Last week Jessie J turned up at The Brits wearing blue lipstick. It got slammed - so slammed she's since tweeted, 'The lip didn't work. Get over it. I have. On to the next look!' But turns out hers wasn't just a bad look or an anomaly: blue lipstick is having a resurgence. And it can look good(ish) if Hunger Games actress Amandla Stenberg, 15, has anything to do with it. Witness the blue lips with a navy lipliner thing she did at the Costume Designers Guild Awards in LA.
To give credit where credit's due, Amandla was way ahead of this curve. 'My mother is amazed by the fact that people wear light blue lipstick,' she tweeted in October of last year (around the time Rihanna was also spotted wearing it) which is no doubt something that most mothers would say. As beauty looks go, blue lips are pretty polarising. But Amandla totally pulled it off and we were so curious as to how she'd managed it - we're thinking her innate youthful coolness helped - we called up Benefit's Head Make-Up Artist And Brow Expert Lisa Potter-Dixon to get the debrief. (Sorry).
'It works because not only has she kept the rest of her outfit neutral, but she's clearly really confident with it,' she told us. 'The Costume Designers Guild Awards is a prestigious, classic event, so it's a brave choice. It also works because she's defined the lips, with a dark blue pencil. There aren't really any decent blue lipsticks around yet - there are some coming out later this year - so she's actually wearing facepint on her lips, with a navy blue eyeliner as lipliner. I'd recommend using face paint, actually, as it's matte rather than oil-based like lipstick, so it will stay on longer.'
So why didn't Jessie' J's work, then? 'Jessie's was a bit of a 'meh' whitey blue and there was no definition of the lip. It is an obscure colour and you have to show that you're not afraid of the trend. Choose a deeper blue, accentuate it with a lip-liner and keep the rest of your outfit lowkey. Do not attempt blue lipstick with a blue dress!' explains Lisa.
Blue lips aside, Amandla's been creeping onto our radar ('rad' being the operative word) for a little while. Not just because of her super-sweet rendition as Ru in The Hunger Games....
.... or because she's a mega violinist and currently playing in a three-piece LA band called Hawley. But because she's witty and insightful and really good friends with all the other supersmart teenagers who are causing a total sandstorm of interest in modern culture right now, including _Mad Me_n's Kiernan Shipka (Mindy Kaling got so over-excited by this that she actually tweeted 'RU AND SALLY DRAPER ARE FRIENDS'), Tavi and Lorde (wait does that mean, by default, she's also mates with Tay Tay?)
Should you need more convincing, witness Tavi and Amandla's conversation with Slutever's Karley Sciortino for Dazed. In it, Amandla offers us an honest and depressing insight into why she doesn't consider most of young Hollywood - the Hailees, the Elles, et al - as competition. 'Being a young African-American woman definitely narrows my choices' she explains. 'Most of the time directors and writers have very specific casting intentions, or there's a family and it's already been decided that the parents are Caucasian'.
Put simply, she isn't offered the same roles as most other famous young actors her age, therefore eliminating 'catiness and competitiveness' for the roles. But we've got a hunch that's going to all change.
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Pictures: Getty
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.