Products that were tested and developed for one purpose are used in other ways. While on the one hand they are avid fans, ever alert for new products and shades, at the same time they delight in subverting the manufacturer's original intentions. This disdain for packaging is part of a tribal wariness toward the cosmetics industry. Which not only suits their nomadic life style, but also demonstrates their determination not to be seduced by frosted glass and golden finials. If something doesn't come in a small clear plastic pot, they will transfer it.
In this tribe, there seems to be a taboo against fancy packaging. Wendy says she knows a makeup artist who puts everything into vitamin bottles. It was in a Kiehl's bottle, but it wasn't Kiehl's. Nina, a green-eyed strawberry blonde, the kind who freckles instead of tans, is describing a foundation that a makeup artist once used - a pale green liquid that somehow made the face look healthy and lightly tanned. Tall, leggy Bekah, who keeps her natural blond hair cropped at chin length, is using moisturizer that looks like library paste, but is called Le Brillant Glace by Lancome. Wendy, who sports a hip, short gamine look, is applying a "very sheer" foundation called Colour Rub from Clinique, which is not discernible to the naked eye of someone watching from the bathtub, but which later, over dinner, will catch the light and mysteriously, intermittently, sparkle. The purpose of this ceremony is to develop a look that will distinguish the Bekah tribe from the Rave Kids, the Homegirls and various undifferentiated Bridge-and-Tunnel tribes that will be encountered in the course of the night.Įven before paint, Bekah's friends have a similar appearance - brows tweezed into neat crescents, nails short and neutral, hair small, as opposed to big. When the anthropologist explains her theory to Bekah, a photographer's assistant fresh out of college, Bekah says, "Of course," and invites the anthropologist to watch the makeup rite she and her tribe perform before going out to various downtown clubs. Or, makeup as the hidden language of women. The anthropologist is testing a theory that while the original purpose of makeup may have been to render the female more attractive to the opposite sex, it has evolved far beyond that primitive impulse, into a vast array of products and rules, whose primary focus is not the male (who is generally incapable of appreciating the distinction of a smudge of cocoa brown versus a swath of frosted blue) but the female, for whom such variations are clues to tribal identity. The amateur anthropologist is standing in a bathtub taking notes as Bekah and her friends are putting on makeup, getting ready to go out.
IT'S SATURDAY NIGHT IN alphabet Land, and sounds from the album "Brand New Heavies" are pounding through a converted loft.
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