Toronto Fashion Week Spring 2013 backstage beauty: It’s all about aerodynamic hair and makeup at Sid Neigum

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“It’s more about a mood than a theme,” said M.A.C makeup key Melissa Gibson of the beauty look for Sid Neigum’s Spring 2013 show. Featuring a strong eyebrow, smoky eyes and matte skin, Gibson referenced Helmut Newton and “Cindy Crawford in the ’90s” as inspiration. “It’s not just a heavy black smoky eye…there’s an edge to it, the fleck of grey metallic in there brightens it up for spring and summer.” To build this graphic-yet-soft look, she used a mix of three M.A.C eyeshadows–“Carbon,” “Print” and “Typographic” ($18 each, maccosmetics.com)—diffusing the pigment across the eye and blending out any straight lines. Fluidline eyeliner in “Blacktrack” ($18, maccosmetics.com) was also diffused at the lashline and lashes were curled and given two coats of mascara for extra drama. But it was two winged-out lines across the brows that completed the look, which was a last minute addition from Gibson: “At the end I threw on that eyebrow and that did it!”

Equally aerodynamic was the hair, which was pulled back in a low ponytail and covered with a nylon stocking headwrap. “I don’t know if we’ve actually developed an official term—I want to refrain from calling it a doo-rag!” said Charise Bauman, lead hair stylist for Aveda Institute Toronto. She prepped the sleek look by applying Aveda Light Elements Smoothing Fluid ($27, aveda.com) to wet hair and blowdrying throughout. Quarter-inch sections of hair were flatironed to further polish the look and then the hair was secured in a tight ponytail at the nape of the neck. Nylon stockings—“Just your basic girls’ nylon stocking!”—were deconstructed, wrapped around the head and tied to the ponytail. The final step was disguising the ends of the stocking by wrapping a section of hair over it. While this hair-around-the-hair-elastic trick is nothing new, Bauman offered a tip to make it absolutely foolproof: “I think when women have short layers it can be hard to get that extra bit of hair [to wrap], so I take that subsection first, wrap it around a quarter-inch curling iron and then [hair] spray it in place—sometimes you don’t even need to use [bobby] pins!”

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