Flapper Style: Makeup and Wardrobe Ideas

by Karen

Flapper style smells like jazz, like roaring 1920’s styles, like bobbed young and not so young gals, like Charleston. The Flapper style inspired, and still continues to inspire Hollywood film directors, producers and Red Carpet divas to buy vintage clothes that remind them of the 1920s. This style inspired one man to shoot “Chicago”, gave us several Oscars and founded the new era of the flapper stream. To be a flapper diva means more than just listening to jazz, smoking or driving a retro car. It means using glamorous flapper makeup and choosing the proper flapper dresses. Overall, this style can be worn to Vintage-Themed Halloween Parties, 1920’s inspired weddings, and 1920’s inspired balls and other such occasions. Makeup may differ depending on the main idea of the event but in any cases it must look vintageous. So what are the tricks for doing makeup and for clothes to have flapper look?

To tell you the truth, there are almost no tricks at all. First, decide what type of party you are going to. Use brighter, darker or more intense colors for Halloween or Vintageous Parties and natural colors for 1920’s weddings or tea parties. Here are step-by-step makeup ideas for flapper style:

Clean the upper and lower lids with anti-allergy wipes
Use white or light beige transparent eye shadows as a basis for the following makeup
Use olive, bronze or light goldish eye shadows on 2/3 of your upper eye lid and dark beige or chocolate eye shadows for the outer eye corner. Blend the edge of the eye shadows.
Use bronze color for the lower eyelid. You can also apply it to 2/3 of the lid starting from the outer corner.
Use dark grey or black cayal for marking the upper eyelid. Blend the cayal.
Do not forget: in the 1920’s thin eye brows were at the peak of their popularity. That is why you should make arch-type eyebrows by tweezing them. If you are uncomfortable with tweezing, then you can disguise the wider parts of eyebrows with a light eye brow pencil.

The ideas given above are for Fall Season type. They may also work for spring season type for whom warm colors and palettes work well. If you prefer a cool palette then you are a winter or summer type and you should apply the following colors: dusty or smoky blue, lavender, and fuchsia. We used dusty lavender and grey lavender eye shadows for upper eyelid of summer season girl + dusty pale pink for lower eyelid. If you are a winter season then you may use dirty fuchsia for outer upper eyelid and pale smoky pink for the rest of the eyelids. The dramatic look can be reached with black (and only black) cayal but unlike warm girls you can change cayal into eye liner. And do not forget that your eyebrows should always be thin. In our recent posts we discussed the four season types and how to dress using naturally inherited skin and appearance colors. You should use only lipsticks for flapper makeup: purple, red, violet, light chocolate… depending on your type. Flapper dancers always had rounded lips. You may enlarge the shape of your lips by means of a lip pencil. If you want your look to be a more authentic 1920’s, then you should color only the central part of lips, thus, leaving the corners of the lips not rouged. This will give you a very authentic 1920’s look, but keep in mind that we are living in 21^st century so it is better to use this trick only for Halloween or informal parties as they might make look too a bit vulgar. After defining your own color types you can try on the following Nataya Flapper Ideas: