The Big Fade

U.S. women have acquired a new face. It is the pale pale look. And in the look, the eye is the thing.

Almost unnoticeably, other features have been fading. First to go was the vivid mouth. By 1961 beige lipsticks, or maybe the faintest pink or tangerine, were de rigueur. Next, bright rouge was replaced by the merest tint of color brushed on the cheekbone to accent the eye. Now eyebrows have to go. Cosmeticians have decided they are merely distracting. Short of shaving them off (shaved brows sometimes won't grow back), the experts are advocating any camouflage method: bleaching, masking them with foundation creams, or even covering them up with a fringe of bangs.

Straight to the Eyeball. Nothing is too good for the eye itself. "Men gaze first into a woman's eyes even before her decolletage," says Elizabeth Arden's top Makeup Artist Pablo. Eyes are outlined in black and thatched with double-thick layers of false lashes. "We want to direct attention straight into the eyeball," says Saks Fifth Avenue's Evelyn Marshall. Lest eyelids get in the way of the ultimate goal, cosmetic firms are now touting a frosty white eye shadow to replace the usual blues and greens. Heavily applied, such white eye shadow gives a pale glow all the way up to the nonexistent eyebrows. The end product of all this work is a mysterious, ethereal face showing a few good bones and two enormous orbs floating in a sea of neutral beige.

The big fade has been carried onto the beach this summer. Not since the days of the Victorian heroine, when pallor was considered a sign of gentle breeding, has the pale pale look been so sought after. The glowing, suntanned American beauty is being replaced in many places by the unsunkissed miss hiding herself under a ruffly parasol, straight out of Gone With the Wind. "Tanning ages skin," says Evelyn Marshall. "It etches those lines around the eyes and mouth." As another expert put it, "The cordovan look is definitely out, and this applies to the whole body, not just the face."

The Lily-White Look. The cosmetic houses, always adaptable, have taken the new look in stride. While still turning out creams, lotions and sprays for the fastest and darkest tan around, they have smoothly introduced products that will prevent the tan. A generous application of the nongreasy, colorless Sun Bloc, by Elizabeth Arden, Skolex or Sun Umbrella, leaves the sportswoman as lily-white all over after 18 holes of golf as she was on the first tee.

A simpler and quicker solution is a floppy hat and one of the new burnoose-like robes. If this makes a girl look like a Bedouin housewife, does she care? No. Like the Bedouin girl, she is less interested in how she looks at the moment she has it on than how she will look later, when she takes it off.

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