What the spice girls can teach us about midlife beauty – from the spray tan to the smudgey eye
Sonia Haria, Beauty Director at the Telegraph wrote an article on the the older generations’ spending habits, and featured comments from our Invisible Powerhouse research.
We don’t get grouped in with the Spice Girls as often as we’d like so this is a fabulous article!
For anyone who didn’t see the video of the Spice Girls mini-reunion at Geri’s 50th birthday on Saturday, we couldn’t help but notice how fabulous this gang of now late forties women looked. Victoria, Emma, Geri and Mel C (Mel B was a no-show) were shimmying on the dance floor looking all glossy hair and glowing skin. As midlife women it was a world away from the pencil thin brows, garish highlights and bright eyeshadows of the Spice Girl era.
They’re not alone in reaching peak-beauty in their forties. The power of the midlife beauty pound has never been stronger with women looking more groomed and glam than at any other point in their lives. A recent report by MullenLowe Group found that the UK’s over-55s are fast becoming the biggest spenders in beauty, holding nearly 70 percent of all UK household wealth.
So what clever beauty lessons can we glean to perfect a chic party look that’s both glam and subtle.
The smudgey eye
Let’s start with the common make-up denominator between them: the perfectly smudged, smokey eyes. This is in fact one of Victoria Beckham’s tips for her better-than-ever beauty look. In an interview earlier this year she told me that simply lining her eyes with a kajal pencil and smudging it out provides an easy smokey eye that is more flattering than a harsh solid line. While brown and bronze tones look eternally flattering, this smudging technique means that even if you’re wedded to your black eyeliner, it doesn’t overpower the eyes too much when smudged out.
‘A strong liner can look too harsh especially if there isn’t a balance with the rest of the make-up look’, agrees make-up artist Lan Ngugen-Grealis. In contrast, a dark brown or grey kajal blended out from where the waterline and lashes meet, softly smoked out with a soft brush and complementary eyeshadow like a shimmer bronze or similar tone can widen and open the eyes to make them look bigger. ‘Having the darkest point come from the lashes helps to keep the definition and contrast around eyes,’ says Grealis, who uses a soft square brush to blend on the line to keep control or a cotton bud to soften edges.
To brighten the eyes, Beckham uses a cream-toned brightening pencil in her waterline to ‘widen and whiten your eyes as if you’ve had a full night’s rest.’ This is followed by a couple of coats of mascara to look separated and curled rather than too voluminous. By using a softer technique around the eyes, Grealis says the make-up can detract from fine lines, bring out clean structure on the shape of eyes especially if the lids have slightly dropped at this stage, and lashes can take centre stage to open up the eyes without being too dark.
Similarly, rather than a full block colour of matte lipstick, Victoria prefers to line her lips with lip liner and then fill in the centre with a pinky-nude coloured gloss, ‘to make my lips look healthy and plump.’ This is a tip used by all the former Spice Girls over the weekend. While a matte lip can often look harsh, especially if the colour is nude, a gloss is a great way to add subtle volume to thin lips and can give the impression of a fuller pout, as seen on Mel C.
‘Throwing back to my Spice Girl days, Posh would always wear a high shine gloss with a heavy lip liner to make her lips look fuller,’ Beckham tells me. ‘That’s when my love affair with gloss started, but I always found it heavy and uncomfortable to wear, and my hair would inevitably get stuck in it – especially riding on the back of David’s motorcycle. So it became my mission to create a gloss that was beautiful, with reflective, mirror-like shine – but wearable and not at all sticky. I believe we got it right.’
Of course she’s no stranger to beauty: Beckham’s flattering make-up epitomises the ‘soft glam’ aesthetic that is so modern in 2022. The line is ever-expanding: in its first full year of trading, her beauty range recorded sales of £7.3million, proving to be a success amongst women of all ages.
The expensive looking winter spray tan
Long gone are the days of the orange tan and overly-heavy bronzer, as seen on the Spice Girls. Of course, they all have the softly bronzed complexion using bronzer to add shape and dimension to the face. It’s a tip frequently used by make-up artists on midlife women.
‘Bronzed, glowy skin will help diffuse age spots and minimise any uneven skin tones,’ says Grealis. Emma Bunton in particular has used bronzer to great effect, on the temples and tops of the cheekbones which adds shape to her face. ‘It gives a youthful healthy glow. Being sun kissed often highlights contours and brings out cheekbones more because it bounces and reflects off light so skin always appears healthier and lifted. There’s nothing more refreshing when you’ve had that holiday glow and don’t need to wear as much make-up.’
All four now have the tell-tale ‘expensive’ year-round tan that gently knocks out any pastiness in the skin and instead adds warmth and evenness to the skin, too. The tanning expert Amanda Harrington, who tans the likes of Sienna Miller and Salma Hayak, calls this type of expensive mid-life tan the ‘Parisian’ tan. It is a natural, hydrated colour tone which blends evenly with your own skin tone.
‘The key is to firstly maintain your skin’s moisture levels and exfoliate your skin no matter the season,’ explains Harrington. For the ‘Parisian’ tan, she then suggests mixing one to two pumps of an alcohol-free light to medium coloured tanning mousse with a gradual tanning cream. ‘The two will blend together beautifully and give the skin a sheen, rather than an obvious looking tan,’ she adds. This midlife tan is a world away from the tan of the nineties, which was cold, dark, mono-tone and patchy.
For tanning expert James Read, he’s noticed more women in midlife requesting tans than ever before. ‘The trend is now about a glow on the skin rather than a full tan,’ he says. ‘It’s about working with your natural complexion to enhance it but not overpower it, as demonstrated by the Spice Girls over the weekend. This type of tan works with your whole look and makes you look healthy and well, rather than obviously spray tanned.’ Read advises tanning the day before a big party, because the glow will be at its peak on day two, and you can use a blending brush to avoid any streaks or harsh lines.
The face framing halo lights
Of course, back in the nineties the Spice Girls all had their clearly defined hairstyles, from Emma’s bright blonde pigtails to Geri’s two-tone ginger hair with blonde highlights. Things have certainly changed for the singers over the decades. For Emma Bunton, she ditched the bright Barbie blonde of the nineties for a much softer honey-blonde tone, wearing it down and tousled rather than overly styled.
Similarly Victoria’s hair has softened over the years, from her nineties severe raven bob, to then high-maintenance highlights during her WAG days. She now typically wears her hair in a longer bob with softer lowlights. Melanie C has found a style that suits her to perfection, with a rich brunette that compliments her skin tone beautifully; a tone that is very similar to Geri’s creamy brunette, too.
There’s one thing they all have in common now: flattering face-framing highlights, which is a trick used by colourists to enhance the hair and complexion. ‘Halo lights or angel hair lights are something hairdressers have been doing forever,’ the leading colourist Josh Wood tells me. ‘In fact during the Golden Age of Hollywood, actresses would use this method to create a spotlight around their face, with results akin to a ring light.
‘Face framing is a slightly bolder way of always making sure that the hair line is a shade lighter than the rest of the hair,’ he explains, referencing the common look between the Spice Girls now, and can be used on blondes, brunettes and redheads alike. ‘It immediately softens the hairline, which in turn is more flattering for the skin tone. The more extreme you make the lightness of the hair line in relation to the body of the hair colour, the more striking the impact will be,’ he adds.
For midlife hair, the techniques used can help to disguise the look of thinning hair, too, if you don’t want to add extensions for thickness. ‘If your hair is getting thinner, you don’t want a hard line between skin tone and hair colour, so breaking it up a little with a lighter colour around the front of the face can really soften the overall look,’ says Josh. This can be done with traditional highlights or balayage, whereby colour is painted onto individual strands of the hair. Pair this with a softly tonged wave, as the four Spice Girls have done so.
