On Beauty | When It Comes to Brows, Thin Is Not In

After years of manicured arches, eyebrows are making a thicker, fuller, more discreetly groomed return to their natural state.

Eyebrows are like shoes: you don’t notice them unless they are exquisitely right or disastrously wrong. As someone who has spent many years in an intense relationship with her own dark, willful Italian brows, I’ve come to realize that they are not trivial, frivolous or merely incidental. Eyebrows matter. They matter a lot. And this season they matter even more than usual: makeup artists are returning to the strong, pronounced lines of Audrey Hepburn in her early-’60s heyday. Although natural-looking brows have been the thing for a while (see the actresses Jennifer Connelly and Rachel Weisz), in this new incarnation, they are fuller, heavier and more precisely sculptured. Unless a woman has Brooke Shields’s natural assets, and maybe even then, she may find herself filling in with pencil or shadow.

The point of all this fuss, of course, is that thick, full eyebrows signify youth and vitality — eyebrows thin with age — and that some semblance of a midpoint arch can make eyes look more alert and cheekbones more angular and defined. But the importance of eyebrows goes beyond aesthetics. Brows are generally the darkest, highest-contrast element on the face, and, along with the eyes, the most important feature for telegraphing feelings and thoughts. Eyebrows, you might say, are the rhythm track of the face, keeping its expressive beat, providing emphasis and punctuation. Without them, the face is an inscrutable platter. (People who lack eyebrows, or who have very light ones, tend to look extraterrestrial — think Tilda Swinton or the Mona Lisa.)

In a sense, eyebrows serve the face’s highest function — that of communication, even seduction. Eyebrows show interest, engagement and understanding. Raising, furrowing or shifting them ever so slightly registers and reciprocates attention. Why, then, do so many women still insist on paring theirs down to skinny crescents, the sort of barely-there lines popularized by film stars in the 1930s and again by waifish models in the 1990s? When I see such brows, I can’t help but think of poor “Mrs. B,” my junior-high music teacher, whose penciled-in half-moons made her look perpetually, relentlessly cheerful, even as she sang melancholy folk songs like “One Tin Soldier.” These days, such incongruities are all too common. If plastic surgery and excessive injections have taught us anything, it’s that narrowing one’s expressive range is a perilous endeavor.

But great eyebrows are not easy to come by, and it’s not just a matter of leaving them alone. Even “natural” brows require a fair amount of backstage grooming. My advice, as with hair color or therapy, is to see a professional, who can not only work some alchemy with tweezers or wax but can also instruct on the artistic wielding of pencils and brushes — thereby preventing a stenciled Kabuki-like effect that’s striking on the runways but shocking on the street.

Like gently trimmed hedgerows, which are more pleasing to the eye when left slightly wild, rather than manicured so severely they look maimed, eyebrows deserve a restrained but sure hand. Recently, I insisted a young friend tag along with me to an appointment with the Beverly Hills brow expert I have seen for more than a decade. The drive took the better part of the morning. My friend was skeptical: could eyebrows possibly be worth all this trouble, all this traffic? But the results — brows that magically lifted my eyelids and excavated my jawline — made her a believer. Never mind the hedgerows. I’d spruced up the entire yard.

On Beauty | Bare Is Beautiful

A face without makeup looks wholesome and shows confidence — but doesn’t come without effort.
When Gisele Bündchen tweeted a photo of herself with her new baby this past summer, the snapshot was notable for more than her sweet, beatific gaze at her infant. Bündchen was sun kissed, windblown and apparently not wearing any makeup at all — and she looked more appealing than ever. Taking a vacation from makeup suddenly seemed like a fresh idea.
In a culture in which the daily veneer of cosmetics can feel like a kind of armor, going bare makes a strong statement. For decades, a woman didn’t leave the house without her powder compact and lipstick; today many keep what amounts to a small arsenal stocked with supplies to apply on the train, in the car or in the office bathroom. Yet on the spring 2014 runways, there was little to no makeup — or at least that was the illusion — with models channeling the confident girl who’s too cool to care.
The story is a wholesome one with a moral: the face as a smooth, perfect canvas that has been prudently protected from the sun, hydrated by eight glasses of water a day and refreshed with eight hours of sleep a night and perhaps a dab of a semiprecious cream like La Mer. And this show of time and money spent doesn’t stop at the jawline, because what is a serenely beautiful face without a neck and décolletage to match?
“It is an expensive look,” says Victoria Tsai, the founder of the Tatcha skin care line. “Or it can be, if you don’t take care of your skin.” Tsai’s formulas, which feature green tea, red algae and rice bran, were inspired by her work studying the closely guarded rituals of Japanese geishas, whose skin, beneath their theatrical makeup, is so legendarily exquisite that there is a phrase to describe it: mochi hada, or rice-cake skin. “The no-makeup trend has been a big one in Asia for a long time, and it’s very much about the skin — in Asia, they spend far more money on skin care and far less on makeup,” Tsai says.
Skin care in the United States, meanwhile, can resemble a clinic or construction site, in which we blast away with lasers, LED’s and battery-operated scrubbing devices, or smear on burning topical applications that can leave the epidermis begging for mercy. “I always compare skin to your favorite silk blouse,” says Isabelle Bellis, who trained with the cult Parisian facialist Joëlle Ciocco and works on the Upper East Side in Manhattan. “If you have some imperfections in your silk blouse, the way you will treat it is with delicate attention.” Bellis isn’t completely opposed to new technology, but prefers a hands-on method for herself. “Like most Frenchwomen, I am very religious about my home care routine,” she says. “I always massage my skin to help circulation and oxygenation of the tissues.”
And while it may take more than a daily massage to transform our vacation photos into Gisele Bündchen’s, Tsai argues that less really is more. “When a man walks out there, George Clooney or Ryan Gosling, they get groomed, but you feel like you are seeing them as people. But when you look at a lot of the actresses after two hours of makeup, they are tucked inside of a beautiful shell — you can’t really see them,” she says. “When you step out from that veil of makeup, you are inviting people to look at you as a person.”

On Beauty | Eyeliner, the Time-Honored Makeup Choice of Bad Girls Everywhere

Demure makeup has defined the eye for the past few years, but now a bold new line is being drawn. Here, a testament to the power of eyeliner.

Brigitte Bardot is wearing nothing but eyeliner. In the opening scene of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt,” the camera lingers on Bardot’s body as she sprawls in bed. Shot through a red lens, her features disappear until only the striking Cleopatra line along her eyes stands out. It is somehow the eye makeup, not the nakedness, that tells us about this character. Without the eyeliner, Bardot is an ingénue. With it, she’s a femme fatale. The eyeliner is important. It practically plays a supporting role.

The cosmetic pencil arrived on the scene in the early 20th century, when Russian ballerinas, drawing burnt cork around their eyes, inspired Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein to create commercial versions. The 1922 discovery of King Tut’s tomb set off an Egyptian craze, and a look that was initially associated with dancers, actresses and the demimonde became an upper-crust accessory to wear when shattering both Champagne glasses and social norms.

Eyeliner’s bad-girl reputation has held sway ever since. From the 1950s cat’s-eye and punk’s deliberate smear to the more restrained geometric line that has appeared on the street and runways this season, nothing else so instantly conjures female sexuality — as both teenage girls and their dismayed mothers know. (When Lindsay Lohan insisted on wearing her own eyeliner in “The Canyons,” she told the producer Braxton Pope that it made her look as if she’d graduated from her Disney days.)

The raccoon rings of the 1920s Bright Young Things were refined along the way to the much more technical line of the 1950s and the Nouvelle Vague ’60s. Posters for “La Dolce Vita” of Anita Ekberg with high-drama cat’s-eyes might as well have been advertisements for eyeliner itself, and Jean Seberg’s spare style in “Breathless” — shorn hair, a striped T-shirt and a bare face but for a restrained, artistic upper line — could easily be worn today. Max Factor and Mary Quant offered application tips for new crayonlike sticks and pots of “cake liner” — modern tools to achieve the look.

When rock merged with art, eyeliner was adopted by both genders, and piratical outlines appeared on everyone from Ziggy Stardust-era David Bowie to Warholian superstars like Edie Sedgwick and Lou Reed. (You can only hope they passed a stick of eyeliner back and forth in the bathroom at Max’s Kansas City.) By the 1980s, the makeup artist Way Bandy’s book “Styling Your Face” brought the larger-than-life look perfected on supermodels like Janice Dickinson to the masses, and women hit the street in Studio 54 jumpsuits or bow-tied blouses and Technicolor outlines that made them look like Duran Duran video extras.

Eyeliner came back down to earth, of course, as it had to. Except for the occasional “smoky eye” that’s all too easy to mess up, a much more demure natural chic has reigned in recent years. The clean, neat, almost geometrical line that takes off at the edge of the eye is a fresh departure, at once retro and modern, and it has become the angelic-vamp look of choice for pop stars like Beyoncé and Lana Del Rey. Perhaps it’s time for a return to a bit of drama ourselves, to the images conjured while you stare in the mirror, carefully drawing that line along your lashes: a sequined minidress shooting quasars through nightclub smoke, a lowered-eyes glance over a fur coat. This is eyeliner’s black-magic promise: A black so striking that the entire world falls in love with the night. The blacker the better.