DosViolines
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source: nytimes.com
Turning Mere Beauties Into Glossy Goddesses
Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times
The makeup artist Charlotte Tilbury prepared a model for Alice Temperley's show.
By NATASHA SINGER
Published: September 15, 2005
JOSEPHINE RHODIN, a 16-year-old model from Sweden, looked like just another fresh-faced Scandinavian blonde until she arrived Sunday night at the TriBeCa showroom of Alice Temperley, a British fashion designer making her New York debut this week. Then Charlotte Tilbury, a British makeup artist with flame-red hair and a passionate personality to match, set about changing this teenager's style.
Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times
Ms. Tilbury, whose work is shown in real life and in a sketch, strives for a look that is "romantic, but not too girly."
It was the night before the Temperley show, and Ms. Tilbury was testing makeup looks on the model, trying to complement the midsummer-night look of the embroidered dresses. She began by rubbing a series of berry pigments into Ms. Rhodin's lips until she got a plummy pink shade. Then she smudged a rosy stain into the apples of the model's cheeks, and brushed dark lip gloss onto her eyelids. When Ms. Tilbury had finished, the once innocent-looking girl resembled a beautiful but slightly disheveled wood nymph after a night carousing with satyrs. Ms. Rhodin kept looking into a hand mirror, trying to recognize herself.
"It's amazing," Ms. Tilbury said, "how just a little makeup can change someone ordinary into someone gorgeous."
Her ability to transform mere mortals into glossy goddesses has made her one of the world's most sought-after makeup artists.
"Charlotte sees the world through a paparazzi lens; she always makes models look rich, famous and ready to be photographed," said Patrick Eichler, a senior artist at MAC Cosmetics who works with Ms. Tilbury during some New York fashion shows. "Every girl wants to look like that. She turns them from just gorgeous into pure candy."
Ms. Tilbury, 32, is at the forefront of a new generation of British makeup artists known for their light touch. Beginning with Dick Page and Pat McGrath in the 1990's, they have dominated the international cosmetics scene. Her keen eye for beauty has landed her gigs with top photographers like Mario Testino and the team of Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott; with supermodels like Kate Moss and Gisele Bündchen; with magazines like British and French Vogue; and as the creative director of Helena Rubinstein cosmetics. For a recent series of Louis Vuitton advertisements, she helped remake Jennifer Lopez into an ultra-groomed Grace Kelly doppelgänger and helped restyle Christina Ricci as the reincarnation of Jean Harlow.
Next month in Paris, Ms. Tilbury will direct makeup at the spring fashion shows of Lanvin, Chloé and Alexander McQueen. This week she has been in New York to create makeup not only for Temperley but also for Donna Karan, J. Mendel and Matthew Williamson.
Just as the clothes paraded on those catwalks offer a preview of what many women will be shopping for next spring, the faces created by makeup artists like Ms. Tilbury have a history of influencing, in time, non-models. New colors of lipsticks and face pigments introduced at the shows end up at cosmetics counters.
Four hours before the Temperley show began Monday evening, Ms. Tilbury arrived backstage with her assistant to unpack her kit. Her main task was to teach a group of stylists provided for the show by MAC Cosmetics how to replicate the makeup she had designed the night before.
The makeup team crowded behind a bank of mirrors to watch as Ms. Tilbury demonstrated on Jennifer Massaux, a 19-year-old brunette from Belgium. "Where did you get those stretchy white jeans?" she asked the model, as if to invite her into the conversation. "And the jacket?"
Ms. Tilbury mixed two matte lipsticks on the back of her left hand to show the crew how to get the exact berry shade she wanted, and the stylists dutifully copied the color scheme into notebooks with pastel pencils. Then she brushed a darker, glossy lipstick onto the model's eyelids until they were wet and shiny.
Finally she mixed gold, bronze and silver face pigments on her palm and gilded the lower eyelid. The longer she worked, the more her left hand - covered with red smears, gray blotches and gold patches - resembled a painter's palette.
"There's a fine line between doll and cool, between sugar plum fairy and rock-and-roll Ophelia," said Ms. Tilbury, who sounded as if she were describing her own girl-about-town persona; her signature look is strappy high heels, cleavage-baring blouses and layers of black mascara.
"I want the models to look romantic but not too girly," she said, sending the team off to practice on the few models who had arrived.
Ms. Tilbury's childhood was spent on the beaches and in the nightclubs of Ibiza, surrounded by beautiful people. (Her father is a painter.) But as a redhead with pale eyelashes, she never felt attractive until she tried mascara when she was 13. Suddenly people she had known for years started remarking on how pretty she was. "It traumatized me to instantly become more popular just because of the mascara," Ms. Tilbury said. "But then I realized that to achieve the power of beauty, sometimes you need a little makeup, darling."
Some directors of backstage makeup work on models alongside their assistants. But Ms. Tilbury, a perfectionist who travels with 264 pounds of cosmetics in tow so that she can have every shade and texture at hand, prefers to observe her team at work. When she sees something go wrong, she intervenes.
"I think she needs a bit more shine," she said to one makeup artist, taking charge of his model. She applied more and more glossy lipstick until the model's eyelids were as dark and shiny as wet tarmac. "Next time make the eyes wetter, darling."
Ms. Tilbury calls practically everyone she works with - from Marc Jacobs to Sophie Dahl - "darling." In her vocabulary the word is not a term of endearment so much as a negotiating tactic.
And it works, said Katie Grand, a British fashion stylist who collaborated with Ms. Tilbury on recent Louis Vuitton advertising campaigns.
"Uma Thurman, Christina Ricci, Scarlett Johansson and Jennifer Lopez are women who think they know how to make themselves look their best," Ms. Grand said, referring to the actresses featured in the campaigns. "But then Charlotte starts saying, 'Darling, I know you like your mascara, but let's just try a few false eyelashes on the outside corners of your eyes, darling.' She's so enthusiastic that no one manages to get a word in edgewise. Even if you're a celebrity, it's easier to say yes to Charlotte than to say no."
So when a frantic producer rushed backstage to ask Ms. Tilbury to hurry up because the editor in chief of Vogue had arrived for the show, the makeup artist called her darling and kept working.
"But Anna Wintour has already been seated for five minutes," said the producer, practically pulling her model off the chair. "We've got to go!"
"Just two more minutes," Ms. Tilbury replied, sitting the model back down. "She just needs one coat of mascara, darling."
The frustrated producer shrugged and marched away. Ms. Tilbury turned back to the model. She darkened her eyelashes, rubbed lipstick into the apples of her cheeks and sent her to "get dressed quickly, darling."
As the Temperley show began, Ms. Tilbury stood backstage, 10 feet from the catwalk entrance, with a fistful of brushes and gobs of dark gloss on the back of her hand, touching up each model before she reached the runway.
"Look at me, darling," she said, painting a lid and then pushing the model forward. "Close your eyes now. Quickly now. Who's next? Who's next?"
One of Ms. Tilbury's frustrations is that she rarely manages to watch the fashion shows she works on. Instead she queries audience members afterward about how the makeup looked.
Once the show had ended and the models were changing back into their street clothes, Padma Lakshmi, an aspiring actress who is the wife of Salman Rushdie, rushed backstage and embraced the makeup artist. Ms. Tilbury grilled her about how the makeup appeared on the runway until she was satisfied that the models' eyes had looked neither too subtle nor too oily.
"We live in a society where, I'm afraid, if someone looks striking or beautiful, people are instantly attracted to them," Ms. Tilbury said later that evening at the fashion show after-party held in the Temperley showroom downtown. She surveyed a group of young women in sleeveless dresses drinking Champagne. "When I look at someone, I instantly know that just a little concealer under the eyes and a little bronzer could make them beautiful."
To her the world would be a better place if only more women wore more makeup more of the time. Ms. Tilbury herself wears it even to bed.
"I think you must try to look gorgeous at all times, even when you're asleep," she said. "After all, darling, you never know who might burst in to your room in the middle of the night."
) interview with that makeup artist: 
...and I was only about 7 years old.
