T Magazine: On Beauty | Talking Blues

Written By Unknown on Jumat, 02 Mei 2014 | 17.35

Favored by 4-year-olds, misfits and drag queens, wearing cobalt eye shadow means forsaking good taste for a welcome jolt of indiscretion.

One of my very first memories is of a girl named Erica. We were maybe 4 when we met in a sand pit. I immediately noticed her blue-veined eyelids and knew to envy them. She looked fragile, sad. I spent the next few days pressing my thumbs into my eye sockets, trying to achieve prettily bruised orbits like hers.

Growing up, I thought of Halloween as merely an excuse to buy and wear blue eye shadow and chose my costumes accordingly: mermaids, fairies, a flying monkey from "The Wizard of Oz." It was the only way to amass such a collection; without the holiday as an excuse, I'd never be allowed to own any eye shadow, blue or otherwise. I'd apply it in secret in the school bathroom and remove it again on the bus home. I was young, too young for it to be about sex appeal or even beauty. All I knew was that when I took it off and gazed in the mirror, I looked disappointingly like myself. Not otherworldly at all. I looked like what I was: a kid who ate sandwiches for lunch, who outgrew her sneakers, who had to learn her multiplication tables.

That same desire for the sublime is why, for spring, models at Marc by Marc Jacobs came down the runway with pearlescent, synthpop-y crescents smudged up and over the crease. It's why the girls at Miu Miu had washes of powdery baby blue from lashline to brow, while the ones at Anna Sui sported milky, sulphur-lake-colored shadow. At Prada, denim-blue pigment was applied with theatrical messiness.

Off the runway — away from the flashing lights and clavicles and dresses so expensive they render anything in their midst desirable — blue eye shadow is anything but elevated. It's shorthand for vulgarity and camp (think Jessica Rabbit, Anna Nicole Smith, Divine in "Pink Flamingos"). Blue eye shadow is a crude trick, one that efficiently enhances a performance of femininity. It's no surprise that it appeals to fourth graders and drag queens.

But there's no denying that like rainbows and polka dots and ruby slippers and cartoon palm trees, blue eye shadow possesses an aura of immediate, almost biorhythmic, appeal. Blue eye shadow is pretty. Full stop. It occupies the same mental space as Michael Jackson's music, Andy Warhol's paintings, Jay McInerney's novels, strawberry ice cream. To wear it is to forsake good taste for childlike instinct. Given the option of a sea-colored smear above both eyes, why would one choose anything else?

There are chemists who specialize in the history of blue, poets who have written it book-length odes. Yves Klein made it into an artistic practice, and Picasso devoted three years of his career to the color. Vladimir Nabokov — émigré, novelist, most famous lepidopterist who ever lived — wrote in "Pnin" of small butterflies ("like blue snowflakes") that when disturbed reveal "the celestial hue of their upper surface." The cerulean-glazed faience hippopotamus, affectionately nicknamed "William," draws thousands of visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And who knows if Kate Middleton's engagement ring would have caused such international fawning were its center stone not a Ceylon sapphire.

It's almost as though we are preternaturally disposed to find beauty in scarcity. Blue is literally hard to get. Until 6,000 years ago, it was hardly ever seen outside of the sky or the ocean on a clear day: in the rare flower petal or insect wing, in a genetically mutated Eastern European eye color. Lapis lazuli, mined in Afghanistan, provided the first blue pigment, prized by Egyptians who used it to decorate the pharaohs' tombs. In pursuit of the same elusive hue, the Chinese alchemized heavy metals and the Mesoamericans are thought to have blended indigo extract with incense.

For better and worse, the blue eye shadows that live in my bathroom cabinet are lacking in precious and poisonous dusts. They shine safely in their stout little pots and sparkle from their svelte, nontoxic wands. Long gone are the days when I applied blue eye shadow in secret, but there are still mornings when I wake up wanting to rub a bit of blue, if not on my lids then on the back of my hand.


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