Home | Beauty | Make-up trends | JFW 2012 S/S: Jenny Fax - James Molloy interview

Molloy, Director of Artistry for Asia and Pacific at M.A.C Cosmetics

Perfect skin, red eyeliner, and the latests make-up trends

We interviewed James Molloy, Director of Artistry for Asia and Pacific at M.A.C Cosmetics, backstage at the Jenny Fax S/S 2012 Fashion Show, at the Japan Fashion Week in Tokyo. With James Molloy we talked about the make-up for this show and about the latest trends in make-up, the make-up trends we can find in his very personal re-interpretation for this very interesting and original fashion show.

What was the inspiration for the make-up look for the Jenny Fax fashion show spring summer 2012?

The inspiration for this show is a kind of social theme. It is about, let's say, the ladder in school. Everybody knows that at school we usually have the popular girls and then you sometimes also have the less popular girl who is probably in heavy music, and she doesn't fit the social norm. The whole idea was beautiful on the inside as well as on the outside, so perhaps this girl is bullied a little bit by the popular girls.

This idea really pays well for the make-up look. For the popular girls we did an almost too perfect looking skin and dolly lips and eyelashes. Everything is really sweet looking. And then, to give it the edge we used a really bright vivid red color for the eyes. This gives the beautiful girl this kind of coldness. They are beautiful but they are actually quite cold sometimes. And then we have the other girl. She is kind of into heavy metal, into Kiss and she wears the Kiss mask.

As an overall concept it really reads trough to high school life, to teenage life and how hard this life can be sometimes. When everyone else seems perfect, you may be the different one but that is doesn't mean it is not right. When Jenny Fax told me the inspiration for her show I thought it was a really interesting concept for the make-up.

Which are the actual make-up trends that you have put into this particular make-up look?

A really current trend from Paris and Milan was an ultrashiny and ultraperfect skin. For this we used Studio Sculpt Mac Foundation which is a backstage favorite. It makes the skin super plump and really healthy. It is really a good foundation because of the technology of the product. It mimics perfect, nearly plastic skin and it looks also perfect under the lights. I noticed that these days girls want their skins to look almost like 'photoshopped'. Almost too perfect. Studio Sculpt makes it really easy to create such a skin.

So here we have a skin trend with an accent which is the bold red accent around the eyes. To create this vivid red accent for the eyes we used a basic red Chromagraphic Pencil which is one of M.A.C Pro products. You can use it for lips, eyes, for drawing body art. And we painted eyelashes. We took a standard M.A.C. eyelash (number 34) and we painted it in this red so that the lash is also bright red. The red eyeliner and the red eyelashes create the effect of a haze of red around the eyes.

And the lips are almost too pretty. We used a really sugary pink lipgloss which is for me kind of ultimate in girly lip colors. We choose a very Barbie Doll pink that goes with the rest of the face to make the make-up almost too pretty.

What can the normal girl copy from this make-up when she goes to school, to work?

I think she can take so much... if you just look at the models! Any girl would like her skin to look like that. And the pink lips are also very inspiring for normal life. Maybe you would not rock in the red eyeliner and red eyelashes, but I think that every girl can really go for a perfect skin as we see in this show. A really fresh skin that doesn't look like foundation.

We thank M.A.C Japan for the interview http://www.maccosmetics.co.jp/

Charlotte Mesman and Alessio Cristianini for Adversus