Many young people now spend hours in their bedrooms, perfecting extraordinarily intricate looks to put up online
‘It’s literally art!” exclaims 16-year-old Milly Provenzano, sitting cross-legged on her single bed. Her eyeshadow is like the plumage of a tropical bird: blue, pink and yellow, to match the rainbow lettering on her Pride T-shirt. On the wall above her, Provenzano has taped up photographs of her favourite Instagram makeup stars: drag artist Hungry, famed for transforming Björk into a vagina-flower hybrid for the cover of her Utopia album, and Antoinette Mahr, whose trademark multicoloured style was clearly the inspiration for Provenzano’s look today. I have asked the teenager from Kettering, Northamptonshire, to justify the many hours she spends alone in her room, perfecting fabulously complicated makeup looks. “That’s like saying to someone who does A-level art and is painting all the time, ‘Oh you shouldn’t be doing that, you should be doing something more academic.’ It’s just art, but it’s on your face.”
Pulling out her phone, Provenzano shows me a list of makeup looks she would like to master. Her inspirations are diverse and obscure. “I’d really like to do an Error 404-inspired look,” she muses. “You know when something glitches online? It’s mainly black and white, but also green and red.” I browse the list – what does the “eyebrow slits … but everywhere” entry mean? “I’ve already done that one!” she says. “I’d just given myself an eyebrow slit, and I woke up in the middle of the night and thought, why not do it everywhere on my face? So I got a tiny brush and concealer, and drew lines through my makeup.”
I live in a little village in Northamptonshire. I’ve never seen anyone walking around with a rainbow eye or in drag
I sneakily told my mum I had a Halloween party so we could buy makeup. She asked, ‘Are you sure this is for Halloween?'
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