Permanently Beautiful

Red Lips on the Red Carpet

Naturally, the gowns were gorgeous, but what really stood out at Sunday’s Academy Awards telecast were the lush red lips many stars wore almost as an accessory. Best Actress winner Sandra Bullock gleamed almost as brightly as her Oscar statue in a stunning, form-fitting silver Marchesa gown with a beautifully embroidered bodice. With just a touch of jewelry at her ears and wrist, it was Sandra’s bright red lips that stole the show. Vera Farmiga matched her stunning lip color to the brilliant magenta silk crepe pleats that cascaded in lush curves down her strapless Marchesa column gown. Charlize Theron garnered a lot of attention with a unique deep amethyst Dior gown that featured hug pink satin rosettes placed directly over her breasts. Her beautiful deep red lip color did bring attention back to her face, but only briefly.

Deep, bright red lip color calls attention to your face and is the hot new look for spring and summer. Unfortunately, deep lip shades can be out of place in the workplace. Women who wear permanent makeup can enjoy the best of both worlds. They can have their lips colored the perfect shade of neutral pink or beige to match their skin tone for everyday wear and enhance their lips with a deeper shade of lip color for evening affairs. Permanent lip color doesn’t exclude you from wearing lipstick when you feel like a change. Simply apply lipstick or gloss directly over your permanent lip color.

Jen's Natural Look

Jennifer Aniston worked her way into American hearts as Rachel on Friends and never left. She’s the proverbial “girl next door,” fresh and wholesome looking. Jennifer uses a few special makeup tricks to create her very natural look. She may look like she’s not wearing makeup, but it’s a light hand and adept application that give Jen the natural appearance admired by so many.

How does she do it? Jen only applies eyeliner to her top eyelid, usually leaving the bottom lid naked or applying only a faint, thin stroke of liner to the bottom lid. To enhance her natural look, Jennifer chooses eyeliners in pale grays and light browns. She counts on a medium coating of mascara on both top and bottom lashes to make her eyes pop. To enhance her eyes, Jennifer favors barely there, lightly applied eye shadow in pale grays, beiges, pinks and lavenders. Jen sticks to natural looking lip colors in light brown, peach or pink. Her trick is to color her lips just slightly darker than their natural color.

Permanent makeup can give you Jennifer Aniston’s natural look 24 hours a day without tedious time in front of the mirror. You can have permanent eyeliner in a natural shade tattooed on just your upper lid or add a barely there line to your lower lid. Permanent eye shadow can enhance your eyes with natural beauty 24/7 and it never cakes or creases. Your lips will always look naturally beautiful with permanent lip color. Permanent makeup is the ultimate natural look!

Want to see how you’d look with Twilight smoky eyes or neon blue Alice in Wonderland shadow? There’s an app for that! Want to learn how to create zigzag hair or add hair extensions? There’s an app for that! Want to know what this season’s hottest “must have” fashion is going to be? There’s an app for that!

Apps are revolutionizing the way we live. Apple led the way with apps for its iconic iPhone, recently broadening the app market by making its iPod Touch app friendly. Other smartphone makers have entered the fray with their own app stores. Savvy app designers have created universal apps that can work on both Apple and Microsoft-based systems. Apps are not only fun to use; they take the effort out of so many of life’s little chores. It’s no wonder that the beauty and fashion industries have begun embracing apps.

Apps make it possible to try on new looks from makeup to hairstyles to fashion accessories right on your smartphone. Sure you can do these things on the Internet, but now you can experiment with new looks while you’re on the go. Makeup apps can help you see how you’d look with permanent cosmetics. Try out different eyebrow arches, redefine the shape of your lips, experiment with thick or thin eyeliner or find the perfect lip shade. Save your “look” and an expert permanent cosmetics artist like Melany Whitney can create and even improve upon the perfection you seek.

It is politically correct today to recognize the inner beauty in each individual and eschew outward appearance as a measure of a person’s worth. But scientific studies have repeatedly shown that human beings are hard-wired to respond more positively to beauty. Beauty seems to be as much a survival skill as intelligence or strength. We trust and value attractive people. It is no accident that successful politicians, movie stars, television personalities and business leaders seem more attractive than the average Joe or Jill on the street.

In her 1999 groundbreaking book, Survival of the Prettiest, Harvard Medical School psychologist Nancy Etcoff applied the nature vs. nurture argument to the issue of physical beauty. What Etcoff discovered is that, despite our intellectual desire to peer beneath the surface, in practice we do judge people by their appearance — and beauty tips the scales in an individual’s favor every time. Etcoff found that beautiful people hold better jobs, are paid more, are promoted more often and seem to find an easier path to success. We may wish it were different, but the reality is that life is easier for beautiful people.

Some individuals are blessed with naturally beautiful features. The rest of us must rely on makeup, fashion and personal style to enhance our features. Fortunately, artistically applied permanent cosmetics can permanently enhance your best features while correcting small flaws that may detract from our appearance. When expertly applied by renowned permanent makeup artist Melany Whitney, permanent cosmetics can create a stunning, more beautiful you, ultimately enriching your appearance and your life.

Looking good has been important ever since humans first started walking upright. British archeologists recently discovered that Neanderthals, our hairy early forbearers, wore makeup 50,000 years ago. Makeup has played an important role in how humans define personal beauty ever since. Neanderthals may have used berry juices and natural clays to beautify their features. Ancient Egyptians are recognized as the first to create and use cosmetics extensively more than 6000 years ago. They mixed pulverized copper and lead ores with charred almonds and soot into pastes that they applied to lips and around eyes. Ancient Romans so valued cosmetics they created a specialized slave caste, the Cosmetae, devoted exclusively to the production of cosmetics.

More than 5000 years ago, ancient Chinese mixed gelatin, beeswax, egg and tree sap into the first nail polishes. Different colors were worn by different social castes with gold and red reserved for royals. Japanese geishas fashioned “lipsticks” from crushed flower petals and sticks of wax and used rice powder to whiten their faces. During the European Renaissance, light-colored skin was associated with the leisure lifestyle of aristocrats. Both women and men used powder to lighten their skin and appear more aristocratic. Even practical American colonial women used burnt matches to line and darken their eyes.

The use of makeup as a beauty enhancement has a long and storied history. Permanent makeup is the newest incarnation of personal enhancement, the most modern way to achieve the most beautiful YOU!

Tomorrow scour your wardrobe for bright red clothing and put on your brightest red lipstick. It’s time to Go Red to support women’s heart health. February 5 is National Wear Red Day when millions of women and the men who love them don red to call attention to heart disease, the No. 1 killer of women in the U.S. The American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women campaign encourages women to learn more about heart health and how to prevent heart disease. Click here to take the AHA’s quick Heart Check Up to assess your heart health. On the same site check out Better U diet and exercise tips to promote good heart health.

You’ll want to keep that tube of red lipstick handy after tomorrow. Bright electric reds, oranges and pinks are this spring’s hot new lip colors. You can apply them right over your permanent lip color. Much like popular new lip stains but with less fuss, permanent makeup subtly colors lips in the perfect shade for your skin tone and personal preference. Permanent lips are beautiful naked or with a touch of lip gloss when you’re on the go and provide the perfect base when you feel like a change and want to command attention with one of this spring’s bright corals or hot reds.

Have you ever heard a woman say, “I feel naked until I put my face on”? For many women putting on their makeup is more than part of their morning routine, it’s a symbol of their femininity. Like doing their hair and dabbing on their favorite scent, applying eye makeup and lipstick makes women feel more beautiful, self-confident and ready to meet whatever the day has in store. Even women who favor the natural look and choose to skip foundation prefer the way they look with a dash of eyeliner, a swipe of mascara and a touch of lipstick. Makeup enhances our natural beauty and makes us feel good about ourselves.

A stroke, arthritis, muscular dystrophy, long illness, accident or other degenerative condition or disease strikes at the very core of who a person is as an individual and a woman. The inability to apply makeup when motor skills are lost and hands shake can be a tragic blow to a woman’s sense of femininity and sense of self. Without makeup she no longer sees in the mirror the woman she once was. It makes her loss cut even deeper. Permanent cosmetics can restore a woman’s sense of personal beauty and her self confidence in her appearance.

Artfully applied cosmetic tattooing can create beauty-enhancing permanent eyeliner, permanent eyebrows, permanent lips or even a full face enhancement. With permanent makeup, a woman who is no longer able to apply her own cosmetics can still look like she’s just applied fresh makeup.

Childhood accidents happen. A fall off a bike, a collision with a wildly thrown baseball, a skateboard trick gone wrong — as your mom will tell you, kids are an accident waiting to happen. Some accidents leave scars, little white lines or puckers on knees and chins, badges of a youth well spent. A defining scar on the chin of a handsome movie star may add to his on-screen allure, but many people consider those childhood scars unsightly blemishes that mar their appearance.

You may have to live with the memories of the accident that created a scar, but you no longer have to live with the scar. Permanent cosmetic micropigmentation can permanently camouflage scars and restore your confidence in your appearance. Scars and skin imperfections resulting from childhood (or adult) accidents, injuries, burns and surgery can be camouflaged using paramedical cosmetic tattooing. Artfully applied micropigmentation can break up scar tissue and color it to more perfectly match and blend with your natural skin tone, making the scar disappear from sight.

Nationally renowned permanent makeup artist and paramedical tattoo expert Melany Whitney regularly receives referrals from prominent plastic surgeons and physicians to assist their patients. Melany has perfected scar camouflage micropigmentation and paramedical tattooing techniques that allow patients to reclaim their natural beauty.

Good news for women of all skin types and skin tones, makeup is going matte! No-shine matte makeup is replacing sheen and gleam for a fresh, natural look this spring. Glimmery makeup was fun during the holidays, but shine emphasizes every tiny facial imperfection. The new matte look minimizes little flaws, allowing them to fade from sight. Matte doesn’t mean dull and flat, though. The new matte look is sheer and satiny, very pretty and natural. Always use moisturizer to prevent a caky look.

The almost air-brushed appearance of matte skin tones lets you focus attention on eyes and lips. Watch for eye shadows in soft earth tones and barely there evening sky colors mixed with pale skin-tone pinks, browns and beiges. Minimal black-brown eyeliner highlights the new downplayed look. And those spiky black stiletto lashes that were such fun during the holidays? Gone; replaced by a soft, natural look. Lashes go au naturel or with just a swipe of soft black-brown mascara. This spring, lips provide the wow! Go retro with bright red, innocent with pale pink or vamp it up with purple. 

If you have permanent makeup, you already have the perfect base for spring’s new natural look. Permanent cosmetics treat you to a salon makeup finish all day long. To change it up, apply cosmetics directly over permanent makeup. Otherwise, just moisturize and you’re out the door!

The dress took center stage at the Golden Globe Awards last weekend. Fabulous body-hugging sheaths bedecked with ruffled trains and cotton candy poufs of chiffon sent the message: Feminine is back! Pink and red were the hot red carpet colors this year with dreamy, creamy lips to match highlighted with a wisp of shine. The vampire craze may have waned. Smudged Twilight eyes were left to smolder in the shadows while stars paraded a return to a more traditional eye makeup style into the spotlight. Eyes were lined with black, highlighted with well blended natural shadow colors — beiges, pale roses and grays — and shellacked with glistening coats of mascara. (This is Hollywood, after all. Unless you’re strutting the red carpet, you’ll want to dial back the mascara to a few swipes.)

Also noticeable was the absence of flashy, gem-studded jewelry. In deference to the economic situation, stars choose elegant earrings and a jangle of bracelets instead of flaunting a neckline full of diamonds. Why annoy cash-strapped fans? Obviously, this year actresses put their money in the dress.

The emphasis on natural makeup was welcome. The stars looked gorgeous but somehow more approachable. That’s the goal of permanent cosmetics, to enhance your natural beauty, emphasize your best features and “repair” any annoying little flaws. Hollywood actresses do it with professional makeup artists and hours in the makeup chair. Permanent cosmetics can give you the same beautifully finished appearance without all the fuss and bother.