We’ve all seen the youtube videos, the rising fame of instagram makeup artists, and the new sensation of beauty bloggers that have emerged this past year into society. Makeup has been a billion dollar business since before the ever-powerful world wide web existed. Department stores have been selling makeup to make you feel like the better version of yourself, even though their emphasis was always on sales, but now with technology and social media and quicker gratification and sourcing, the possibilities are endless. Makeup is a business and that includes trends, more products, and sell sell sell no matter what the consumer may think, but has makeup gone to far with contouring?
If last year’s beauty buzzword was no-makeup makeup, then this year’s is contouring. It is such a hot topic that Sephora has declared this the “Year of Contour” — a full year. It might even be a plotline for Marnie in the next season of Girls. But celebrity makeup artist Pati Dubroff, whose clients include Charlize Theron and Dakota Johnson, isn’t buying into the trend. On her own Instagram account, Dubroff has taken a stand against contouring, posting examples of particularly extreme demonstrations of the technique, with messages like: “i would NEVER SUFFOCATE THE SKIN or create a MASK LIKE CREATURE like this.” As she tells the Cut, her anti-contouring stand has largely earned her support from the beauty community, but also hate mail and cyberbullying. In her own words, Dubroff explains why she thinks contouring is bad for psychology and why she chose to be vocally against the extreme version of this trend. Contouring has always been around, but lately I see women who are physically destroying their skin in the name of this trend. If your jawline is not very sharp, it’s not a bad thing to give it a little shadow. But that’s not to say that every single plane on your face needs to be rejiggered. People look in the mirror and want to look like the retouched version of the world. But it’s not real, none of it’s real, whether it’s being done in doctors’ offices or on the computer. You can use makeup to accentuate the things you love but not to completely reimagine your face.
If you’re doing it once in a while and you clean it off really well, okay. But it’s assumed that it’s supposed to be done more often. I heard people are thinking they should make it part of their daily, weekend, or evening routine. But when they take it all off — what’s happening? What’s the psychology of it all? If there is so much time and product spent on fixing, where is the self-love? When other people are looking at that, they’re seeing the mask, they’re losing the person.
Read the rest of the story here: New York Magazine
