Must-Read
Whether you're talking fawning over celebrity magazine profiles or characters in serious novels, the canon brims with beautiful women who never wear makeup and ugly women who are caked in it. A marked and unbelievably consistent departure from reality, and one that I rail against endlessly.
I am in the middle of the absolutely fantastic The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa—is there anything better than being in the middle of a really good book?—which, for perhaps the first time in contemporary literature, features a beautiful woman in makeup. Makeup that makes her look even prettier. The woman, a.k.a. the Bad Girl, is no angel, but the makeup is not presented as part of her devilry. She ages, but the makeup does not maker her look more aged. The man in love with her is forever noting how well she does it, how flattering, how tasteful; he also calls out the hair.
Makeup is hardly the only reason to read The Bad Girl; it is gorgeously written and unputdownable.
*I happened to look at the new Barneys New York catalogue just as I began reading The Bad Girl, and the model dancing around in the red lipstick and the red Marc Jacobs dress within its pages somehow morphed with the book and provided a visual for me.
—Jean Godfrey-June
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