Extreme makeup: how the girls and boys of Generation Z created a huge new subculture
September 2, 2019Many young people now spend hours in their bedrooms, perfecting extraordinarily intricate looks to put up online
Its literally art! exclaims 16-year-old Milly Provenzano, sitting cross-legged on her single bed. Her eyeshadow is like the plumage of a tropical bird: blue, pink and yellow, to match the rainbow lettering on her Pride T-shirt. On the wall above her, Provenzano has taped up photographs of her favourite Instagram makeup stars: drag artist Hungry, famed for transforming Bjrk into a vagina-flower hybrid for the cover of her Utopia album, and Antoinette Mahr, whose trademark multicoloured style was clearly the inspiration for Provenzanos look today. I have asked the teenager from Kettering, Northamptonshire, to justify the many hours she spends alone in her room, perfecting fabulously complicated makeup looks. Thats like saying to someone who does A-level art and is painting all the time, Oh you shouldnt be doing that, you should be doing something more academic. Its just art, but its on your face.
Pulling out her phone, Provenzano shows me a list of makeup looks she would like to master. Her inspirations are diverse and obscure. Id really like to do an Error 404-inspired look, she muses. You know when something glitches online? Its mainly black and white, but also green and red. I browse the list what does the eyebrow slits but everywhere entry mean? Ive already done that one! she says. Id just given myself an eyebrow slit, and I woke up in the middle of the night and thought, why not do it everywhere on my face? So I got a tiny brush and concealer, and drew lines through my makeup.
Provenzano shows me a photo. Her eyes are orange. Her cheeks are a garish pink. There are thin lines down her face, as if her makeup has been stencilled around them. It is enormously impressive. After she finished the look, Provenzano uploaded a picture to Instagram, then washed the makeup off. Sometimes I keep it on if I really like it, she shrugs. Then a few hours later, Ill take it off.
Once, young people used makeup as visual code to gain admittance into different subcultures: black lipstick for goths, winged eyeliner for punks. Now, makeup is a subculture all of its own. In communities centred around Instagram and YouTube, young people gather virtually to look for inspiration, swap product tips and master tricky techniques. They often come to makeup through superstar vloggers such as NikkieTutorials (12.2m subscribers), Jeffree Star (15.6m subscribers) and James Charles, who boasts 15.9m subscribers, despite a series of scandals, one of which involved his former mentor releasing a 45-minute video claiming he had pressured heterosexual men to go out with him (claims he denied in another video), temporarily losing him millions of followers.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us