Fashion Week Is Especially Hard on Models with Sensitive Skin

Fashion Week! In New Yawk City!! [Whistling noise; dazed look up at all the tall, shiny buildings] Golly gee willikers, ain’t that glamorous? It sounds like it should be glamorous, but there’s a lot of hair pruning, makeup basting, and nail biting that goes into putting on a runway show.

An anonymous model recently told Cosmo’s Carly Cardellino all the backstage horror stories that prompted her to drop out of the Fashion Week rat race she’d been running from ages 18 to 21. For starters, her skin launched a full-scale insurrection against the industrial coat of makeup and hairspray that makeup artists would layer on her poor face. It got dark:

The hardest part of fashion week for me though was when I sat in the hair and makeup chair. My skin is sensitive and I’d breakout almost immediately after they’d apply foundation. It actually got so bad that I started carrying around my Chanel Vitalumiere Aqua Foundation to each show, asking the makeup artists to use that instead, or else my face would start to burn and I’d get an inflamed rash all over. And — ready for this? — makeup artists set the makeup with hairspray (yes, they spray hairspray in your face), which didn’t help matters! So basically, my skin never had a chance to calm down because the next day, the layers-of-foundation plus hairspray would go on. And on. And on.

This is what happens when an entire industry regards a huge part of its human capital as walking, pouting mannequins. I’m not sure what my skin would do under such stress because I’ve never worn more than an exploratory swath of makeup, but based on that experience, I’d say my skin would probably have this sort of reaction: