Angelina Avallone on the Art of Stage Makeup

Makeup designer Angelina Avallone has worked on over one hundred Broadway productions, so she’s the perfect person to explain stage makeup to wide-eyed ingénue Kurt Andersen. Her latest work is for the musical “War Paint”  about rival cosmetics moguls, Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein. In this play all about makeup, the pressure is really on for Angelina. She said that sometimes there are unexpected complications in a production -- even when she thinks she's good to go. “Sometimes you've picked out the perfect shade of red lipstick after a month of searching," she said, "and everybody's in love with the lipstick, and you get the actor on stage, and the lipstick looks brown!”

It takes an hour for actresses Patti LuPone and Christine Ebersole to get into makeup for each night’s performance, but now you can do it with the touch of a button, using the app YouCam Makeup. “War Paint” has collaborated with this augmented reality app so you can put a Helena Rubinstein or Elizabeth Arden filter on your selfies to do your makeup in each woman’s signature style… without bugging Angelina for help. You can download YouCam Makeup in the App Store and on Google Play. We took the app for a spin using a photo of Kurt:

Kurt Andersen, the natural look.
Kurt, the Helena Rubinstein look.

Produced by Zoe Saunders