On Beauty | Two-Tone Eye Shadow, Double the Effect

This season opposites attract, as eyes are dusted with complementary colors for a moody two-tone effect.
For every makeup look that strives to be effortless and invisible — the nude-toned lip, the beige contoured cheek, the clear-mascara-swiped lash — there will be equal instances of the opposite, outré effect. Such is the case with the color-blocked eyes created by the makeup artist Tom Pecheux for the fall 2013 runways. At the Altuzarra show in New York, he decorated the lids in a steely gray shadow, then smeared a contrasting purplish red under the lower lashes for what he refers to as a “tragic chic” look. “It reminds me of a ....................
woman who’s been crying and rubbed her eyes,” he says.
At Max Mara in Milan, Pecheux did the reverse: painting a mercury tone under the eyes and a prune shade above the lids, in two wide bands that extended past the brows. While the look might skew a bit ’70s glam-rock, Pecheux says he goes into each show “with a clear head, no references,” yet admires the work of the late fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez, who often painted similarly vivid strokes in Pop Art colors around the eyes when doing sketches of his glamorous muses like Jerry Hall and Pat Cleveland.
But lifted from a runway, or sketch pad, is the look wearable? Well, maybe not to the morning dog run, but Pecheux insists the technique isn’t terribly complicated. “Two-tone for me is pretty simple,” he says. “It just depends on the colors you choose to contrast with.” He explains that dark eye shadows will read dirty, sexy and grunge-y, while lighter, icy shades are more delicate and polished. His advice is to take a “powerful” shade, like cobalt blue, rich plum or emerald, and trace a thin streak of it across the upper lash line. On the bottom, try a “dainty, romantic” color on the opposite end of the spectrum, like baby blue or champagne. “I’d start off with one layer of each color, and then experiment to see how far you want to push the look,” Pecheux advises. The makeup artist François Nars agrees, saying that the effect is “only as intimidating as the person allows it to be,” and recommends balancing it with luminous skin and little to no color on the cheeks.
More adventurous types should consider framing the eyes in wider swaths of color, and employing an angled makeup brush to sketch sharp lines, Pecheux says. Just be careful when choosing a shade. “It needs to be a strong red tone. If the color is too light, it can look like you have the worst flu ever,”