Do women really want to look this battered?

By Mao Shan Wang

Beautiful eyes. Who doesn’t want them, especially those of us not especially blessed, and need some tools of colour for enhancement? But I really can’t make out the make-up du jour. From Chanel’s single blacken eye to Julia Fox’s total black out, what is really going on? Why, at a time when we really want to look healthy and unscarred by a unrelenting virus, does any woman desire to give the impression that she was abused? Willingly! Or, is this some self-pummeling as a beauty expression I—and, presumably, you—know not of? If I were to leave my home looking like that, people I know (and do not) would be very worried. Either my eye make-up skill has gone to the dogs, or domestic violence—no laughing matter—has roosted in my home.

The Chanel models I can understand. They did not have a choice in the colour of their eye makeup, nor the intensity of the make-believe bruise. But for Julia Fox, a woman then dating the most powerful man in music and fashion, the indefatigable Kanye West (they reportedly broke up in the middle of this month), and attending the Kenzo and Schiaparelli shows with her beau, the black eyes offered not quite positive optics for the actress and the man next two her, known to be somewhat misogynistic (how do you call his attack of Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish?). Could this be Mr West’s doing—a compulsory makeover of the women he dates? Or was Ms Fox trying to look as sexy as Diggs of Cats and Dogs?

I am tempted to see this trend as makeup brands attempting to sell more eye colour. Chanel’s runway looks certainly impacted their makeup division bigly before—remember the nail colour Vamp? Or was 1994 too long ago? Dark nail polish (and it would get darker), while totally new then, was not suggestive of violence (Vamp would go on to be so successful that it was ranked fifth all-time best-selling nail colour of the previous century) willfully inflicted on women. But a black eye socket? So that fashionable women could appear as though there were physically assaulted? Or, in the case of Chanel, like they fell off a horse? I give up.