My Brigitte Bardot Makeup Look
This year Max Factor are celebrating 100 Years of Glamour. It has been a whole hundred years since Mr Max Factor (real person!) launched his first ever cosmetic, his Flexible Grease Paint Foundation. Max Factor was a bit of a mover and a shaker in the makeup world; he was a big Hollywood makeup artist, working on all of the most famous actresses on the most important film sets – think Ava Gardner, Jean Harlow and Marlene Dietrich. He also created loads of groundbreaking products that could stand up to the intense heat of the movie lights and the long days on set. If he was around now, no doubt he would have a reality TV show called Extreme Hollywood Makeup: Can It Take The Heat? Max was the first to develop many of today’s important cosmetic items, including Lip Pomade (later known as lip gloss), waterproof makeup and non-smudge, or indelible lipstick. He developed that in 1940. 1940! Quite incredible when you think that brands are still working on improving the lasting-power of lipsticks now, with all of the technology and research they have access to.
In celebration of this 100 Years of Glamour, Max Factor have released a series of images with Gwyneth Paltrow, recreating iconic beauty looks from throughout the decades. Audrey Hepburn from the fifties, Brigitte Bardot the sixties, Farrah Fawcett sexing it up in the seventies and good old Madonna, Queen of Reinvention, representing the eighties. Max Factor asked me to pick my favourite and create my own interpretation in a video tutorial, and you might be able to guess who I picked… Actually, maybe you won’t! Because it was quite a difficult decision; I was torn between Brigitte’s sultry, sex-kitten eyes and Farrah’s golden-hued, glowing skin. A Bardot/Fawcett hybrid would have been my ideal face, but I could only choose one and so after some deliberation, I plumped for Brigitte. Not only because she’s one of my all-time beauty heroes, but because I really wanted to get some practice in with my liquid eyeliner. I’ve been trying to perfect the “feline flick” for quite some time, now, and this gave me a good excuse to sit down and really get to grips with it.
You can see in my video tutorial that actually, once you slow down and stop panicking, the feline flick isn’t too difficult to do at all. I think that the secret is not to try and do the whole thing at once; line close to the lashes first and then draw out to a flick, using the contour of the lower lashline to guide where the flick will end. I mark the end-point of my flick with a little dot of liquid liner (I used Max Factor’s Colour Xpert Liner for this, which worked perfectly – really jet-black and non-budging!) so that I know what I’m doing before I start and don’t get my knickers in a twist. Watch the video, anyway, hopefully you’ll get an idea of how I construct the flick in a few different steps.
My other star product in this tutorial is the Lipfinity lipstick in “Always Delicate”. I must remember to do a separate post on this liquid lipstick, because it has incredible staying power and manages to be non-drying at the same time. It comes with two parts, a kind of liquid stain and then a topcoat balm to give a bit of shine; in the video, I just pat on the lipstick and it gives a gorgeous matte, soft-focus effect. Apparently this shade is the one used at the Victoria Beckham AW14 show and I can see why; it’s the perfect pinky-nude that’s just the right amount of girly. You can see all of the products used to create my Brigitte Bardot look in the video; it’s a very straighforward, minimal-product kind of face.
I barely use anything on the skin – just Max Factor’s CC Cream to even out my skintone and a bit of Mastertouch concealer beneath my eyes to keep things looking bright and clean. It’s really all about the eyes. Dark, smouldering liner (I smudge a bit of kohl into the lashline before using the Color Xpert liner, and I also use the Trio of eyeshadows in shade 1 to give some depth of colour to the eyelids) and then lashings of 2000 Calorie mascara in “Black Brown” for a retro feel. I did finish off my look with false lashes, but to be quite honest, you could easily get away with just a few good coats of the 2000 Calorie. Far less fiddly than falsies!
You can find all of the products mentioned in the video at Boots.com - here’s the full list: CC Cream in shade 75, “Tanned”, Mastertouch Concealer in shade 301, Max Colour Effects Trio Eyeshadow Trio in “Coco Crazy”, eyeliner kohl in 020, Colour Xpert Liner in black, 2000 Calorie Mascara in Brown Black, Lipfinity lipstick in “Always Delicate”.
Right, here we go; watch the video for the full step-by-step! Try not to get me mixed up with the real Brigitte Bardot, won’t you? And if you’d like to see a recreation of the Audrey Hepburn look from the fifties, Anna from ViviannaDoesMakeup has posted that up here. Which of the looks would you go for? Do you have a favourite “beauty decade”?
*This video and post have been sponsored as part of my work with Max Factor and the 100 Years of Glamour campaign.
