Cat's Incredibly Glamorous Modeling Tutorial

Nodding off in a makeup chair is not hot unless you are Jessica Stam, and surely I am not. However, that's what I spent much of the morning doing, being shot for the pages of Lucky (as any reader knows, it's part of the job). At the downtown studio by 8:30AM and spackled with smoked-out gel liner and spidery false lashes as if preparing for a night of sensuous cage dancing at Club Tequila Las Vegas, I groggily made several pronouncements to the makeup artist, hairstylist, photographer, and crew, all people whom I did not in any capacity know: "That face cream is made of baby foreskin and I'm obsessed with it!" I volunteered. "This weekend I watched Eyes Wide Shut four times!"

Then there was the actual smiling-for-the-camera thing. "Don't, um, grimace," the photographer said. "Relax your mouth. Deep breath. Okay, now smile with your eyes. Relax your mouth. Turn toward me? Okay, umm, unclench your feet." "Prune," I whispered to myself, as the Olsen twins do. "Chin up," said the photographer. "RELAX YOUR MOUTH!"

The worst, though, was returning to the office post-shoot and being, by chance, introduced to a famously glamorous executive at my company that I didn't anticipate meeting EVER, so important is she. "I don't—I don't usually wear this much makeup," I stammered, my left eye twitching desperately to expel an errant mascara clump as humiliation flushing through four layers of foundation. "Great meeting you!"

Then it was upstairs to a different photo studio for my 'cute outfit' to be shot for the Lucky website. "Have you seen Eyes Wide Shut?!" I shouted over the music and the whir of the wind machine. "With Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise and he's the rich doctor and he goes to that bananas masked sex-cult party with the prostitutes..."

"If you want to get out of here fast like you say you do, you need to stop talking," said the photographer." And so I did.

—Cat Marnell, associate beauty editor