Black Eyeliner

“…it can get dirty and you don’t have to worry. You know, you can spill coffee on it… I mean, I am getting a little tired of it now… I tried for two or three years and then I went back to this; because it’s so— I think it really is about not wanting, for me. I don’t want to feel. I don’t want to worry about myself, I want to be out of myself and I don’t want to worry about my body. I don’t want to worry about anything. I don’t want to worry about it…” told Annie Leibovitz, the final photographer of a living John Lennon to Bella Freud, granddaughter of the father of psychoanalysis, on her psycho-fashion-focused podcast Fashion Neurosis. Aside the convenience of the color, and a small stint of sprinkled shirts when having child; her reasoning being an interesting explanation; an apparel chosen so as to dissociate from her own external persona. A black-flat-affect, so to say. 

Regarding fashion and its actual impact on a person’s psyche, undoubtedly as a person is what they eat, they regret what their attire refracts, chosen for aesthetic effect. Not as cause, more a contributing factor. Perspective taken in by the senses; light refracting into the eyes for sight, historically has a fair role in life as well as in general health: during the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918, treated patients placed outside into open-air wards gained an increased likelihood for survival in recovery. 

Under settings a bit over a century later in more modern refractions of data, the change from yellow lighting to pale, fluorescent and its subsequent salience is a poignant pick. The former being warm, nostalgic, infectious but pleasant; while the updated replacement is stale, sterile and coldly reminiscent of a hospital or morgue— a place uninviting. 

Simultaneously, sitting in the sun and that truly warm light the yellow imitates, can cause skin cancer and land one in for that final hospital stay regardless of mode of dress. With that it’s not so black and white, rather a refutation of that polarity. Humans are not vampires outside of kinks and rare allergies; the sun is needed for nutrition as much as nightly negations of it are as a matter of balanced being. 

Interestingly however, both pale and yellow lighting are uncanny in their own reflections in their own way. Similar to the analogy regarding morality and the aesthetic based qualms about killing one and simple flicks of the wrist in attempts at the other, it’s almost a false binary in that. Yellow feeds into nostalgia while pale lighting is almost designed for depression. The moon’s refraction isn’t pale, it’s with a silver hue that separates it from the sun; though it is with the same light-style as a morgue, “the moon attracts and repels alternately the fluid of the earth, and thus produces the ebb and flow of the sea…” [Transcendental Magic, Eliphas Levi] Light within the dark making it possible for life; and dark encompassing it so as to allow for a balanced breath in the midst of solar heat. 

Departing momentarily to a brighter hue and quoting American designer Pauline Trigère, who urged simply, “when you’re feeling blue, wear red,” and in response and extended explanation in her guidebook Your Beauty Mark, Dita Von Teese asks on this advice and answers extensively. 

“How essential is red to a wardrobe? As my makeup artist friend Gregory Arlt likes to quip: ‘Red is the little black dress of makeup!’”

[…]

“So are the powers of a red lip that the color is unequal to any other shade of lipstick. In traffic, red might mean stop. Yet everywhere else in life, it connotates action. Ancient civilizations applied red face paint for fertility rituals. Artists color passion, lust, and anger in red. Witches claim it is the most potent of colors in a spell… Scientists have established that seeing red increases heart rate, blood pressure, and hunger… two researchers in 2008 […] found that whether the forces are societal or biological, the color red acts as an aphrodisiac for men: they find women in red more attractive…”

Bulls charge at the color, however analogous that statement can be used in differing contexts, all are with the same gist; red is an invigorating color. Historical aesthetics however, has been quite saturated in and remembered in “monochromatic celluloid” and the polar coloring being testament to the big screen’s influence. Evolving into the pale blue hue bleeding into eyes from pocket devices in the middle of the night. 

Being a matter of perspective the style and interpretation of the presented image can be manipulated by various changes of frame. Literally. All however seems to be active inductions of dissociative phenomena, similar to Annie Liebovitz’s personal experience with black; a more monotone, apathetic application of mirror neurons in regards to one’s own existence.