Paying homage to the most iconic moments in beauty and the women who created them. 

The notion of make-up as armour – though mildly insulting to every woman on earth that wears make-up – comes alive for me in the face of Edie Sedgwick. Her thick black rimmed eyes, a standard motif of the 60s, emitted a sort of toughness unseen on the faces of Twiggy or Brigitte Bardot. I mean, imagine her without eye make-up at all – she’d look like a petrified little vole. 

The black felt tip liner around her eyes was the shield between her inner self and the world looking in. It became her. Her eyes were exaggerated emblems of adulthood; loud screams in the face of vulnerability. With a deliberate, heavy hand, the dense black line traces her socket, snaking around to the lash line and around to the lower lid, forming Edie’s own sort of poignant never-ending line drawing. 

This is no standard black eyeliner situation. This is not Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face. This is an utter fiasco of eyeliner. A brilliant piece of make-up drama heightened further by the black pools Edie has for iris’ and the otherwise pale, unmade up face, with only her ferocious, unkempt man brows helplessly manifesting the riot lying within. It’s this dichotomy between femininity and masculinity, childhood and lost innocence pushed through the daintiness of lashes and the tough two-fingered salute of the thick black lines that has made this look as ripe for revival as pop-art itself. 

So onto the Edie eye: this can be either ridiculously, insanely difficult or as easy as colouring in: it all comes down to the eyeliner you select. I like a slim brush tip that I can control and build up (pens though they seem easier, allow more room for mistakes), so I’ve used Lancome Artliner in Noir, £20 at Harrods. And because this is like painting by numbers, before the eyeliner touched my skin, I traced my socket line with a soft black kohl pencil before blending it out to form a sculpted greyish contour. 

They are by no means perfect, but I am pretty sure Edie would have scowled in the face of perfection. But then, oh God. The false lashes. I can only do one side well. It took seven attempts to get them looking halfway like sisters, let alone twins. Which prompts the question, if I can’t do them when I’m really concentrating, how the hell did Edie when she was out of her mind on narcs half the time? 

And despite being a million light years away from the dark nights that Edie inhabited, this look left me with a sense of unfettered danger. Intensity borrowed from the hands of an icon. Andy Warhol adored women who were living on a knife’s edge between life and death, reality and fantasy. I do too.

 

1 Bobbi Brown, Long-wear Cream Shadow Stick in Vanilla, £20 at John Lewis 

2 L’Oreal Paris, Super Liner Perfect Slim, £6.99 at feelunique.com

3 Lancome Artliner in 01 Noir £20 at Harvey Nichols

4 YSL Volume Effect Faux Cils Babydoll in 01 Fetish Black, £24.50 at Selfridges

5 Shu Uemura False Lashes in Slant Black, £15.50 at Selfridges

 

Photography: Hugo Yangüela