting any vivid color, Bata says, is to pick the right shade, based on whether your complexion is warm or cool. Bata works with a new company called Three Custom Color Specialists--3C for short. Every color that 3C makes--and they make more than 100 of them--comes in both cool and warm versions. Trying the 3C Warm Sky on one eyelid and the Cool Sky on the other, it is clear that I am a “warm” despite being rather pale; the cool tone simply looks dull, while the warm version sings.
As for my intense Electric Eel, Bata suggests that an “interesting” way to wear a bold color is “a little dab in the corner of your eyes. It adds spark. Skin-colored eye shadow with a blue or green liner is also good.” Sure enough, when I dabbed the Electric Eel at the corner of a beige eye with a new frosty, orange-pink Lorac shadow called Mesmerize on the brow bone, I suddenly had a gestalt thing happening. And it’s nothing like my adolescent self would have worn.
Still, if a color named after an 8-foot-long, 600-volt Amazonian fish is too exotic for you, there are gentler, more dignified shades of blue available. On the lighter side, a sheer, pearly eye shadow can give you that Lee Remick saucy, nerves-of-steel look of cool sophistication that’s ready for the country club or a jewel heist. Creme eye shadows are back, and they’re the perfect medium for going gently blue. Estee Lauder’s Go Wink Liquid Eye Shadow in Liquid Sky is a robustly iridescent turquoise blue, while M.A.C’s Sheer Color Extract in Splash is a flattering, soft robin’s egg.
Nars, which seems to offer more intense shades of eye color than a peacock has tail feathers, makes a solid creme shadow that comes in a mirrored compact. Their Carioca is a cool but vivid blue-green that goes on very sheer and pearly, and which can be amped up to summer evening intensity with a matching liquid liner called Neverland. Not long ago, in the quest to jazz up a gray cashmere sweater I insisted on wearing to a cocktail party (I had a cold and it was comfy), I added a hair’s breadth of the bright Neverland liner to gunmetal eyelids, and I looked so good that I actually felt better.
Navy is another wonderfully wearable shade. The In The Navy Blue eyeliner pencil from the very Parisian-chic Lola Cosmetics boutique on Robertson is a blue that Coco Chanel surely would have worn. (Ah, just think what sought-after, high-priced places trailer parks would be if only Coco had lived in one!) And Smashbox makes a creme eyeliner in a shade called Picasso that can be painted on with a brush but is more forgiving to the amateur artist than liquid liner. Last time I was at the dentist’s office, I saw Meg Ryan on a magazine cover wearing inky shadow smudged all around her little pixie eyes--very ‘90s, except for the fact that the eye shadow was dark blue, not black. To get there, Lanc0me’s Colour Focus Eye Shadow Darkroom is a true black powder with a very fine infusion of blue glitter. But for high drama, Nars’ China Blue powder achieves something I would have thought to be an oxymoron: a neon-bright shade of navy. And for less dramatic occasions (dinner in a bistro, not a ballroom), Clinique’s Blue Sky High Impact Eye Shadow Trio for spring includes a light navy shadow, along with dove and peach highlighters. This is the first time I’ve ever owned a trio where I actually used all the colors together, but someone thought this one out, and the sensible, flattering color combo makes it perhaps the most wearable blue of all.
And I confess, I do sometimes break the cardinal rule and wear Stila’s Lotus Infusion to work--it’s a quad containing an astounding, unnamed color I can only call David Hockney Swimming Pool. I get away with this because, unlike Cameron Diaz, I work at home.