BEAUTY for Día de los Muertos: Vanessa Davis

English make-up artist extraordinaire Vanessa Davis is also known as The Skulltress and it is easy to see why. She paints herself as various--and gorgeous--stylized skulls that recall the Mexican calaveras seen at this time of the year, Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead.

https://www.instagram.com/the_wigs_and_makeup_manager/

BEAUTY: Photography and Make-Up--Ryan Burke

Photographer, make-up, and visual artist Ryan Burke transforms himself into startling creatures of a different kind of beauty... such vision, such creativity.

http://www.ryanburkephotography.com/

Serge Lutens

In anticipation of Paris Fashion Week for men which begins today, let's take a look at one of France's most interesting designers...

Serge Lutens is not only a fashion designer but a photographer, filmmaker, hair stylist, and, most famously, a perfume art-director as well. In the 1980s, the Japanese beauty product company Shiseido hired Lutens to develop their product image for Europe and North America. What resulted was an astounding output of package design, make-up design, art direction, set design, and commercial direction. His make-up creations and styling tended toward a pale white face with dramatic dark colors on the eyes and lips, a look that fit well with traditional Japanese ideas of beauty. These highly stylized, nearly hallucinogenic commercials for Inoui, a Shiseido brand, owe a debt to the magical film work of the great Jean Cocteau.

Lutens also directed a very memorable commercial for Jun Ropé, the Japanese fashion brand. I find this one to be the spookiest of the lot. There is something inexplicable and dream-like about the positioning of the woman in the car--she is presented almost like a cardboard cutout, all torso and no lower extremities; see how she is facing the window as if she has no lower body. The sheer nylon around her head gives her an unsettling, ghostly appearance. And the final tableau of the couple in the backseat, staring disconnectedly out toward nothing, seems so frozen and stiff...a cold approximation of what that moment could be. It gives me goosebumps every time.

Lutens is alive and well, and has created over fifty scents for his own perfume empire, Les Salons du Palais Royal.

http://www.sergelutens.com/

BEAUTY: Men In Make-Up

I do love a smokey eye on a man, but these fashion-forward make-up looks are more post-apocalyptic/future dystopian tribal war paint by way of Goths and Apaches than anything else. Make-up as mask. Make-up as marking.

Many of these looks remind me greatly of the black stripe Daryl Hannah as Pris the android sprays over her eyes in the 1982 sci-fi film "Blade Runner," the first time we had seen such an application...soon followed by Malcolm McLaren's Buffalo Gals (via Vivienne Westwood's "Nostalgia of Mud" collection) in the video for his song "Buffalo Gals," and then finally on Annie Lennox in 1992 when she dueted with David Bowie on "Under Pressure" for the Freddie Mercury Tribute.

BEAUTY: Men--All that glitters...

HALLOWEEN BEAUTY: Photography--Rankin

British commercial photographer and filmmaker Rankin photographed a series of headshots based on Mexican Day of the Dead calaveras, or sugar skulls.

http://rankin.co.uk/