Toronto Fashion Week Spring 2013 backstage beauty: It’s all about aerodynamic hair and makeup at Sid Neigum
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“It’s more about a mood than a theme,” said M.A.C makeup key Melissa Gibson of the beauty look for Sid Neigum’s Spring 2013 show. Featuring a strong eyebrow, smoky eyes and matte skin, Gibson referenced Helmut Newton and “Cindy Crawford in the ‘90s” as inspiration. “It’s not just a heavy black smoky eye...there’s an edge to it, the fleck of grey metallic in there brightens it up for spring and summer.” To build this graphic-yet-soft look, she used a mix of three M.A.C eyeshadows--“Carbon,” “Print” and “Typographic” ($18 each, maccosmetics.com)---diffusing the pigment across the eye and blending out any straight lines. Fluidline eyeliner in “Blacktrack” ($18, maccosmetics.com) was also diffused at the lashline and lashes were curled and given two coats of mascara for extra drama. But it was two winged-out lines across the brows that completed the look, which was a last minute addition from Gibson: “At the end I threw on that eyebrow and that did it!”
Equally aerodynamic was the hair, which was pulled back in a low ponytail and covered with a nylon stocking headwrap. “I don’t know if we’ve actually developed an official term—I want to refrain from calling it a doo-rag!” said Charise Bauman, lead hair stylist for Aveda Institute Toronto. She prepped the sleek look by applying Aveda Light Elements Smoothing Fluid ($27, aveda.com) to wet hair and blowdrying throughout. Quarter-inch sections of hair were flatironed to further polish the look and then the hair was secured in a tight ponytail at the nape of the neck. Nylon stockings---“Just your basic girls’ nylon stocking!”---were deconstructed, wrapped around the head and tied to the ponytail. The final step was disguising the ends of the stocking by wrapping a section of hair over it. While this hair-around-the-hair-elastic trick is nothing new, Bauman offered a tip to make it absolutely foolproof: “I think when women have short layers it can be hard to get that extra bit of hair [to wrap], so I take that subsection first, wrap it around a quarter-inch curling iron and then [hair] spray it in place—sometimes you don’t even need to use [bobby] pins!”
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