“A woman should wear fragrance wherever she expects to be kissed”-Coco Chanel
Laura Reynolds looks at some of the cheapest beauty products available
After vajazzles and vajacials, the beauty industry really should have lost all ability to shock us with the new trends it advertises. This past month though has seen blogs, magazines and even newspapers whipped up into a frenzy over the latest craze (thankfully, this time, not vagina related). Temporary lip tattoos, launched by Violent Lips, are the subject of all this media coverage. They come in the form of your average temporary tattoo, to be applied to your lips by holding a damp cloth over the tattoo for a couple of minutes and there is a variety of patterns to choose from. There are leopard print ones, rainbow print ones and even glitter ones, should you fancy turning your lips into a disco ball.
I mentioned this new trend a couple of weeks ago and have been thinking since then why oh why anyone would buy these things, let alone wear them for a night out! I can understand why there would be a market for them, in fact, I’m surprised Lady Gaga’s ‘House of Gaga’ didn’t come up with them first, but that’s because I can’t imagine anyone apart from the fabulous Gaga and other performers who want eye-catching costumes and make-up wanting to wear them. I see the objective of wearing make-up as enhancing your looks in a natural looking way, not changing your looks to stop you from looking human.
Here’s the problem though, there isn’t really anything natural about make-up at all. We’ve applied it for thousands of years, often poisoning ourselves in the process. Yes the ingredients people have used for their make-up may have been natural in the past but that certainly can’t be said to be the case, for the most part, nowadays. Whilst we may have a natural inclination to enhance our looks, applying make-up certainly isn’t natural. Since make-up application isn’t natural, why limit ourselves to applying it only in a ‘natural looking’ way?
Make-up can be used to make ourselves stand out from the crowd and there is no reason why only performers and famous people should use make-up as a tool to make their appearance eye-catching. Temporary lip tattoos aren’t for me, but I think it’s great that some people want to use them and have fun with make-up and their appearance. Anyone who’s got the confidence to wear them should be congratulated. They represent that make-up isn’t just a way of enhancing one’s looks to attract a partner. They show that make-up is a way of getting creative and expressing your fun side. Furthermore, as students, this is the point in our lives where if we’re going to (safely) experiment with weird beauty crazes, we should. When we’re 30 and heading off to work in an office, temporary lip tattoos probably won’t be so acceptable to our employers. For now though, embrace those colourfully patterned lips!
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