YOU ARE A BABE
CONNIE WANG, GLOBAL EDITOR, REFINERY29
DECEMBER 26.2011
by AIMEE BLAUT
"I grew up in Minnesota but then I went to school out in San Francisco. Um. . . I moved to New York and when I started at Refinery I was maybe the third editor they had. I was number six on their staff, now we’ve grown to maybe fifty people with a huge team. I’m the Global Editor, so I manage everything that shows up on the homepage for Refinery. I source freelancers and contributors that have really niche interests and I also write stories and trend reports."
“I don’t use face wash since I have very dry skin, if I wash it even once a day it gets super dry. I think it’s a well-known cardinal sin for beauty but it works fine for me. I use the Boscia luminizing black mask when I need to recover from a long weekend of debauchery. The only thing about it is you need to do it by yourself since it goes on super black. It peels off all in one sheet and is very satisfying. I feel super clean afterwards like it pulled out all the impurities and build up. Since I don’t wash my face this kind of thing is really helpful.”
“Since I live so close to where I work, I wake up fifteen minutes before I have to be at the office. My beauty routine starts with messing up my hair. I shower before I go to sleep and wake up with crazy bed head so I like to play off that. I use Bare Essentials on my cheeks because they can be a little bit red and some Bare Minerals bronzer and then Stila eyeliner and I’m ready to go. On fancier occasions I have this eye shadow palette that I’ve been using for like five years, it’s a mix of gold colors by Smashbox. I doubt they even make it anymore. I don’t wear mascara since I have really short eyelashes and I don’t think it makes much of a difference. I generally stick to Tarte lip balms or lip crayons because they stay on longer than lipsticks do. I picked up a lot of wet N’wild Halloween lipsticks that come in those vampire makeup kits – they’re super pigmented and last forever.”
“At my core I’m a very lazy girl but I’ll take risks with my nails. I’ve had stiletto and 3-D nails before, I’ll go all out. I’m also obsessed with body lotions and creams; I love La Roche Possay cus it’s made for sensitive skin. Otherwise I use this Avène body lotion – it’s a little thick though, so I only use it during the winter. I use a ton of hand lotions too and keep a million of them at my desk because I type all day long and forget to wear mittens during the winter. The Khiels ultimate strength hand salve, is my super serious one.”
“Working at Refinery I road test a ton of different treatments. Over the past two years I’ve had the most insane things done to my hair. I’ve gotten a perm, which was awesome for a couple of weeks and then just destroyed my hair. I’ve gotten it dyed six different times in the past two years and I’ve gotten really strange haircuts that took forever to grow out. My hair has seen everything and is super dry now. I try to take care of it with oils and deep conditioning treatments. The Rene Furterer intense hair mask and karite oil transforms my hair and makes it look amazing. I also use the Sally Hershberger wave spray and it smells so so good I end up over spraying it as perfume.”
Photos by: Aimee Blaut
Tags: Avene, Bare Essentials, Bare Minerals, Boscia, Connie Wang, Editor, Hair trauma, La Roche Possay, Nail Art, Refinery29, Rene Furterer, Sally Hershberger, Smashbox, Tarte
THE SPOTLIGHT
DZINE’S IMPERIAL NAILS
DECEMBER 05.2011
by AIMEE BLAUT
Chicago-based artist Dzine takes grooming very seriously, so much so that he has turned the traditional manicure on its head and into a work of art. He teamed up with Standard Press to launch —“Nailed” a comprehensive history of nail art and culture from around the world. To celebrate the book’s release Dzine and Societe Perrier transformed a hotel room at The Standard, Miami Beach into a makeshift nail salon, “Dzine’s Imperial Nails.”
Dzine: “I wanted to create this intimate setting and recreate particular memories that I had growing up. The whole project is about social interaction. It is one part performance and one part installation. We opened it in New York at the New Museum and at Salon 94. In order to kind of keep true to the language of my studio practice and what the project was about, the whole nexus of the idea was that my mother had a bootleg beauty salon when I was growing up. I would hang out with her and the ladies in the house and clean up the hair and you know hang out with them while they were gossiping and watching soaps—that whole salon culture. I felt that I needed to reproduce that experience I had as a child. So I transplanted the living room and brought it here. It is actually my parents’ living room. I mean it is all exactly how I removed it.”
“My stuff is really iced—out, I brought these nail techs into my studio and I didn’t realize there was a name for what I was doing, it’s called snow-globing. The beauty aspect of it all makes the experience cross over into pop culture. The book and the installation have this historical connection with Egyptian nails up to everything that is going on now. It was hard to find information on the history of nail culture, which is how the book came about. I have had requests to take this and to collaborate and commercialize it somehow but I would like to keep it in an installation like setting, which is what keeps the integrity of the work for me.”
Photos by: Aimee Blaut
Tags: Art Basel, Culture, Dzine, History, Installation, Nail Art, Societe Perrier, Standard Miami Beach, Standard Press
Connie, you ARE a babe!
SUCH A BABE!