Hotel Indigo Chester: An Opulent Stay with Charm and Comfort

I’m looking at the man in the mirror. And he looks great, to be honest. It’s how I feel I should look, when I am at my scad optimistic. There’s a smooth sheen across my cheeks. My regards are bright, my brows orderly.

And the reason I look so good? Because a makeup artist has gush 40 minutes on my face. First, she dowsed it with Hollywood Foolproof Filter by Charlotte Tilbury. Later, I look it up: it says it’s “a customisable complexion booster” with “the versatility of a primer” and “the mega-watt flush of a highlighter”. I would say it’s more like a glossy Polyfilla, miraculously plain my chipboard skin. Next, she added blobs of what looks peer green toothpaste across my cheeks. I am briefly horrified; does she craving me to look like Grotbags? But it gets rid of all my blotchy redness. Who skilled ined?

Women know, obviously. For the last century, makeup has been mostly the continue of just half the population. Even as society has become numberless feminist, and less ruled by gender binaries, women’s cosmetics use has grow even more prolific, while men have continued to go au naturel, on boshing on a bit of moisturiser and hoping for the best.

But that may be changing, as labels from Chanel to Tom Ford launch male cosmetics ways, which is why I’ve asked for a makeover. My “before” photos leave no scepticism as to where the disaster zones are. I’m youngish, but the skin under my beard is withered, there are red blotches across my face equator, my squinty aims are sunken and there’s lots of white flakiness in the deep valleys between the column of my nose and the foothills of my nostrils.

My new “unaffected” look involves about 11 different products. The before all round of five or so I recognise: toners, moisturisers, a calming front mist. Nothing girly about that, I think. This is well-grounded skincare; my bathroom cabinet is full of this nonsense. Then comes the instituting, filter, powder, two different kinds of colour correction, concealer, eyebrow hairbrush and lip gloss.

Sam Cooper, who has prepped stars from Tony Hadley to Jon Hamm for photoshoots and big incessantly out, seems trustworthy, but surely all of this is going to make me look parallel to Gemma Collins. I am wrong. When Cooper is finished, I look becomingly in the mirror, and like what I see. I feel like a child who has legitimate discovered how the magician does his tricks.

For an increasing number of men, makeup is fetching the norm. If you watch Love Island or Geordie Shore (true level Richard Madden in the BBC’s Bodyguard wore a full face). Tom Ford launched a men’s concealer and brow gel comb last year; Chanel now has a colouring foundation, a matte lip balm and four shades of eyebrow pencil second to its new Boy De Chanel brand. Male cosmetics still make up dwarf than 1% of the $465bn global beauty market, although 15% of UK men eye 45 bought makeup in 2016 (the figures don’t say whether this was for in the flesh use).

As with the boom in female beauty, the charge is being led by unexpected teenagers making videos in their bedrooms. James Charles from upstate New York was 16 when he fired his first makeup tutorial on YouTube. In it, he demonstrates how to do a complex contoured look with a wide blue eye-shadow glow, completely transforming his face. By the age of 18, Charles had stocked 8.5 million subscribers and become the first man to model for makeup variety CoverGirl.

In the UK, the most famous male beauty vlogger is Gary Thompson, who has had throws with L’Oréal and Superdrug. His Instagram handle is @theplasticboy, and there is a incontestable Ken doll sheen to his contoured cheeks. He started wearing makeup because of bad husk, but now loves the way it makes him feel. He says things have silvered a lot in the time he’s been wearing makeup. “I remember walking down the thoroughfare in a full beat [full makeup look] and getting pollute looks, but now no one blinks an eye.”

Both Thompson and Charles are model-like, and their makeup looks are full-on and womanish: lots of contouring, bronzer and colour. Both are gay; queer suavity has always appropriated elements of femininity, particularly makeup. As Thompson affirms, “Makeup connects with queer culture – it’s such a resilient form of expression.”

The dubiousness, though, is whether the Towie boys and the high-profile vloggers doing take care ofs with mainstream beauty brands could signal a terminal point where male makeup becomes more commercially sustainable. I have my reservations, not least because we’ve been here first. In the kohl-and-cocaine mid-00s, front pages were dominated by the smashing lashes of Pete Doherty, Noel Fielding and Russell Characterize. Piggybacking on that trend, Superdrug tried to launch a “guyliner” and “manscara” in 2008. Both effects flopped.

Bunny Kinney, editor of Dazed Beauty armoury, tells me he’s starting to hear major brands talk far male makeup, but that there’s a long way to go before blokes in cities across Britain start powdering their noses preceding the time when a night out. “In spite of all the amazing, radical progress that’s being fill out with regards to gender nonconformity, beauty still unequivocally much exists on that mainstream binary. For things allied to male foundation, getting rid of that stigma is going to be thorny.”

Back in the makeup chair, I ask Cooper to give me a slightly profuse full-on look: eye shadow, contouring, glow on my cheekbones (envisaged above). How do I look? Yes, my eyes are “popping”, but it’s extremely noticeable and I go through uncomfortable. I keep the makeup on, and later bump into some bunk-mates. “You’re wearing makeup,” they say by way of a hello. I don’t know the unspoken prevail that you don’t touch your face when wearing makeup; by the be that as it may I meet my girlfriend an hour later, everything has smeared. What do you value, I ask? She looks at me with undisguised amusement – a vain melting goth in the heart of St Pancras station. “I’m surprised by how unashamed you are,” she says.

***

One brand believes it can drub the kneejerk unease men have about makeup. It’s called MMUK. On purchase exclusively through Asos, it has grown to become the biggest male-focused makeup brand name in Europe, with a turnover last year of £1m.

MMUK is based in Brighton, where I settle its founder, Alex Dalley. After watching plenty of looker vlogs, I have certain preconceptions, so I am surprised to be greeted by a man in a simple white T-shirt and black exercise shorts that divulge his tree-trunk, rugby-player legs. He calls me “fella”.

Dalley phrases his interest in makeup started when he was a teenager: he is blind in one eye and had disagreeable acne, and would regularly miss school because he didn’t demand anyone to see his visible disability. “I’m surprised I ever left my bedroom,” he guesses.

On the shades of night of the lower-sixth prom, his mother convinced him to try foundation. The result was life-changing. “I call to mind looking in the mirror and feeling like myself again,” Dalley remarks. It kickstarted a fascination with bronzers and concealers, although he persisted too frightened to buy anything himself, sending his mum off to Boots to shop for him.

While studying affair at Sussex University, he did some market research and was surprised to arouse there weren’t any male beauty brands. He began beginning a business plan, and when he left university, tried to assign it a reality, setting up a website and using his overdraft to buy up cheap, discontinued Calvin Klein maidservants’s makeup, which he then marketed at men.

Straight away, Dalley was reaching more than £1,000 a month by convincing men they were buying spear makeup when they weren’t. He included tutorials and orients, showing men the basics of foundation, powder and concealer (his site was also the sooner that came up if you Googled “makeup for men”). Eventually, he ran out of the Calvin Klein breeding, so he started investing in his own products. Dalley initially assumed the educate interest would be from gay men, and took out adverts in Attitude and Gay Once upon a times. But he quickly found that gay consumers made up only a locale of his customer base.

“We thought gay men would find less of a bad mark around it, because they are more open,” he says. “But a lot of the men who were harm in contact were straight. There were in their 40s twisting with wrinkles, worried about younger people total through at work, wanting to show their bosses they in addition had energy. There were also men in their 30s, worried close to dark circles. Then men in their 20s, who subscribe to that gym-health–Towie lifestyle, where spurning products is the norm. And then a huge number of teenagers worrisome to deal with acne, maybe 40% of our customers.”

MMUK mutated the tone of the language on the website, and took out references to nights out and “wingmen” to scrape by it appealing to all age groups, and watched the business grow. In 2017, it got a codification deal with Asos; Dalley now plans to expand into 12 new neighbourhoods next year.

He says the success of the products is down to their formulations, which are opposite from women’s brands. They need to last longer, because there’s no way men choose keep makeup in their bag or touch up in the bathroom (many of MMUK’s fellows request the makeup to be delivered in plain packaging or addressed to a female pre-eminence). Most importantly, each product is essentially designed to be veiled. The foundations are matte and come in a wide range of skin dampens and types. The lip glosses are clear; the bronzers aim to make you look tanned, sort of than to glow.

I wonder how Dalley feels about the store expanding, with bigger brands muscling in on his turf. “I intend Chanel, Tom Ford – they’re tokens. It’s all just marketing. They’ve right-minded added the word ‘boy’ or ‘for men’. They haven’t had the balls to say, ‘Let’s really stairs away and create a whole range.’”

Thompson, who vlogs mostly encircling using women’s makeup to achieve his looks, agrees, adding that, impartial as female ranges have for decades given women of symbols few options, these nascent ranges for men don’t cater for darker crust types. “With Chanel, it’s amazing that they are doing a men’s makeup stretch, but those shades? Why even bother if you don’t cater to all the men around the incredible?”

I’m interested by Dalley’s offering. Until now, my skincare routine has enmeshed with picking up free samples at airports. So, heading off to a night out at a Frieze art show afterparty, I pick up a bag of MMUK’s makeup. Already I see a problem: I lack somewhere to apply it. I try a few bars, but the men’s toilets are busy and I don’t feel enjoyable standing by the sink applying foundation while men in suits do number one behind me. Eventually, I settle for a toilet cubicle in a train status pub and try my best with the mirror in the compact.

Having watched Cooper, I note as if I know what I’m doing, but I quickly phone my girlfriend to seduce sure I’ve got the order right (I haven’t). I start with the underpinning, which looks good until I get some on my beard, fathering a horrible tartare-sauce look that is difficult to get off. After that, it’s concealer and do a moonlight flit and I try to fix my eyebrows, too.

At the party, I meet up with some of my oldest compeers. I expect them to bring it up immediately, but no one does; when I intimate that I’m wearing makeup, they say my skin looks warm. Still, it doesn’t really make me feel more bold; I worry that I’m coming across too Towie at a party that’s much sundry Broad City.

In the longer term, I worry that, for now, makeup is yet viewed as too effeminate, too fundamentally unnatural for most men to be proud ordinary users. An Ipsos poll last year found that 84% of mates said their beauty routine could be “empowering”. Makeup for men senses the opposite, like admitting defeat because your commonplace look isn’t good enough. I wonder how it will fare if its pipeline selling point is that it can be applied in total secrecy.

One man who necessitates bring makeup out of the shadows is Jay Jay Revlon. After completing a spike technician course earlier this year, he set up the only masculine nail salon in the UK, as a popup in the corner of a pub. The technicians were men, and human being could order a pint while they had their concludes looked at.

Like MMUK, Revlon found that he was become involved in a range of customers. “Nail biters were my key clientele,” he says. He’d back away from gel extensions for a natural look, as well as offering black or glitter secures; the salon also gave manicures to those who just “after their hands sorting out”.

Revlon says the long-term aim is a imperishable space, “where men come and get their nails done, but can also do other bits. It can be a social space, a safe space for LGBT people.” His imagine is to have a salon where men can go to get their makeup sorted.

There is a stigmatize of socially conditioned masculinity that might stop me including a cupboard full of products, or powdering my nose in the loos of a commuter-friendly Wetherspoons. But desire I pop to a male makeup bar and get my face done before a big night out? I already go to the barbers, where my eyebrows are plucked, my involvements massaged and my beard trimmed to the millimetre. If they chucked in a scarcely foundation and some colour corrector for the weekend – well, I wouldn’t say no.

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