“Who doesn’t love Gaga?” asks YouTube micro-celeb-gone-legit Michelle Phan, and frankly, I don’t. What I do love, however, is how she pushes my limits of tolerance for meaningless perversity.
Michelle does the same here in this freaky little makeup tutorial to get the same look Gaga sports in a scene from her Bad Romance video. What I find particularly perverse about this piece is that, included as parts of the tutorial, are instructions for altering one’s pupil size with contraband contact lenses and applying tracking dots for further CG-based enhancement.
This, to me, goes well outside the realm of simple makeup and into the land of SFX. It also speaks rather loudly of our continued reliance on the image to convey a reality we see fit rather than an unretouched reality.