TOOTH AND NAILS
By her own account, Kathy Dwane is not exactly what one would call a prom queen. In high school she wasn’t into girlie fashions or looking like everyone else.
“I was never a traditional girl. I guess I just have a more artistic personality, and I like to express that,” Dwane says.
Even today, at age 23, the Costa Mesa resident likes to look different, especially when she’s at a nightclub taking in, say, the techno scene at Metropolis in Irvine.
Dwane likes “trippy colors.” She shops for unusual clothing at the Electric Chair and Zac Attac, both in Huntington Beach. She keeps her hair an unnatural shade of black and blue. So when it comes to makeup, “it’s not like I’m going to find something at the Clinique counter,” Dwane deadpans.
Dwane is more likely to be found at the Urban Decay counter in Nordstrom, where she can pick up nail polish the color of blue metallic car touch-up paint, lipstick in iridescent emerald or blood-red eye shadow.
“The colors really stand out. I feel they express my personality,” Dwane says. “They’re not your typical pinks and oranges, which aren’t really me.”
Costa Mesa-based Urban Decay and other counterculture cosmetics appeal to those who like to go beyond the pale, who are seeking an alternative to the dictates of fashion magazines and society.
Fans of Gothic music and literature, fashion designers, club-goers and others who tend to start fashion trends instead of follow them embrace Urban Decay. Gwen Stefani, of Orange County’s Grammy-nominated No Doubt, wore blood-red Gash lipstick recently on TV’s “Saturday Night Live.”
At concerts and at clubs, women--and even a large number of men--have found that the way to avoid looking like one of the crowd is to don extreme makeup. Often that means wearing deathly blue lips, black nails and spooky eye shadows.
Christopher Hall, a Costa Mesa resident and stylist with the Justin Rays salon, wears glittery lipsticks, nail polishes and metallic shadows by Urban Decay and Los Angeles-based Hard Candy, another alternative cosmetics line.
“What I wear depends on my mood. I DJ at a nightclub [Jillian’s] in Long Beach on Monday nights, so I lay it on pretty heavy,” says Hall, 23.
Hall also wears makeup to rave parties on the weekends and when he goes to clubs in Los Angeles, which is four or five times a week, he says.
“I’ll do it very dramatic. Sometimes I’ll do bright red eyeliner and black out my eyelids. Right now I’m into Urban Decay’s Frostbite lipstick and the Asphalt eyeliner. Mostly I do it for the drama because I’m performing. But the people who go to the clubs wear it too. I see it more on the men than on the women.”
Consider one of Urban Decay’s recent advertisements, which earned the company a cease-and-desist order from an irate Mattel Toys. “Burn, Barbie, Burn,” read the copy.
“Barbie is a stereotypical image that says, ‘This is beauty.’ We’re saying there are a lot of other ways to be beautiful instead of subjecting yourself to stereotypes,” says Wende Zomnir, part owner of Urban Decay who answers to the title Ms. Decay.
As Zomnir stands before Urban Decay’s industrial-looking counter at the cosmetics department of Nordstrom in South Coast Plaza, Costa Mesa, a woman in her 50s stops to ask her the color of her lipstick. The lanky, long-haired Zomnir has her lips painted in an iridescent lavender shade called Graffiti, which Urban Decay will introduce in the spring.
“I had a blue lipstick on in Corona del Mar, and a guy stopped me and said, ‘That is the most amazing lipstick.’ It makes you an enigma,” Zomnir says.
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Behind the counter, Cynthia Olson sports Urban Decay’s Gash lipstick and eye shadow that matches her burgundy hair color. As Zomnir points out, Olson looks a lot different from the other cosmetic representatives at Nordstrom, who tend to favor understated makeup palettes.
“The key is, Cynthia doesn’t look average or like everyone else,” Zomnir says.
Olson has found that most buyers of Urban Decay want the more outrageous hues. A current bestseller: Shattered, lipstick the color of a green beer bottle.
“I can’t keep it in stock,” Olson says. “It’s difficult to find unusual colors like this.”
Urban Decay products go by unappealing names such as Roach (a deep brownish burgundy), Frostbite (deep metallic blue), Smog (coppery brown) and Gangrene (deep purple with a greenish sheen).
“Anna Sui named the color Gangrene,” Zomnir says. “She was mixing the Frostbite [dark blue] with the Uzi [gray], so we came up with Gangrene for her.”
Polishes are $9, lipsticks $12 and shadows $14.
Zomnir says she has seen people wearing it to concerts at Irvine Meadows.
“All the little girls are wearing it,” she says.
Unlike makeup lines sold in elegant, feminine vials, Urban Decay’s lipsticks and shadows are sold in unisex metal tins. The lipsticks resemble shotgun shells; the nail polish comes in little medicine bottles.
“When we started selling the line [a year ago], people thought we were absolutely crazy,” Zomnir says.
The line is now carried at 300 retailers nationwide, including Urban Outfitters, Nordstrom and Fred Segal in Los Angeles.
