Body makeup

Body makeup is foundation for the body, and it comes in three strengths. Sheer tints and wash-off bronzers even out tone and add colour for a day, like a tinted moisturiser for the legs. Face-and-body foundations are thin, flexible liquids that cover more and are sold to survive heat and water. At the far end are camouflage creams, dense with pigment and made to hide veins, scars, vitiligo and tattoos.

All of them solve the same problem. The body moves, sweats and rubs against clothes, and it is far larger than a face, so body makeup has to spread thin over a wide area, dry before it meets fabric and stay put when it does. It is not self-tan, which colours the top layer of skin for days, nor a shimmer oil or luminiser, which adds light rather than coverage.

Choose by what you are covering. For uneven tone, a fading tan or freckled legs, a sheer tint or wash-off bronzer is enough, looks most like skin, and comes off in the shower. For redness, bruises and small veins, a face-and-body foundation or a leg makeup spray gives more cover while staying thin. For tattoos, scars and vitiligo, use a camouflage cream: heavily pigmented, applied in thin layers and set with powder. Dark ink usually needs a corrector first — an orange or peach shade to cancel blue-black — before the skin-coloured layer, which is how tattoo-cover wheels are arranged.

Match the shade to the body, not to the face. Legs and arms are often paler or more tanned than the face, and the chest is often redder; test on the inside of the knee or the forearm, in daylight. And read the claims as claims: water, sweat and transfer resistance are the makers’ own, and depend on the product being set as they direct.

Exfoliate the day before rather than the hour before, so that the skin is smooth but not raw, and moisturise lightly well ahead, so that the makeup grips instead of slipping. Work in sections — one shin, then the other — with a mitt, a large kabuki brush or the hands, spreading a little product thinly and going lightly over knees, ankles and elbows, where dry skin grabs colour. Sprays are best sprayed into the palm or onto a mitt and smoothed on, not aimed at the leg. Build a second thin layer only where it is needed.

Let it dry fully before dressing: most body makeup is sold as transfer-resistant once set, not while wet. Press loose powder over creams and camouflage with a puff, and mist a setting spray over a tattoo cover that has to last. Wash your hands and check your palms. At the end of the day take it off with soap and water or, for waterproof formulas, an oil or makeup remover, and keep pale sheets and collars out of reach until you do.

Body makeup is older than the stocking shortage that made it famous. At the end of the nineteenth century women whitened the neck, shoulders, back and arms that evening dress left bare with liquid powders, applied with a sponge; in 1893 a theatrical costumier told a magazine that many used “a sort of enamel—sold liquid in bottles” on their shoulders and arms, adding that “theatrical grease paints cannot be used in daylight; they are too crude.” On the stage the equivalent was wet white, a water-based make-up less likely than greasepaint to come off on contact, which made it the body make-up of dancers and chorus girls.^[1] The Berlin greasepaint house Leichner made one, Eau de Lys, for exactly that trade.^[2]

Colour for the legs came next. Doraldina’s Leg Make-up of 1927 was sold to replace stockings; in 1929 a London store’s “hosiery cream” was being worn by actresses and by girls on seaside holidays; and lotions such as Dorothy Gray’s Finishing Lotion of 1929 and Elizabeth Arden’s Velva Beauty Film of 1933 gave legs the look of a tan. The wartime chapter, when stockings vanished and cosmetic houses large and small sold leg make-up in their place, taught chemists much of what went into post-war foundations; afterwards leg make-up shrank back to a way of looking tanned.^[3] Leichner’s London company added Island Tan, “a cream make-up in large tubes”, in 1949, and later Tan Klear, a liquid body make-up.^[4] When cosmetics moved into aerosol cans in the 1950s and 1960s, make-up was, in the historian James Bennett’s words, “a noticeable omission, with the possible exception of a spray-on leg make-up”.^[5]

Covering marks on the body grew out of covering them on the face. Lydia O’Leary, who devised Covermark for her own port-wine stain, had by 1936 added a Waterproof Covermark that would “remain intact throughout the day no matter how wet it becomes” and was “therefore also recommended for blemishes on the hands”, and her creams were used on birthmarks, X-ray burns, varicose veins and vitiligo.^[6] The airbrush came from the cinema: it was first used to apply liquid make-up on Ben-Hur in 1959, to tan the cast and extras.^[5] Today’s leg sprays, body blurs and tattoo covers are those lines — the stage, the tan and the cover — sold side by side.