A Fast On the Fly Make Up Look With Lady Dee
Eye makeup can define how natural or dramatic your look is. Whether you want to learn a process you can use every day or look stunning for a special occasion, proper application of eye makeup is a useful skill that can both impress your peers and help you look and feel your best.
Promise Phan, a popular YouTube beauty-video blogger, recently uploaded a tutorial called “Mystery Celebrity Transformation.” It looks straightforward at the beginning. First, she applies varying shades of brown powder in confident strokes around her eyes, deepening the creases. Then she makes bold, parallel lines down her nose to give it a sharper, more aquiline contour. She angles a brush and stipples black eye shadow into a goatee and a scant mustache, then shades in dramatic cheekbones, giving her face a gaunt, concave look. With the addition of a wig and blue contact lenses, she no longer looks like a young Asian woman. At all. She does, however, look remarkably similar to Daryl Dixon, the crossbow-toting redneck from “The Walking Dead.” It’s absolutely mesmerizing.
A search for “make-up tutorial” on YouTube retrieves more than 20 million results, most of which aren’t as dramatic as Phan’s gender-bending performances. (She also has transformed herself into the hip-hop artist Drake and the former One Direction member Zayn Malik.) Many of these videos simply help viewers learn professional makeup techniques at home: the angular wings of a cat-eye, say, or smoky eyes just like Kim Kardashian’s. But with those basics covered, the ironclad law of web content — that there must always be more — has now brought us tutorials that go beyond these utilitarian roots and into territory that is artsier, weirder and far more subversive. I recently watched a young man draw triangles of white and brown concealer onto his bare pectorals until he created the illusion of cleavage. I watched a woman paint on violet and indigo eyebrows to match her colorful dreads. I watched a woman bind her breasts so her chest was almost perfectly flat; another used eye shadow to strengthen her jaw line, so she looked more masculine.
These are more than viral stunts. The looks and trends explored in the more outré tutorials are often ones that are ignored by mainstream beauty publications and outlets, perhaps because the videos’ techniques are geared toward those with darker complexions and gender nonconformists. But the Internet can afford the space to include them, because the Internet has room for everyone. Seen this way, even a tutorial as seemingly impractical as Phan’s is about much more than learning extreme contouring techniques — it’s a means of expanding traditional notions about beauty, to the point where they explode.
