“We do not see that individual shade each time we have a look at the evening sky, however after we do see a superb electrical blue throughout the heavens, you completely cannot ignore it,” Eiseman says. “Some respondents would possibly name these brighter blues scary, even…however that is half and parcel of what the colour means, too. If it’s scary, it calls your consideration. It makes you cease and look.”

A Shade of Contradictions

Maybe what most permits blue, and by proxy blue eye shadow, to face the take a look at of time is its enduring duality. Ever in a state of disagreement, neighboring blues can without delay evoke the pure (robin’s eggs, bluebirds, Menelaus blue morpho butterflies) and the unreal (a bodega orchid dyed blue-violet, blue raspberry cotton sweet). Davy’s Half Magic Magnificence provides eye-catching blue glitters and shadows in shades named Neptune Daddy, Daydreamies, Off the Deep Finish, and Fairies are Actual, packaged in bins suffering from electrified pearls and unicorns. That temptation of fantasy is then offset by the flexibility to personal it: Magic you should buy for $22.

Within the fictional world of Euphoria, too, highschool ladies peacock within the hallways, utilizing shades of blue to magnify their inside needs in contradictory style. Davy, who serves as the top make-up artist on the collection, typically used hanging cobalt blue or heat cyan on Kat and Maddie’s eyelids to counsel a willingness to experiment, edginess, and “a extra overt and confidently sexual undertone.” In the meantime, for Cassie’s notorious cry child scene, Davy selected a “child blue shimmery cool tone, nearly periwinkle shade.” The colour visually contrasted the flushed peach of Cassie’s face and the pink of the lavatory partitions, Davy notes, but it surely additionally advised the efficiency of innocence — impressed partly by Christina Ricci in Vincent Gallo’s Buffalo 66. “Cassie’s seems to be are at all times by way of the male gaze, actually attempting to be delicate and child doll-ish,” Davy says.

Male auteurs have equally used blue eye shadow as a siren tune of types: symbolizing both a virginal innocence (as with Ricci) or a distaste for girls who weaponize their sexuality, typically related to white trash, intercourse employees, or decrease class ladies. In French new wave filmmaker Jean Luc Goddard’s first foray into coloration movie, the 1961 Une Femme est Une Femme, he selected shiny blue eye shadow for Angela, a stripper who desperately needs a toddler. In David Lynch’s cult basic Blue Velvet, Isabella Rossellini performs a blue-lidded nightclub singer who unwittingly drags a person into her world of sexual abuse and violence. And in Bob Fosse’s Cabaret, Liza Minnelli takes on the Equipment Kat Membership’s seductress and “devastating tragedienne,” Sally Bowles.