American flag – red white and blue eye makeup with glitter (1965)
Vintage 1960s Night Stuff eye makeup by Coty Originals (1967)
60s mod eye makeup: Dolly Talk — Groovy Talk — Moody Talk
Who needs words? One look from these eyes says it all. Your eyes are tell-tales. They gossip away to anyone who catches their glance. Talking in a different way as your mood switches. Sometimes soft and dreamy. Sometimes bold and bright.
That’s why Max Factor’s eye make-up range is mood-blended in lots and lots of different tones. So your eyes and their make-up can always talk the same language. Telling the way you feel.
Flamboyant designs open new worlds for makeup: Here’s art in your eye (1965)
This is the year of the eye. The orb and its surroundings are getting more attention than the knee, the waist or the bosom, and this has produced a whole new fashion art form.
These fantastic samples of eye makeup are the creations of Pablo, Elizabeth Arden’s makeup designer, who won a special Coty American Fashion Critics’ award. His eyes are done in a variety of techniques.
The leaping fish and the abstract patterns are painted on. The flowers are glued on petal by petal. The mosaic of jewels is made of 300 rhinestones pasted on one by one.
Eyes like these take Pablo as much as five hours to do and he sees them as more inspirational than wearable. He hopes they will encourage women to break out their own brushes with wide-eyed abandon.
Stunning but simpler eyes for adept do-it-yourselfers
The intricate process of painting and pasting
Twenty years ago, a face was all mouth — today it’s all eye. The switch has taken a generation but the changeover is total. Ten years ago, the sale of products for beautifying the eye came to $7,000,000. Last year sales were up to $30,000,000 — and this year they will be even bigger.
What sent the figures soaring? As with so much else these days, the teenagers. Born too late to the nostalgic about bright-red mouths, they latched onto the postwar European look of big eyes in a pale face, a look launched by Left Bank Parisiennes in cellar cafes, the girls who also launched boots, turtlenecks and long, straight hair.
MORE: How to use false eyelashes to get a real big-eyed retro look: Vintage tips & examples
Unlike their mothers, US. teenagers had no qualms about eye makeup being theatrical and “not really nice.” Now, an astonishing 95 percent of them probably use some eye makeup. What’s more, so do most of their mothers.
Once eye makeup consisted of mascara, eyebrow pencil, a cream shadow and a pair of tweezers for plucking. Now it takes twice as much equipment, and the tweezers are relegated to holding the fake lashes. The girl who sits down to her mirror has to know almost as much as a professional model in order to achieve a successful eye.
Flamboyant eye makeup step-by-step
First, a foundation is put on the face to blank it out. It must be a non-pink beige, though some avant-garde types like a mat white. Then follow:
1) drawing the liner, a brown or black line drawn across the base of the eyelash;
2) brushing on eyebrow coloring to give the brow a soft, natural-looking line (tweezing down to a fine line is out);
3) painting shadows on the lids: browns and grays plus exotic colors used often in pousse-cafe layers, but never in the old matched-to-your-pupils shades;
4) applying whitener to go above the shadow to “open up” the eye and highlight the bone; and
5) brushing on blushers, brown-toned colorings, high on the cheekbones instead of rouge to accent the eye area;
6) attaching fake lashes or lash-lengthening mascaras.
Working with these tools, a woman can achieve many different effects. Mala Rubinstein, niece of the late Helena, once confided, “I feel coquettish today, so my shadow is in three parts, a touch of Jade, a touch of Golden Smoke and a hit of Holiday Highlight.”
Intense mod 1960s eye makeup
How to do demi-makeup for eyes – Revlon (1968)
Revlon invents new Demi-Makeup for Eyes. Soft demi-colors. Soft demi-textures. For lids. Lashes. And even brows. Translucency makes eyes look soft. Glowy. (Marvelously ‘unmade-up’!)
When Revlon invented Demi-Makeup for skin, your face went the way of Today. Open. Fresh. Free. And now we’ve done it for eyes. With new Demi-Makeup. The Today Fashion in eyewear. Everything is totally translucent. That means soft. A whole new kind of soft. Almost see-through soft. So soft, in fact, it shouldn’t even be called makeup. And it’s not. It’s Demi-Makeup.
The colors are the merest little mists. The gently polished textures are refined (and re-refined) to an almost floatable lightness. What they do is absolutely rivet attention to your eyes without being show off-y, about it. From now on, hard, showy eye makeup has had it. The look that’s in for eyes is translucent. Soft. Demi.
Dramatic eye makeup by Cutex (1963)
Blue eyeshadow and big eyelashes (1967)
Aziza eyeshadow colors (1968)
Trios of frosted shadows in tones of one color and liners iced to match
Mod 60s makeup with heavy eyelashes (1969)
Mod eye makeup with decorations from 1970
From Mademoiselle (June 1970)
Color’s the name of the game, and any girl with lots of imagination and no inhibitions can play. Can invent—new outlooks. New self-images. New mind’s-eye views of herself.
The wear-withall — kaleidoscopic new crowds of pots and tubes and sticks and cakes and cases of color. Supercolor. Foresty greens. Sunshiny yellows. Red-reds. Dawn blues. Deep purples. Like that. Now play. Because everything — lipsticks, eye shadows, mascaras — goes. Everywhere.
The eyes are unreal. Eyes you imagined in your wildest dream and then made up — like The Dotty Eyes (first and second photographs) on this page.
They’re lidded and under-colored with blue and green, shaded up to the browbone with yellow-green and then — dotted. Eye stuff here (under the dots), Helena Rubinstein’s Minute Shadow Sticks.
ALSO SEE: How to create the pretty retro pastel eye makeup look they loved back in the 60s & 70s
The Dazzler (third down) is all golden-bronze shadow swept around the eye, with a T of shiny gold flecks pasted down with eyelash adhesive. Eye colors from Dior’s glorious new batch of shadow sticks.
The Kabuki Eye (fourth and fifth down) works this way: red on the lid and under the eye, green arched over it. Both colors from Shiseido.
The Winged Eye (sixth one down) is mostly green and lavender with a haze of mauve winging all the way out to the hairline. Eye things are from the ‘Ultima’ II Silkprint Eyecouture Collection. Yummy.
The Pointillistic Eye (bottom) is all lavender and pale-blue lids, mauve underlining, and an arc of impressionistic little dots. They’re Estee Lauder’s Solid Creme Eyelid Shadows. Help for fantasy eyes: a fixative top coat like Frances Denney’s Indelible Eyes; brush-on brow-paler such as Max Factor’s Brow Light; even a brow-setter . . . e.g., Andrea’s Eyebrow Make-Up Set.
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