Paying homage to the world's most iconic beauty looks and the women that created them

Do not adjust the dials of your screen. Startling though this is to the human eye – your eyes - I’ve not been doused in flour (I am anti-fur) or taken on the role of a white walker on Game of Thrones. No, I’m just – with questionable success, obviously – trying my hand at the look that sealed Karen Elson as a thread into the cultural carpet of the 90s; the ghostly pallor, the heavy, deliberate imprint of her black-cherry lips.

It was a late 90s Karen Elson that got me reading The Face, her cherubic-vole face invariably wallpapered the pages of the iconic magazine every month. And in doing so, she opened an invisible door to a far off dimension that celebrated the dark side of beauty, revelled in the hyper-speed of what ‘cool’ was and presented a world which wanted no part of sugary lip balms and gingham dresses. It took me away from Sugar and Just Seventeen and headfirst into the future. 

And part of this brave new world was a new set of ethics on beauty; a ripping up of the rule book. Cindy Crawford was out and Karen Elson was in. Feeling awkward and overtly aware of my own perceived otherness, I was in silent raptures at her arrival. Karen had her own cross to bear too, remarking at the time, ‘at school I got harassed so badly for being tall, too thin, too pale – too everything. That has gotten me where I am now, which is quite ironic.’ Ironic? Sounds like utterly delicious revenge to me.

"It was a late 90s Karen Elson that got me reading The Face, her cherubic-vole face invariably wallpapered the pages of the iconic magazine every month"

Three cheers for being different is all well and good, but the actual mechanics of her look are not quite as easy. You see, ridding yourself of eyebrows – which if you are as pale as me, can entail simply whitening them out, or bleaching them if your skin is deeper in tone – is a most unsettling experience. It’s an instant sledgehammer of a reminder that you have a skull. And that skulls are a bit weird. Eyebrows, those precursors of emotion, feeling are quite good as disguising skulls. And, in my case, they’re also good slightly minimising the look of a five-head. When they’re gone, my face becomes wickedly evil.

Still, there’s a mischievous sense of fun deeply rooted in subverting your own look on a regular basis, bending the elastic band that’s bound around the make-up look that slowly sneaks up on you every day until you realise you’ve been doing the same thing for years. And, sidled up against a lusciously blackened, sticky lip, the look becomes surged with electricity. 

Photographically, it’s a brilliant smack on the face. Sadly, in person, it’s a bit of a stain on the eyes. Still, I won’t hear a word said against 90s Karen Elson. She is and will always be, as Nick Knight so eloquently put it, ‘fashion’s red queen.’

1. Illamasqua Precision Ink in Scribe, £10
2. Bobbi Brown Eye Shadow in White, £17 at Selfridges
3. Shu Uemura Eye Light Pencil in White, £16
4. Nars Train Bleu Velvet Matte Lip Pencil, £17.50

Photography: Hugo Yangüela