You probably noticed since a few months ago that more and more celebrities are going out make up free on purpose. Or are “accidentally” papped with “nothing" on their faces. US television show The view had the whole show presented by unmade up presenters. And now W magazine, the holy grail of fashion cool has done a non-scripted, non-made up fashion story with some very famous people. What up, you may wonder? Have they all of a sudden become all devoid of vanity? Yeah, right.
I call it photoshop damage control PR spin. Not thought of a catchy name yet, feel free to drop me a line if you come up with something better.
We have all seen some images of celebs retouched to infinity so they no longer resemble themselves. Call it the ultimate makeover or whatnot. And rightly so, the general public started to complain, especially if that said celebrity is flogging some “looking younger” cream where the “younger” effects are achieved by some skilled individual on their Apple Mac. And their Adobe CS.
So some big shot clever PRs, who are paid big bucks to “look after their clients” and assure they keep getting those lucrative endorsements, thought of a great way of doing that. Stars going out with no make up. Genius. The stars still look “good enough” but real. But definitely not perfect to alienate the public.
Except they are really not walking around with zero make up. Just less of it. The Daily Mail machine is working hard to bombard us with those images and make it a “story”. So when you see a celebrity with no make up walking down the street shot, remember they most likely have concealer, a bit of foundation, a bit of blush and some mascara. And lipstick.
So when the celebs get that beauty campaign and get so retouched/botoxed/filler-ed up they can always credit a good make up artist for looking like that. For sure.