Campaign images like this make my heart swell. (Photo courtesy of 19/99 Beauty.)
There’s a scene in Killing Eve where assassin-for-hire Villanelle (Jodie Comer) chides fellow murderess Dasha (70-year-old Harriet Walter, all attitude and pencilled-on brows) for lighting a cigarette. “If you quit smoking you would look ten years younger.”
“Why would I want to look ten years younger?” Dasha shoots back. I may not kill people for a living (do what you love, right?) but I agree with Dasha. I am officially past trying, or caring.
Harriet Walter as Dasha, taking a break from her exhausting job.
This freeing attitude aligns with the vision behind 19/99 Beauty, a new cosmetics line for women who “want to define their own beauty and don’t give a shit about what is considered appropriate.” The collection is meant for women from 19 to 99 (get it?), but I like to believe it was created just for fifty-plus women.
19/99 Beauty’s Voros is a bold, assertive red. (Photo courtesy of 19/99 Beauty.)
The brainchild of former Bite Beauty executives, Stephanie Spence and Camille Katona, 19/99 Beauty is their response to seeing “diversity becoming more mainstream, but still under one lens of beauty,” Katona tells me. “We saw an opportunity to widen this one definition and create something new.”
For the products, the duo collaborated with longtime makeup artist Simone Otis, who herself felt ignored by advertising’s default representations of older women: “there’s the wacky old lady with blue hair or the Ralph Lauren woman,” she told me, identifying two of the culture’s more fatigued tropes. (I was nodding so furiously in agreement at this part, I may have pulled something.)
Adds Otis: “Why can’t I look cool? I just want to look cool.”
To that end, the line “merges a fashionable aesthetic with a message that is open and honest, but still comes from a place that’s beautifully branded and inspiring,” adds Spence. And that’s the thing, isn’t it? Makeup is meant to be fun and transformative and cheering. And while it’s nice to have lofty marketing rhetoric, it’s ultimately about the products.
Elaisha & Michelle both wearing Voros (Photo courtesy of 19/99 Beauty)
19/99 Beauty launched this past April with a transparent high-shine gloss and one universally-wearable, red pencil, Voros (red in Hungarian, fyi). “Red is timeless, ageless,” explains Katona. “And you can apply (the pencil) precisely or diffuse it for something softer.” (Witness the red used on both lips and eyes in the top image.)
Elaisha in the Lustro highlighter pencil. (Photo courtesy of 19/99 Beauty.)
The collection is small and carefully considered. Along with the red, there’s pinky nude Neutra, and now, just-launched eye pencils, a rich brown (Barna), and a champagne (Lustro), each formulated to be used anywhere on the face, and each only $26CAN. (There is also a US site at 1999beauty.com.) Bolder shades are expected next spring.
The pencils are made in Italy and are the high quality you’d expect from a pricier luxury brand. (Do not get me started on the disappointment that is the ‘merely okay’ quality of a lot of the offerings from direct-to-consumer industry star, Glossier. Products that you will receive through the mail really need to “surprise and delight,” to use this most cliched of marketing terms.)
19/99’s pencils are richly pigmented, the highlighter has the perfect shimmer-to-transparency ratio (no disco ball here, just luminosity) and they all glide smoothly over skin, which is key when wielding a pencil anywhere in the vicinity of an over-50 eyelid.
And if you do catch the vibe and want to try the red as eyeliner, the duo couldn’t be happier.
“Makeup is temporary,'“ observes Spence. “wear a brighter bolder colour even if it’s just for an hour— or five minutes.”