Unsolicited Advice

Julie writes: If I wanted to make up a pale face like mine so that it looked good being photographed, and by "looked good" I meant "had features that didn't all blend together, but don't look like the headshots place at the mall," what would you suggest? I'm thinking photographed outside in natural light, without a flash. Oh god, the dreaded mall photography studio. Those people are like the school photographers, except more dangerous, because they also have a makeup kit. They like to spackle you half to death, on the erroneous assumption that more makeup = more glamorous! There are a few different ways to do camera makeup if you're very pale. If all you want is to show up properly on Skype without looking like you're really wearing makeup, your best bet is probably to apply eyeshadow, eyeliner, eyebrow pencil, and lip color in a scheme called 'nude'. This is a terrible name for it, frankly; like 'nude' bras and 'nude...

To all y'all who have asked me "how do I put on makeup?": I cannot answer you unless you give me some idea of what you want to look like . "I want to look pretty," is NOT a helpful answer. Information on what you look like now, what your budget is, and how much trouble you are willing to go to in order to apply the stuff is also helpful, but I can literally give you nothing unless you tell me what your end goal is. You are effectively looking for lessons in how to paint. Manet and Jackson Polluck were both painters; getting "Olympia" out of pigments and canvas is a hell of a lot different than getting "No. 5". Your best bet is to find a picture of someone whose makeup you like and link me to it. Then I can tell you how to do that particular thing. Otherwise I'm helpless.

There's a photo I've been staring at, off and on, for about the past week, trying to work out if I could put my thoughts about it into words, and whether it would do anyone any good if I tried. After much writing and deleting and writing and deleting and writing and deleting with extreme prejudice, I think my point is: If ever there were an example of how we do the human race a grave disservice by using the very concept of intimacy solely as a euphemism for sex , it is these two. I have no idea where this picture was taken. It's a candid shot; the flat lighting suggests an unbounced flash, and the depth of field is not quite sufficient to get everything in focus at the same time. No pro would have done that intentionally -- and if it happened accidentally, the image would have been trashed with anything else that didn't quite work at the proofs stage. I don't know what prompted the gesture. They could be acting, I suppose, but they're comedians. When t...

Whenever I start writing up a profile on someone, I always end up going through things like fan blogs and message boards to find links to their material. And sooner or later, I always run into someone who thinks it is fun to start a conversation with, "If you could ask [celebrity] one question, what would it be?" It might surprise you to learn that I very rarely have a question that I'm dying to ask anybody. The few that do accumulate are universally either too stupid for words or very very nosy, except for the ones that are both stupid and nosy. The problem is that all of the really good, useful answers belong to questions that I don't know enough to ask. In real life, when something happens to bring a specific question to mind, I handle it by just asking point-blank for what I want to know; sometimes people are flustered or embarrassed, or flat out lie to me, but even the fact that they feel the need to lie about something gives me a lot of information. With the c...

Sometimes I wonder if other people can even see the subtitles I keep getting on conversations. One of the recent eps of NMTB was hosted by Richard Ayoade, whom you might recognize from the Boosh stuffs and also The IT Crowd . He has a positively superhuman deadpan, resistant to almost anything thrown his way -- although if you watch the gag reels for The IT Crowd , on the rare occasion that he does crack, Ayoade can't quit laughing and usually wrecks a dozen takes in a row. This episode is uniquely hilarious for the complete lack  of jokes from the host. Even if you didn't know they'd worked together before, it's easy to tell that Fielding at least knows of  Ayoade; he starts hiding behind his coffee mug and trying not to die laughing before anything's even really happened. Given whatever brief context you've picked up here from my babbling, what might the following exchange lead you to guess about Ayoade? My observations below.

I am surprised and somewhat bemused to discover that I am in fact wrong about having to be completely hosed before Luxury Comedy  is hilarious. It's total gibberish  unless your brain's working. Mog and I ran the first episode while we were lolling around legless and then I said 'sod it, back to Live At Brixton ', which I happen to think is shiny meta comedy gold in any state of mind. I attempted the thing again sober, and it works much, much better. It's not actually completely incoherent, although it's damned close if you can't recall the extremely loose excuse for a plot across the thoroughly random interstitial segments. It's very Python-esque, in that something from the beginning usually comes back to bite you by the end. And it reminds me oddly of things like a show I used to watch as a very very small child, Zoobilee Zoo , which had the same strange air of live-action cartoon-ish-ness. It's like some kind of sweet little musical play, except...

Anonymous writes: Thanks for this! I have zero sense for what makeup colors look good on me, so even though I would like to occasionally don lipstick to brighten up my very pale face, I haven't found one that doesn't make me feel clownish. I've tried visiting makeup counters at department stores, and they have been surprisingly unhelpful - they seem to expect you to already know what you want. I've had a couple of makeup counter salespeople try to help me pick a color, but everything looked garish on me. Suggestions? and Irene writes: Lipstick (in some traditional shade, of course, not blue or anything) as rouge -- yes or no? My mother used to recommend it, and it seems like the obvious way to get the cheeks to not clash with the lips, but I always fear that it's a classic newbie error. (I wear makeup roughly once every six months to a year -- usually lipstick and mascara.) Anonymous, you should wear any lipstick you thinks makes you look nice. A lot of sal...