That’s before she met licensed esthetician Michelle Phillips who has “a passion to analyze the skin.” She likes to help women recognize how makeup often works against itself (and us) to make us look older than we are.

“One thing a woman doesn’t want to do is to get lost in her same old makeup, say, the lipstick she has worn for the last 25 years,” said Sandra Bodnar, a teacher in the esthetician program at the Lancaster School of Cosmetology.

Color in makeup needs to be updated because, like hairstyles, makeup changes with fashion and can quickly become outdated, she continued. “The look of the skin is an individual style. Correct colors and finishes must be applied to the jawline in daylight or in the special lighting of a makeup counter. Find a makeup artist who can look at the structure of the face, skin tone, eye color and hair color and advise you on what is best for you.”

Phillips works in a small office at the Physicians Day Spa on Harrisburg Pike, under the supervision of Dr. David Silbert, an oculoplastic surgeon — one who specializes in cosmetic, corrective and reconstructive surgery of the structures around the eye.

Phillips found her dream job, a second career — helping post-surgical patients and “women whose makeup is out of fashion” to learn how to apply medical-grade cosmetic treatments and products. Medically based skin-care products are more aggressive, more concentrated than over-the-counter products, according to Phillips, and so must be dispensed by licensed practitioners, who are trained to explain the precautions. In a medical setting, the client’s history, diagnosis and follow-up care are part of the process.

Medical-quality skin products provide no ground for infection, she said. For example, they can be used to camouflage the redness that results from laser resurfacing that is often part of medical correction for wrinkles, deep facial lines, droopy lids or eyebrows.

Quality control on medically based skin-care products allows her to dispense and monitor the use of products containing such active ingredients as copper, Vitamin C or glycolic acids or retinoid products that are effective in a stronger concentration than you can buy over-the-counter, she said.

Enter Siglin with her lavender eye shadow, a leftover from her high school years (Manheim Township Class of 1979).

Her custom: To go to the drugstore and find a color she liked, without even trying it on her skin. Most often, she said, she would buy makeup to match her dress.

“Uh oh,” said Phillips, “Blue eye shadow to match a blue dress does not go anymore.

“Yet we are not born with a makeup gene,” she continued. “Women do not automatically understand makeup.”

Siglin was ready for something new this year and Phillips went to work, educating. “We want to see how pretty her eyes are,” she said, “not how pretty her makeup is.

“Jennifer has natural luminosity. We want to remove old makeup, condition the skin and allow its true nature to come through.”

Eyebrows

When we get older, our eyebrows get thin. We lose the frame of the face and without brows, you fade into the wall. “We need them,” Phillips said.

Marlene Dietrich and the stars of the black-and-white era of film would shave their eyebrows, then paint a black line above the eyes. That hard style aged them, she said, rather than creating a soft, younger look. The natural look comes by trimming the eyebrows, then applying eyeliner by looking in a lighted magnifying glass, she said. Go right into the lash and use a pencil that moves with the skin but does not tug at the skin. Move from inside to outside on each eye.

Phillips uses a fine brush for a mascara applicator. “For eye makeup, we want a blended line, never hard,” she said.

Siglin confesses that she has become a collector of brushes, emulating her teacher.

Lip Liner

Line the lips, then color inside the lips with a brush. Dark colors recede, so use light colors and glosses to bring out the lips. A lip brush works color into the lines of the lips, but a stick of lipstick just sweeps across them and the effect is not long-lasting.

Wrinkles

We often overly obsess about them, said Phillips. Many women in their 80s have wrinkles, yet they still have fresh, dewy skin with good color and luminosity that is the result of good care.


The cosmetic trend is toward a monochromatic palette, she said. As we get older, less is more on the face. Bright pink blush or bright red lipstick, applied with many layers of product is out of fashion and harsh.

“You don’t want to look like a pumpkin — (carved, contrived and waxy),” said Bodnar.

Roberta Strickler’s e-mail address is rstrickler@lnpnews.com.