At times, happiness at all costs can become tiresome and exhilaration makes way for new yearnings of dark emotion and unexplored nostalgia. Feelings, madness and the dream are today’s new luxuries, giving prominence to personality above frivolous appearances that have become boring of late. It isn’t merely the fault of a too fast and short lived stylistic excess, because the rules are always the same, to reaction, action. Interest in a season of overindulgence is forgotten and replaced with a glow-to-go outlook that ‘illuminates beauty with immensity’, exploring the centuries in the search of a little ‘savoir vivre’. In a kind of illusory wheel of eternally repeating to oneself there is a true Romantic remake but with a difference; from the past we only distill the one thing in harmony with the present and that is light. This is because light and regeneration are the ying and yang of a new beauty concept, ‘more with less’.
So, panta rei and back to the past! More precisely the past of Shakespeare’s heroines, feminine and educated, whose grace results from the balance between light and dark. The sleeping beauties of English 19th century paintings have awoken and are among us, more metropolitan than ever! They are looking for fun with strobing strokes for a long lasting, all-over radiance for cheek bones, nose, cupid’s bow and the centre of the forehead. Dark and light isn’t just a look but a way of life: light therapy and iridescent textures like life’s surprises; meditative darkness to shape the face, reminiscent of those heady sensations when your mind drifts off in thought.
In such sophisticated surroundings, good taste abounds and you aspire to the essential but certainly not without pleasure. Romantic women love the slow life that helps identify the right pace for heart and skin. The glowing look setting, very important to artists like Blake, has faded from paintings and now with detox cures and oxygen boosters, is in a shade accessible to all of us. Art dresses us in light and cosmetics grace us with a radiant complexion thanks to barrier effect products and global protection against pollution and radiation.
What more can we say? The past teaches us. If by chance then, the glow-to-go effect should be late arriving, whisper the incantation –Lumos maxima– with determination and conviction. It might help, but without Harry Potter around… will it work? Let’s turn the light on our beauty routine and get in line for the next art exhibition because in front of Hayez’s kiss your face will beam.
