You should`ve seen the look the man behind the counter at the drugstore gave me when I asked him if he had any invisible makeup.
There is such a thing. Max Factor`s Invisible Makeup Foundation comes in a perfectly visible rectangular bottle with a white pump top. When you pump the pump, visible blobs of beige goop spurt out. It`s when you put it on your face that it becomes invisible-it looks as if you aren`t wearing makeup.
The bottle says it ”helps even skin tone without adding color or heavy coverage” and ”blurs fine lines,” but I couldn`t tell the difference. Under its layer of Invisible Makeup, my skin tone looked about as uneven as usual, and my fine lines appeared unblurred. Factor`s PR person said the micronized titanium and fused silica beads in Invisible Makeup diffuse light to give skin ”a kind of radiance.” She also said she likes to wear it under her regular makeup base.
Invisible Makeup Foundation arrived hard on the heels of Factor`s Little- Color Mascara, which is so lightly tinted only a trained eye can tell you`re wearing any. Little-Color Mascara came out a while after Factor`s No-Color Mascara, which is as clear as spring water and invisible when applied to eyelashes.
Who`d spend good money on cosmetics you can`t even see?
Zillions of women, it turns out. When Factor introduced No-Color Mascara, it sold six months` worth of the stuff in the first week on the market. It won the cosmetics industry`s top award and was listed by Forbes as one of the top 10 new products of the year.
It caught the beginning of a trend. The Face of the `90s-Mirabella, Vogue, USA Today, everybody says so-is a natural, neutral, unmade-up-looking face.
Who decided? No, not some Cosmic Makeup Wizard in the Sky. Beauty editors and cosmetics company new-product honchos arrived at this insight through empirical research. Which is to say they looked around-at women ranging from Romeo Gigli`s runway models to their sister-in-law from East Orange-and noticed that a lot of them seemed to have lost interest in going around with scarlet slashes where their mouths should be and rainbow stripes painted on their eyelids. A lot of these women, they found, didn`t have time to put 19 layers of makeup on in the morning and then keep it touched up all day. Besides which, they didn`t think it looked right for driving the car pool-or, for that matter, for presenting next year`s departmental budget to the senior executive conference.
”Wow!” the wizards and editors thought. ”The Natural Look! It`s the Face of the `90s!”
The new-product honchos went to work on makeup engineered to make skin look a little bit better without looking made up. Uncolorful makeup. Unshiny makeup. Makeup custom-blended to match the customer`s skin. And the beauty editors started explaining the new look, which, according to one makeup artist, is ”much more difficult to achieve than a more made-up face.”
Buying a lot of makeup so you`ll look like you aren`t wearing any may sound silly, but invisible makeup has advantages. For one, it`s hard to overdo. Slap on as much as you like, it still doesn`t look like too much. (It may feel like too much, though; when I absently rubbed my cheek a while after trying Invisible Makeup, the stuff came off in little rolls.)
It also doesn`t show when it wears off, so you don`t have to touch it up. And, if you`re really pressed for time some morning and skip it altogether, who`s going to know?
