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| Blue Velvet, 1986 |
Changing beauty looks is also key to character development. In Sabrina, Audrey Hepburn plays the chauffeur’s daughter who leaves for Paris as a shy young ingénue and returns a sophisticated woman. Her cat-eye flick, groomed brows and painted lips indicate her transformation as much as her glamorous new clothes. The movie makeover takes a darker turn in Vertigo when James Stewart’s tortured detective moulds his new lover Judy into the image of his deceased lost love, Madeleine. He asks her to dye her hair an icy blonde and wear a pale pink shade of lipstick, so that when she returns from the beauty parlour it looks as if Madeleine has risen from the dead.
For other film heroines, makeup is a form of armour that shields them from the slings and arrows of the world. Liza Minnelli’s Sally Bowles is rarely seen without her exaggerated lashes, emerald green manicure and pencilled-in beauty mark in Cabaret, even when her life is falling apart. More recently in Molly’s Game, Jessica Chastain’s Molly Bloom realises that she needs a sleek blow-dry and a smoky eye to make the men at her poker games take her seriously. “A professional stylist turned me into what my defence attorney would later call the Cinemax version of myself,” she quips in a voiceover. Beauty, she discovers, is still the most powerful tool for reinvention. Here, Miss Vogue presents 30 of the most memorable beauty looks in film.
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