Many young people now spend hours in their bedrooms, perfecting extraordinarily intricate looks to put up online
āItās literally art!ā 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 Bjƶrk into a vagina-flower hybrid for the cover of her Utopia album, and Antoinette Mahr, whose trademark multicoloured style was clearly the inspiration for Provenzanoās 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. āThatās like saying to someone who does A-level art and is painting all the time, āOh you shouldnāt be doing that, you should be doing something more academic.ā Itās just art, but itās on your face.ā
Pulling out her phone, Provenzano shows me a list of makeup looks she would like to master. Her inspirations are diverse and obscure. āIād really like to do an Error 404-inspired look,ā she muses. āYou know when something glitches online? Itās mainly black and white, but also green and red.ā I browse the list ā what does the āeyebrow slits ⦠but everywhereā entry mean? āIāve already done that one!ā she says. āIād 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.ā
I live in a little village in Northamptonshire. Iāve 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, āAre you sure this is for Halloween?'
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