LANE CRAWFORD IS 170:
Moments in Makeup

When women marched through New York City in support of their right to vote, Elizabeth Arden was there handing out red lipsticks from her own brand. Red lipstick wasn’t seen as socially acceptable at the time, and suffragettes wore it as an act of solidarity and defiance.

Though the house was founded over a century earlier in 1828 and launched its first lipsticks in 1840, Guerlain has proven its dedication to female empowerment from early on. The brand released the first ever Rouge Automatique lipstick in 1936, a product that women on-the-go could apply with a single one-swipe hand movement.

It’s little wonder that Helena Rubinstein is still lauded for mascara today having created the world’s first waterproof iteration in 1958, a game changer for makeup wearers everywhere. She even invented the first system for classifying skin types in 1912.

British model Twiggy took the fashion scene by storm with a signature style defined by a short pixie cut and heavily applied mascara that had makeup lovers running to beauty counters for false lashes, even stacking two or three pairs to achieve the model’s iconic wide-eyed look.

In 1991, Bobbi Brown launched ten lipsticks under Bobbi Brown Essentials, all of which were brown-based hues to usher in a more natural era for makeup. She expected to sell 100 lipsticks in the first month, and ended up hitting that target on the first day.

Two years before his passing and a year before he launched his own brand, legendary makeup artist Kevyn Aucoin released Face Forward. The New York Times bestseller introduced contouring, a technique Aucoin had been using on supermodels for years, to the world. It was so popular, in fact, that the publisher ordered three rounds of reprints in the first month alone.

By 2018, Korean beauty had become hugely influential for both skincare and cosmetics, driving a ‘glass skin’ trend that quickly captured the world’s attention. It was all about a seemingly poreless and luminous complexion that showed no traces of powder, as if the skin was in the first flush of youth.

In a year filled with uncertainty, a bright spot on the horizon in the beauty world is the launch of iconic fragrance house Byredo's debut make-up line, translating the je ne sais quoi of its cult-favourite scents into a world of colour and cool.