I came to makeup as I came to Divine: late in life. Or at least, consumable on a grand scale. In the same way that the Criterion Collection enjoys taking the lowest and highest cinema and re-releasing it in sleek new packaging, so, too, does the makeup industry take seeds of ideas that were once radical (red eyeliner, anyone?) and make them tame. But the multi-billion dollar industry is just that: An industry. ![]() It’s about being scrappy, using far too much glitter and loose pigment, and making a fucking mess before you find a face for the day that’s going to make you feel beautiful, terrifying, and larger-than-life at the same time. It’s not about running through YouTube tutorials at the speed of light. It makes me cringe as a non-binary person who wears, loves, and finds ways to feel visible through makeup. I’m not a drag queen in the real sense - I don’t perform, and I don’t have a persona, and being on the male spectrum of things may or may not disqualify me - I haven’t exactly gone out of my way to find out. And by someone like me, I don’t mean a drag queen or a non-binary person. When that image becomes adopted by communities that don’t exactly go out of their way to embrace the most radical ideas embodied in drag, it makes someone like me cringe. Creating an emblem of vicious, lethal womanhood, consisting of overlarge, frightening features, desperate acts, who inhabits the body of a woman of size in a way that’s unabashed and powerful, is incredible. I enjoy the idea of an idol who’s completely indigestible in the mainstream, especially in an age of RuPaul and bachelorette party-infested gay bars. It’s not surprising that the image of Divine entering the mainstream should give some of us pause. Divine, it appeared, was finally ready for the mass market. This corresponded with the announcement of Criterion Collection’s release of Female Trouble, the legendary John Waters film featuring a star-making performance by Divine as Dawn Davenport, a rebellious teen turned career criminal turned acid-stained performance artist screaming in the electric chair. It seemed the mainstream commodification of Divine began in 2018, after a Kat von D makeup palette launched in the spring, using Divine’s face and image to sell the product. Until recently, I’d only known of her as an idea, something I instinctively felt aligned with. ![]() Until frighteningly recently, I hadn’t seen any of her films, except for Hairspray, which I remember watching almost on a loop for a year in 1998 when my grandfather died. I came to Divine late - embarrassingly so.
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