This spring, two books from Rizzoli New York celebrate two of the world’s greatest beauty eccentrics – Isabella Blow (Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore, out now) and Veruschka (From Vera to Veruschka, out on 18 March). Blow was famous, not only for her hats but for her pillar box vermillion red lips and lily-pale skin. And, as a 1960s supermodel, Veruschka’s body became a canvas for all kinds of fantastical and psychedelic painting and decoration. Both were spectacularly eccentric and avant-garde in different ways. But have the days of women like this being visible to the public eye now passed? Do today’s pop stars like Miley Cyrus, Gaga and Rihanna challenge convention in just as powerful ways? Or are the halcyon days of the grand beauty eccentric well and truly behind us?

Many of us feel drawn to the innovators and outsiders in fashion and pop culture. They seem to express our most powerful inner sentiments of alienation and marginalization whilst also channeling that eternal teenage desire to rebel. If you grow up feeling different, perhaps you will always feel different. 'Throughout my youth I was always attracted by beauty which invited you to experience a different world and detach yourself from the mundane,' says MAC Director of Make up artistry Terry Barber. 'For example I was captivated by Kate Bush from the first time I saw her in the late seventies. She was like a Pre-Raphaelite Liz Taylor with a high-pitched fragile voice which was intoxicating to me. True eccentric beauty is not just about shock, it can be feminine, fragile, literary and poetic.'

It’s easy to recall pop and fashion culture eccentrics from the last 50 years or so that have made an indelible impression on the mainstream. From Boy George to Bjork, face painting, crazy colour hair and in the past, tattoos and piercings allowed us to enter a technicolour, subversive world where hair and make up became hyper real and super weird. 

I for one, think its good for us to be both inspired and unsettled by people’s aesthetic sensibilities, it is these people who can imprint themselves most vividly onto our lives. Barber also cites Grace Jones as a formative influence on him with her strangely androgynous hair and visage. ‘Her collaborations with Jean Paul Goude were, for me some of the most provocatively beautiful images of all time.’ 

Club culture doyenne and Wonderland beauty writer Princess Julia cut her teeth during the flamboyant era of New Romantic nightlife. ‘I loved what Leigh Bowery created with his extreme imagery, he created looks that reflected the mood of the time.’ A seminal figure in the 80s, Bowery was predominantly a performance artist and club promoter and famous for his conceptual make up statements; from chalk white skin and huge exaggerated carmine red lips to multicoloured splats of paint dribbling all down his forehead, to a totally green painted face he was fearless in playing around with the precepts of beauty.

"True eccentric beauty is not just about shock, it can be feminine, fragile, literary and poetic" - Terry Barber, head of make-up artistry, MAC cosmetics

Artist and fashion illustrator Julie Verhoeven is one of the current contemporary scene’s truly avant-garde and innovative beauty eccentrics. A lecturer at St Martins and fellow of the RCA she is famous amongst the students and teachers for her constantly mutating asymmetric haircuts, alternately blue, green and yellow hair and A fearless approach to make up: penciled in eyebrows teamed with a patchwork of multihued eyeshadow and doll-like blushed cheeks. 

And, it seems she has always been this way. During her final year at school she describes having the back of her head shaved in an arch, ‘like a monkey’s naked bottom’ and the front of her head, a crop of multicoloured corkscrew extensions. ‘More recently, I tried to copy a haircut I saw artist Orlan had once sported – a cropped hairline and then half and half coloured bob. It sounds quite tame but the receding Elizabeth 1st hairline was subtly disturbing!

So what does Verhoeven think of the other supposed beauty eccentrics in today’s pop culture? ‘I think Gaga is the only one who might be a true beauty eccentric but only time will tell as her beauty journey is so media savvy and flawless - everything a true beauty eccentric would rebel against. The others- Rihanna and Miley Cyrus are more overtly occupied with their sex appeal at a very base level and the vision is so stifled and self-conscious.'

Terry Barber of MAC agrees that few of those on today’s pop scene can really be garlanded as true inheritors of the eccentric beauty gene. ‘The new generation of faux-eccentrics no longer shock simply because they contrive to shock.’ Instead he offers a different model for what is strange in our modern world. ‘To be an eccentric now would be to strip yourself away from all the clichés of what is assumed to be eccentric i.e. tattoos, piercings, hair dye and bonkers fashion. Tilda Swinton is the best example of a truly modern beauty eccentric.’ 

Perhaps more optimistically, Princess Julia sees eccentricity flourishing in today’s club, fashion and pop worlds. ‘I’m interested in performers who are thought provoking,’ she says, ‘Jonny Woo, Scottee and Theo Adams for example. They all experiment with gender and social awareness, they are beauty activists!'