Legendary beauty Dita Von Teese has a new beauty book, Your Beauty Mark: The Ultimate Guide to Eccentric Glamour (co-written with the fabulous Rose Apodaca), which hits the shelves December 1st and is available for preorder now. She sat down with Stylite to talk myriad of topic including brow shaping, skincare, nutrition, plastic surgery and who gets to see her without her makeup on.
“I’ve always felt that creating glamour is an art form and it’s different from God-given beauty,” she says. “It’s a little bit like someone putting on their drag. We all have this opportunity to style ourselves the way we want to be seen, and sometimes it’s vastly different from what we’re born with. My book isn’t just: Here’s what you should do. My book is very much: This is how it makes me feel; maybe it will make you feel the same way. Or maybe it won’t! It’s very open and respectful of people’s individuality,” she explained.
Which red lipstick is your go-to?
Well, I use a lot of MAC, and I have a lot of favorites with them. I’m using one right now that’s a color that they’ve sent me that isn’t out yet, but I always love MAC Ruby Woo as my perfect blue-red matte lip color that stays on all day. I love that, and I also love YSL red lipsticks because I love that luxurious, ultra-pigmented red color that smells like roses.
I’ve heard you learned about an amazing red lipstick from porn stars.
Oh, yeah! That’s in the book as well. It’s called Lip-Ink and I learned about that when I used to do a lot of Playboy videos when I was on the cover of Playboy. I used to talk to all these girls, and I remember learning about it on set, like, “Oh, wow, that’s amazing.” I was wondering how they do that. I knew a lot of racy people—I knew a lot of porn stars back then, and that’s what they told me they use. I still use it occasionally when I need my lipstick to stay on onstage sometimes—it’s not like any other indelible lipstick you’ll ever find in the drugstore or department store. This is like house paint. It is truly semipermanent. You could wear it for a couple days if you wanted to. You need a remover to get it off—it’s a Hollywood trick. They sell it at stores that work with professional makeup artists.
What kind of makeup remover do you use?
MAC has a great Cleanse Off Oil that I really like and it just melts everything away. My other favorite is by Éminence. I love their stuff. I use a lot of their products, and they have one called the Stone Crop Gel Wash. It has such an interesting, slick texture and it’s all-natural, so you can use it on your eyes and everything. I use the Cleanse Off Oil to get the real heavy stage makeup off, or waterproof mascara, and then I use the Stone Crop Gel Wash for everything else.
Say you’re newly dating someone, do you still take your makeup off before you go to bed, or do you keep it on?
I see it two ways: First of all, it’s a great motivator in making sure that your skin looks good, which I feel sometimes people neglect and they’re just busy buying beauty products to [cover it up]. You could take care of those skin dramas if you just ponied up a bit of money to see a dermatologist instead of buying $200 face creams and thinking that’s going to fix it, because it won’t… If I’m in bed with someone, I like to reveal myself. I’m not at all embarrassed of people seeing me without makeup, but I don’t think everyone has a right to it.
Right, a bare face is personal.
Everybody could see me strip down, but there are people that I love being intimate in that way with and I’m happy to reveal everything about myself. Even lipstick is a little bit like a striptease—nobody ever sees me without red lipstick except for a few people, and they appreciate it. It’s almost like what you hold back from the world becomes kind of precious. When people see me without any makeup, for whatever reason, they’re like, “Wow, you look so young without all the makeup.” And I say, “I know, but I’m not trying to look younger. I just love how my makeup makes me feel, and I like the power I get from it, the power I feel from beauty.”
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