Beauty Icon of the Month (Not Lindsay, bwahahaha)

I'm again chiming in with my bitches over at Jezebel re: Elle Magazine. I bought it so that I could read it on the way to PA last weekend so I could be a (token real-girl) model in my wonderful friend Samantha's production for her Spring 08 presentation (more on this come fashion week). Lohan aside, this magazine is shockingly full of content. Content I want to read. My absolute favorite was an article from The London Times they reprinted where Bethan Cole, their beauty editor writes about being met with international scorn after wearing black lipstick on GMTV (like the British Today Show). She says: "I am not a bland, blond beauty doyenne with tasteful highlights, a bronzed complexion, and waxed, tanned limbs." Translation: Homegirl is pale. "This would be a kind of death for me." Aieee!! I love her. Her work is a totem for everything we strive to be here at Cheek headquarters (hee-hee!): Brazen, intelligent,

independent, unapologetically obsessed with outsider makeup. If you're interested, I encountered a sequel to the Black Lipstick article published a few weeks later. If you are as smitten with Ms. Cole as I am (and you should be), this is a compelling read. It's about the difference between indie and faux-indie. She cites ingénue pop figures like MK Olsen and Daisy Lowe, who are "all examples of the current epidemic of faux-indie, which takes the artifice of indie, leaves behind the ideology and ditches its ideas about otherness and the tortured state of abjection." Yowch. The best is that she concludes the piece with a list of seemingly irrelevant products she likes. Which I will do right now: LORAC Creme Lipstick in Babydoll is lighter-than-even-my-skintone pink, yet somehow looks glowy and Bridget Bardot-y if applied with a light hand. Do this look with minimal eye makeup and black mascara on a sunny day before summer ditches us.