I have just hiked eight hours, mostly uphill, through mud up to my shins. Along the way, I swam under a 300-foot waterfall that pounded my face so hard it stung. I am covered in muck and bruises, and I have a two-inch gash on my thigh to commemorate falling ungracefully off a jagged, slime-covered rock into an ice-cold stream. I have perspired copiously and nearly wept more than once. My waterproof makeup, however, is immaculate.
This episode of Manhattan beauty editor versus nature has been masterminded by Urban Decay executive creative director and cofounder Wende Zomnir, who is so confident in the waterproof powers of her brand’s products that she devised a grand experiment: lead me into the wilds of Kauai and subject me to all manner of makeup-imperiling activities. So I hike. I kayak up a jungle river in the rain, surf in the pummeling waves of Hanalei Bay, and get wind-whipped, splashed, and bodily thrashed on a five-hour rafting trip along the magnificently ominous Na Pali coastline. I snorkel, briefly, until I snort water upon seeing my first fish, and end up having to splutter back to shore. After each activity, I check my mirror: not a smudge.
You might ask: Who, in the real world, would even bother to wear makeup in such circumstances? There are a lot of women who deem bringing so much as a lip gloss on a camping trip an unnecessary frivolity. Shouldn’t one, when communing with nature, be…natural? Not necessarily. As far as I’m concerned, the face I wake up with in the morning—stubby-lashed, blotchy, plain—doesn’t need to be seen by anyone, anywhere. Walking around with it on display, even in the great outdoors, would be discourteous, like leaving the house without bothering to get dressed. Zomnir, a former Texas beauty pageant queen who now epitomizes SoCal boho chic, is on the same page: This is a woman who does intense CrossFit workouts several times a week—when she’s not surfing, playing tennis, or being dropped from a helicopter to snowboard on pristine slopes—and she prefers, she says, to “look reasonable,” no matter what.
The development of Cannonball, Urban Decay’s new “ultra waterproof” mascara, was something of a personal mission for Zomnir. “I’ve always found that waterproof mascaras tend to go on really wet, and then dry really spiky and hard,” she says. “I needed one that would lengthen and thicken and separate, but still last through all of the crazy activities that I like to do.” After testing roughly a hundred different iterations, she hit the jackpot with Cannonball, which has joined the indelible-arsenal ranks of Urban Decay’s 24/7 eye pencils and Eyeshadow Primer Potion. (The company recently conducted a clinical trial on the latter, in which it was shown to keep eye shadow color-true and crease-free for 24 hours. “We had to stop the test because people were tired and wanted to go home,” says Zomnir, “but my guess is that you could push it a few more hours.”) Unlike traditional waterproof fringe-boosters, Cannonball’s gel-like formula remains soft and springy after it dries, so lashes feel feathery and full, not crispy and breakage-prone.
A non-waterproof-makeup lesson, once learned, is unlikely to be forgotten. When I was a sophomore in high school in Florida, a dreamy surfer boy—a senior!—took me on a date to the beach. It seemed to be going swimmingly…until we swam. I remember so vividly the horrified look on his face when we clambered out of the ocean and collapsed onto our towels. He made excuses and took me home, and when I went inside to look in the mirror, I understood why: I was a monstrous thing to behold. Rivulets of blue eyeliner and black mascara crisscrossed my face like veins, and my foundation had washed away entirely, exposing the riotous red rosacea I struggled throughout my adolescence to conceal. As I cried, the streaks became wider and darker, pooling into bruise-colored patches. I looked like a clown who had just lost a fistfight. And no, dreamy surfer boy never asked me out again.
That experience would have spooked some women away from makeup for good—or at least from wearing it at the beach. Not me. My solution was to simply protect my face from H2O at all costs, like a Gremlin. Even when swimming—torturously, ironically, my favorite athletic activity—I developed the habit of craning my neck to keep my head above water, the effect being that of not so much an elegant mermaid as an alarmed turtle. Over time, I grew out of the teen insecurities (hallelujah!) that sparked my initial makeup mania, but my love for the way I look and feel while wearing the stuff has remained unshakable. Thankfully, waterproof formulations have improved and diversified over the years—from film-forming, moisture-deflecting, silicone-based formulas to long-wearing stains. It’s now possible to element-proof your whole face, from skin to lips to brows, so you can head to the beach looking like you’ve lost your way en route to Studio 54 and still not have to dread a meltdown. Personally, I want to look natural; I just don’t want to look the way I do au naturel. In other words, the goal is to look super-natural—like I just happen to have nice skin and lush lashes and pink lips and big pretty eyes, even if I’ve just fallen off a boat.
According to Revlon global artistic director Gucci Westman, “while it’s possible to look both natural and glamorous, it’s a lot of hard work. I think it’s a lot harder to do really good natural makeup than to do bold makeup. It’s challenging to subtly bring out the features without the face looking done.” Her beach-friendly technique is to use pore minimizer and concealer to even out the skin, then dust it with a water-resistant, non-shimmery bronzer. Instead of lipstick, she recommends lip stains, “which dry to a matte finish and really stay put even when you go swimming.” The eyes can be even more involved: “I’ll use a bit of brown eyeliner just underneath the lashes and smudge it with my finger to give the eyes some definition,” she says. “Then I’ll curl the lashes and apply one coat of mascara to the root, really lifting the lashes. I like to stop the application before I get to the tips—that way it’s less visible but it still looks like you have real length and definition to your lashes. To finish, I’ll put a little flesh-colored pencil on the inner lid, to make the eye look bigger and brighter.”
Makeup artist Terri Apanasewicz, who preps the likes of Adriana Lima for Victoria’s Secret swimwear shoots, swears by the magic of self-tanner: “Skin that has a healthy glow requires less makeup to enhance it,” she says. “And the more makeup you use, the more susceptible you are to the whims of weather, such as humidity and rain.” There are ways to give even non-waterproof makeup more staying power too: “If it’s very humid or rainy, cream products are always your best bet. And if it’s really hot, use blotting papers to soak up oil or perspiration before adding more powder to prevent caking.”
Zomnir’s approach is particularly refreshing: She’s a firm believer that makeup should be worn in any way that makes you happy, and if that means wearing peacock-colored eye shadow while scuba diving, so be it. Although Urban Decay’s waterproof makeup formulas were originally developed, she says, “because there are a lot of fans of the brand who love to go out at night, and when they come home at 5 A.M. they need their makeup to look as good as it did when they left the house,” she soon realized that even non-night owls could benefit from smudge-proof beautifiers. Ultimately, a mascara like Cannonball isn’t just for those of us who want to emerge from the ocean looking like Ursula Andress rather than Alice Cooper—it’s a survival tool for everyday life.
“I don’t know anyone who has time to do their face more than once a day,” Zomnir says. “Women have a lot to do, and we don’t have time to think about whether or not our makeup’s okay.” Her rigorous tropical-locale testing technique may be pretty extreme, but it makes a lot of sense: “If you can wear a mascara while surfing, you can certainly wear it to a wedding or during a rainstorm or while doing sweaty yoga. Nothing’s going to be as intense as diving under a wave or getting pounded by a waterfall.”
To that, I can attest.
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