Chuck out all your make-up! Even Lady Gaga has gone all Tilda Swinton on us!
The new cover of Harpers' Bazaar shows Lady Gaga with no make-up, hair plain. The new minimalism. It's not a fresh and peachy just-off-the-beach baring all. Rather the white-eyebrow, white-hair, no-eyelash austerity of actress Tilda Swinton. A look that goes further than natural, it's less than zero, a dramatic and daring absence of colour.
Bugger! Just as I'd mastered the dark tapered eyebrow, just as I'd hunted down a place that does the deepest of spray tanning and bought $200 worth of that gunk that darkens and lengthens your eyelashes. Bloody hell. Always that one step behind.
Tilda Swinton famously wears the most severe couture, often without even a hint of lippy and her hair slicked back. She is the antithesis of someone who cares what's cute.
Is Lady Gaga reflecting our on--the-edge-of-a-depression times? Is bare-faced the equivalent of long hemlines heralding a seriously sad economy. The Tilda look has been adopted by many. Prada's latest campaign shows this same lack of make-up as does Armani and Honor Fraser for Zara. Louis Vuitton is pale, pale faces with just a stagey scrap of eyeliner.
In keeping with this bleakness, no wonder Jane Eyre and foggy wanderings on the moor has been so popular in the cinemas.
Or maybe it's not a negative - no colour equals sombre - but rather a positive. You have the confidence - just as you are - to face the world - just as it is. Just as Tilda Swinton has the chutzpah to: lie in a case in an art show; have a husband, twins and a lover and make it work; and wear metallic baby-poop gold without a hint of blush or mascara.
I choose to do it the old-fashioned way, with curled, dyed eyelashes, a brush of blush and a dash of pink lippy. Now that's daring.