Jack & Hill: A Beauty Blog - make-up, cosmetics, perfume, and the substance of style

Nancy Sinatra & Me

Chapter Three of Super Vixens' Dymaxion Lounge went up today, about a pool party at the Playboy Mansion circa 1996. Here's an excerpt:

I make my way back to the pool. I need a loo, and find one in a pool cabana that looks like a seventies wine bar, the kind of place that was always called The Hobbit. There's a dimmer switch next to the commode, and a bowl of bobby pins next to the sink. On the way out I bump into a woman in a tuxedo. She has a cigar in one hand and a sushi roll in the other.

I spot Mel Torme.

At the bar, I try to get a drink, but instead I end up in a pitch meeting with a loathsome, tubby creature who claims to be a movie producer. «It's a John Wayne, Tom Cruise kind of thing!» he exclaims. «A musical kickboxing thing!» As I turn to leave, he slips me his business card. «I went to college with Stallone,» he whispers.

I lose him, because the fifty-four-year-old Nancy Sinatra is about to make her comeback by performing «These Boots Are Made for Walking» on a cramped little stage...

Read the rest of the chapter here. I may have to tease my hair today, in tribute to Nancy.

Carla Sarkozy (née Bruni)

Seems like I’m the only one disappointed by what France’s first lady wore this week. With one bright exception, it was all dowdy, boring, unflattering, and terribly aging. I would have loved to have seen her break out one or two of her vintage catwalk looks for this trip. What a waste of beauty and allure.

Gwyneth Paltrow cut her hair

I might not normally find this worthy of a post (oh, who am I kidding?) but the fact that she has traded her long, flowing locks for this awkward length and blah style has moved me. The hell?

Beauties: Tilda Swinton

Tilda Swinton was like a Richard Neutra house plopped down in a tract of Hollywood McMansions on Sunday. Her bleak marble face, that curtain-wall column of a dress--next to that, even the normally quite modernist Hillary Swank looked like a fussy boudoir throw cushion, with all that lace.

Swinton's beauty is challenging, requiring the onlooker to strain and reach, to really experience the act of seeing. At first, for instance, you want desperately to give her eyebrows, but this would be wrong, very wrong, like putting a cornice on the Lever House.

If you try to understand Swinton's appearance in terms of the red carpet, or even in terms of of movie star, she is impossible to compute, but think of her in terms of an architectural statement, and it's possible that she's finally doing for beauty what Mies and Eliel did for architecture in the middle of the last century, ie, changing it forever, from the DNA up. Although it's possible that she will remain a splendid anomaly, like Kate Hepburn, who wasn't a skyscraper at all despite her height, but a yar sailing ship.

My boyfriend sent me a link to a story about her interesting love life--apparently the 50ish Ms Swinton lives with her 70ish artist husband and their children, and they are sometimes all joined in happy cohabitation by her 30ish artist lover. I think it's grand that this odd, elegant creature lives such a passionate life of her own devising (even if she was a communist in her 20s--why she couldn't just smoke crack like Amy Winehouse is beyond me. At least she has the decency to be a rich communist.).

I just got samples for MAC's new line of austere neutral shades, and I will be experimenting with them with new respect, now that Swinton has set the bar for stark elegance so very high. I may have to try going without eyebrows, or taking a young artist lover--and fair being fair, if my boyfriend wanted to bring Tilda home and paint her in the nude at our rambling country manor, I'd have to let him. We'd just have to steer clear from politics at the dinner table.

Katherine Heigl's Oscar hair

I learned too late (as in less than a year ago) how aging it is to wear your hear curly and big when it's this length. But I didn't have the benefit of a team of expensive stylists. So it pains me to see Katherine Heigl wearing this look. As my boy Michael K put it, "Joanna Kerns wants her hair back."

It is nice to see a picture of her without a cigarette for a change, though.

Lindsay Lohan as Marilyn Monroe

My five word review: 21 never looked so beat.

For real, how alarming are these pictures (NSFW, duh)? I know she smokes like a chimney, but that's no reason for her to look like Magda from There's Something About Mary.

Scarlett Johannson + Natalie Portman: The W cover

This is the best they could do? Seriously?

ScarJo looks like a little girl playing dress-up - and not in a charming way. NatPo looks gorgeous as usual, but boring. Hate her fugly top, and the collars they're wearing are blah. This whole cover annoys me.

Oh well, at least we have Scarlett's ample bosom to comfort us...

Beyoncé at the Grammys

She looks like a Real Doll (link possibly NSFW) in this picture, but I thought she killed it last night with her highlighted, wavy hair and that perfect skin. This is one celebrity who I can take or leave, but last night she really made the most of what she's got. Don't even get me started on her strong, beautiful body.

Britney's makeover

I feel really sad about Britney Spears. My ultimate fantasy for her is that she gets the help she desperately needs, gets to make everything up to her kids, and becomes the world's most notable advocate for understanding of manic depression. I want good things for her and wish the rest of the world would, too.

That said...this is not encouraging. I will let Michael K articulate it for me:

Hairstylist, Kim Vo, spent four long hours doing Britney's rat's nest the other day and this is the final result. It went from looking like a dirty rat's nest to looking like.....a dirty snake's nest. I'm trying to look for turtle eggs in there. Horrendous.

...I don't understand how brand new extensions could look like that. It looks like he made her a weave from the hair that gets stuck in the shower drain.

I might cry if we start to talk about the ever-present stains/wet spots all over her clothes. Everyone's rock bottom looks different, and I cannot imagine what Britney's is going to look like. I have a feeling we're all going to find out, though.

Leona Lewis

That hair (it can't be real), those eyes, that skin...I just wish they'd let her be herself and not a Mariah Carey impersonator.