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Character makeup: Mrs Meers of ‘Thoroughly Modern Millie’

This week in makeup class I was assigned the task of designing makeup for a real character. I choose Mrs Meers from the play Thoroughly Modern Millie because she is over the top, and makes for interesting makeup choices. Her character is a  retired actress who is white, but is now pretending to be Chinese (but she doesn’t do a very good job). She is evil, but also comic relief so, her evil isn’t too threatening…it’s more tacky.

I choose to make my face look a little older, with smile lines, an older jaw and more bony cheeks, but I didn’t want to appear too old, because surely an actress as full of herself as Meers would take care of her face.

Meers makeup with green eye shadow and brown lip liner.

The strangest part about this makeup is the eyebrows. I wanted to block out my own and redraw them higher for more drama! But I have such dark eyebrows that up close you can totally still see them. I made a paste of white makeup and brushed it into my eyebrows to attempt to cover them. Then I drew new ones with a thin brush and eye-liner color. In the pictures this looks quire strange but from far away, it actually doesn’t look that weird.

I also added green eye shadow and ugly brown lip liner to get that tacky, tasteless look. Seen in the pictures above.

Next time we’re going to experiment with other methods of blocking out the eyebrows, which may work a lot better on my very full, dark, brows.