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Like all trends, '80s Makeup Trends seemed normal at the time, but looking back by twenty years or so, we can see the difference in the apparent natural look of today. In the eighties, women were coming into their own as far as workplace issues were concerned, and the trends were towards ultra-smooth color on the face, bright eye and lip shades and plenty of make up. The combination of workplace politics and cheap fluorescent lighting played absolute hell with women's makeup, turning foundations and eye shadows (blue was popular) into strange colors indeed. And makeup was important if you wanted to be taken seriously. It was quite usual for a woman to apply a full set of makeup—foundation, powder, lipstick and liner, mascara, eyeliner and eye shadow—to go to work. Like most fads, 80s makeup trends looked good: nowadays, women who make up that heavily look like they have something to hide.

For the perfect eighties theme party costume . . .

But if you're going to an 80's style retro party, you can easily create the eighties look. Fashions are easy: a matching dress or skirt suit with big shoulder pads, preferably in a bright color is a good start. Heels are imperative, and hair should be big and fluffy but very controlled. Remember, the '80s look is all about minimizing flaws but maximizing power. It was the decade of the woman's power suit, along with power lipsticks in bright reds and power perfumes heavy on the oriental floral scents. Need a model? For a perfect '80s hair style and suits, look at reruns of Designing Women.

--Editors Tip ----------------------------------------------------------------------

Mica Makeup and Cosmetics Complete the 1980’s Look

Before there was pure mineral makeup, there was mica for eye shadow. Mica is a highly reflective mineral, which makes for strong color and a lasting look. Ground fine, it provides all the glam of glitter without the grit or flakiness, because mica makes a powder so smooth, you can't even feel it once it's on. It's exotic, romantic and lush. In the '70s and '80s, mica was de rigueur for eye shadow, evening contours, dusting on shoulder blades and all sorts of other groovy places. A little pot of mica shadow will last you about fourteen years, unless you decide that it's so cool as a cosmetic that it would look even better swiped onto a wet paintbrush and smeared across a pure white wall in an iridescent rainbow. Then, you might need to buy a second pot. Mica is also great because you can find it all a lot of different colors ranging from black to purple to white, but all iridescent and shiny.

Unless you're planning to cover your entire body with mica, it's easier to apply it damp, either with a sponge or a brush. It's great worked into moisturizer or mixed with lip balm or even put into nail polish. It's inert, so if it gets in your mouth it won't hurt you, but it will still bother your eyes like any dust would, so be careful applying it around the eye area. Because it's so fine, it can be flyaway otherwise, and truly untidy. But it's so much fun to experiment with, you may just decide to buy a big powder puff and go for it.

After Mr. Right gets on his knee and proposes, family and friends are informed of the upcoming wedding news and the reality of wedding planning sets in, a bride-to-be can quickly feel overwhelmed with all of the details and choices for her big day. Many women dream of their perfect wedding day, are constantly tuned into the Wedding Channel or flipping through Brides Magazine and hope not one single thing goes wrong. Most importantly however, they want to look and feel beautiful. After all, wedding pictures usually stay on parents’ mantles for years. While makeup and the dress are important, it’s also vital for brides to give great thought to wedding hairstyles and updo options. If you’re planning the wedding of your dreams, use these wedding hairstyle tips to gather ideas for your big event.

Classic Wedding Hairstyles

For years brides have been wondering how to wear their hair on their special day. Some women dream of a traditional wedding look, complete with an elegant French Twist. Some of the most classic hairstyles include a high or low bun, ringlet curls, a curly updo twist and a bouffant. Classic wedding hairstyles often look very formal on any bride or bridesmaid in the bridal party. Most often, a classic wedding hairstyle will be completed and topped off with a beautiful traditional wedding veil.

Long Hair: Wedding Hairstyles

When you have long hair, choosing a wedding hairstyle can be a challenge. After all, you can wear it up or down, with ease. If you’re trying to create a romantic and fairy-tale inspired wedding theme, you may want to choose to let your hair flow in curls. However, if you prefer to be able to stay cool during your reception party, you can always choose to have it swept off of your neck into a braid with flowers. The best way to think about your long hair choices is to think about your dress. If you have a dress with great back detailing, you’ll likely want to wear your hair in an updo. However, if the back of your dress is not your focus area wearing your hair down is perfectly appropriate.

Short Hair: Wedding Hairstyles

Just because you’re hair is short doesn’t mean you don’t have options on your wedding day. Many brides with short hair are choosing to forgo veils and in exchange wearing beautiful tiaras on their wedding day. For a modern twist, messy curls can make a tiara look less formal and more chic. If a tiara isn’t your “thing” you can instead choose to use a sparkling hair clip, decorative bobby pins or even tuck a flower behind your ear for extra flair.

Modern Wedding Hairstyles

Creating a modern look on your wedding day is all about the simple and easy wedding hairstyles and accessories. Today’s modern bride often chooses to wear her hair down and straightened. The modern wedding hairstyles are less focused on curls and ribbons and more focused on looking polished, sophisticated and elegant. Instead of going for the same French Twist a bride wore to her high school prom, a modern gal will choose to keep her hair simple and fuss-free. Often modern brides will choose to go without a veil and will tuck one single flower bud behind her ear to complete her wedding look.

Basic Updo Tips

1. Always be sure to use a multitude of bobby pins when you want your updo to stay. It’s best to let a professional do your updo for your wedding. However, if you are wearing your hair down you may want to save money and construct the style yourself.
2. If your hair doesn’t hold well, think about using spray freeze instead of everyday hairspray on your wedding hairstyle. Many spray freeze brands come with an added “shine” in them, which will make your hair sparkle on your wedding day.
3. Think about your dress when choosing your hairstyle. You want your hair to work well with the design of your dress.
4. Consider your wedding day accessories. If you have earrings you want to show off, an updo or a style which pulls your hair away from your face is likely the best option.

Bank note paper - quantitative easing is good for business!

(San Francisco Bay Area 2050? 2100?)

We don't know if our readers are as interested in coastlines as we are, but we do want to point out a new competition to generate ideas for a near-future San Francisco and environs inundated by sea level rise caused by climate change and with a population perhaps too unwilling to be displaced.

To grapple with the realities of sea level rise, a new suite of shoreline design concepts is needed. The Rising Tides ideas competition seeks responses to various design challenges, such as: How do we build in an area that is dry now, but that may be wet in the future? How do we retrofit existing shoreline infrastructure such as shipping ports, highways, airports, power plants and wastewater treatment plants? Can we imagine a different shoreline configuration or settlement pattern that allows temporary inundation from extreme storm events? And how do we provide flood protection inland of marshes without drowning the wetland when the water rises?

We're hoping not to see stilts and barges, because there are just too many of those littering other ideas competitions. How about more of this and less of this? But then again, we'll be eating everything up — any and all ideas — with sustained glee: monstrous Army Corps megaengineering; the Golden Gate Dam; stilt forests; mobile sewers; genetically modified water sucking post-arboreals; SpongeOakland; San Francisco, Utah; bay-to-river-to-rivulets land reclamation; Climate Refugee ID cards for an odd/even year system of temporary displacement; walking houses; container wetlands as wildlife preserves and wastewater treatment plants; The Super Awesome Supersurface of Super Awesomeness.

Submission entries must be postmarked by June 29.

(With thanks to Georgia Seamans for the tip. And to Geoff Manaugh for the title.)

Here's a question I've never been able to figure out the answer to: why doesn't the price of running shoes ever seem to fall?

Because it seems to me that running shoe "technology" has improved noticeably over the last decade, but the prices of the base models don't seem to be falling. In cars and computers, the fancy pants technology tends to filter down over time from the high-end models to the lower-end ones. Not so with shoes: if you're only willing to spend $80-$100 at a typical shoe store, you will end up with same crappy piece of footwear you would have spending the equivalent amount ten years ago. The only thing that has changed is that now you have the option of spending $250-$300.

What am I missing?

The Browser has brought my attention to a very interesting article from The Economist which explores the differences in professional backgrounds for political leaders around the world.

Some findings:
Lawyers dominate democracies, Africa is full of military veterans (quelle surprise), Egypt likes academics; Brazil, doctors; and South Korea, civil servants. What caught my attention, however, was the predominance of engineer-politicians in China. Many of the top dogs, including the Prime Minister, President and previous President, were trained as engineers. Here is The Economist's explanation for why this might be:

The presence of so many engineer-politicians in China goes hand in hand with a certain way of thinking. An engineer’s job, at least in theory, is to ensure things work, that the bridge stays up or the dam holds. The process by which projects get built is usually secondary. That also seems true of Chinese politics, in which government often rides roughshod over critics. Engineers are supposed to focus on the long term; buildings have no merit if they will collapse after a few years. So it is understandable that an authoritarian country like China, where development is the priority and spending on infrastructure is colossal, should push engineers to the top.

Can anyone think of any other possible reasons?

This passage reminded me of another area of work dominated by engineers: terrorism. I noticed this trend and mentioned it to an undergraduate professor of mine who specialized in political thought in the Middle East. He confirmed that, yes, this was quite common: engineers and doctors make good terrorists because they are "do-ers" and less likely to argue about theology/ideology. Instead, it's all about putting ideas into practice. Sure enough, the al-Qaeda recruitment handbook recommends recruiting among the non-religious, particularly at colleges/universities, for precisely this reason.

So obviously I'm not suggesting that all terrorists are engineers, or that all engineers are terrorists, or even that all Chinese politicians are terrorists. Disclaimers aside, however, the parallel between terrorist groups and China's leadership is an interesting idea to play with. In both cases there is a strong ideological/theological foundation which the academics can quibble over, and, when it comes to getting things done, they turn to the engineers.

(The Catacombs of Domitilla, Rome. Image by Norbert Zimmerman/Vienna Academy of Sciences.)

For the past 3 years, a team of archaeologists, architects and computer scientists have been laserscanning the underground network of burial chambers, tunnels and chapels carved out of the soft, volcanic tufa rock of Lazio.

The scanner, according to BBC News, “looks like a cylinder on a tripod, stands a metre or so high and is a piece of kit you usually find in the construction industry.”

Gone are the days when archaeologists just used shovels, brushes and sieves to unearth the past.

The scanner has been placed in hundreds of different locations in the Catacombs.

It turns slowly, sending out millions of light pulses that bounce off every surface they come into contact with. The light pulses rebound back into the scanner and are recorded on a computer as a series of white dots, known as a "point cloud".

Gradually, every wall, ceiling, and floor is bombarded with the dots, enabling the computer to build up a picture of each room.

All told, “four billion dots” were gathered, and on a computer screen, they coalesce into a digital 3D model of the necropolis: a filigreed network of subterranean voids that's not unlike the complex clustering of a Romanesque basilica and its companion buildings.


(Domitilla's underground Oort clouds of dots. Image by Norbert Zimmerman/Vienna Academy of Sciences.)

You can zoom in and zoom out, rotate about the axis, and render it with color. Perhaps you can record your scopic drive through this digitized world, as one would with Google Earth. Give it a soundtrack, and you've got yourself a YouTube music video.

And maybe Radiohead would like to give it a go for a sequel to House of Cards.


(Image by Norbert Zimmerman/Vienna Academy of Sciences.)

One of the stated goals of the project is to study the paintings in the Domitilla catacombs: from the pagan images of the early 3rd century to the theologically fully developed Christian iconography of the late 4th century, and how this micro-history of early Christian art reflected the broader changes in late Roman society.


(Images by Norbert Zimmerman/Vienna Academy of Sciences.)

Now if only someone could make the laserscanner mobile (a spelunking Paranoid Android) and then send it roving through other labyrinths — other necropolises, ancient underground aqueducts, sewers, stormwater megatunnels, abandoned subway tunnels — kicking up an underground maelstrom of point clouds.

Google comes a-knockin', and soon everyone will be exploring these passages in a flurry of nighttime clicks. Google Hadesview®.

In the Archives:
Rome Stillborn 1.0

(An incomplete itinerary for a CLUImidwest tour. Map.)

Depending on how much you already know about your city, this task will involve a fair amount of research and perhaps some site visits. There are three parts.

1) Confect together a fantasy itinerary for a CLUI tour of your city.

Where are the wastewater treatment plants? Where does your trash end up and where are the places they used to go? Where are the abandoned landfills, those now capped with park or forest preserves and possibly leaching toxic chemicals into underground aquifers?

Where are the water purification plants? Does your city get its water from hundreds of miles away? From another country? Where are the pipes, canals and aqueducts? Any reservoirs? Are there dams nearby? Desalination plants? Where are the control rooms surveilling the whole system?

Where is the electricity coming from? Nuclear, solar, hydro or oil? Are there oil refineries anywhere?

Where are the communication antennas showering the whole landscape with electromagnetism? Do you live in a city that's at one end of a submarine communications cable? If so, where does it enter into the continent? (Taryn Simon photographed once such entry point.)

How is your city managing to stay solidly in place? Where are the levees and flood control? Where are the avalanche tumuli, debris fields, anti-tsunami warning and protection system and wildfire surveillance network?

Any military bases nearby? How about abandoned ones? Or how about abandoned ones that's been adaptively reused or been sown with a replicant pre-settlement ecosystem? Among concrete bunkers and silos, wildlife now flourish.

Are there stone quarries, coal mines, steel mills, lumber yards, shipyards, Supermax prisons, land art?

The headquarters of supranational megacorporation? National science laboratories and testing grounds?

Look through CLUI's Land Use Database to see what could be considered CLUI-esque.

2) Map out these places.

It's simple. Just go to Google Maps, and below the logo on the left is “My Maps”. Click that link and then “Create new map”. The rest should be easy. It'll simply be a matter of searching the site and then tagging it with a placemark. The learning curve is low.

3) Let everyone know about it.

You can do so by leaving the link in the comments. If we get a good amount, we'll collect it all into a new post.

This is optional, but we do want to know about these places and so will others. It'll be interesting perusing through these fantasy itineraries, going on late-night scopic drives through CLUIrome and CLUIlondon and CLUIlosangeles. CLUIhongkong! CLUImexicocity!

CLUImecca!

(With thanks to Geoff Manaugh and Jo Guldi for providing us the jumping-off point for this idea.)

Google is to privacy and respect for intellectual property rights what the
Taliban are to women’s rights and civil liberties

Provided by none other than Willem Buiter (and you wonder why we love this guy?). Read the rest.

(Chicago and its suburban sattelites.)

Inspired by a Dwell article published last summer — in which Geoff Manaugh, in his temporary guise as the magazine's Senior Editor, asked Matthew Coolidge, of The Center for Landscape Use Interpretation (CLUI), what makes his favorite city work — we have concocted a fantasy itinerary for an infrastructural tour of our HQ, Chicago. We, too, are interested in learning what makes the city function. From where does it get its water and electricity? What happens to our shit? What about our trash? Where is the nerve center overseeing all that traffic?


(The pure geometries of Stickney Water Reclamation Plant. Map. Tour info.)

Coolidge started at a wastewater treatment plant, so we'll also begin in one, the Stickney Water Reclamation Plant. It's the largest in the world, and if you live in Chicago, this is where your shit, condoms and dead pet gerbils end up eventually after swirling for miles and miles in a vortex network of underground pipes and tunnels.

It should be noted that Stickney doesn't yet have its own Wikipedia entry. If being zoned out of the city and exiled into the fringes isn't a sign of its off-center status, then its digital absence from the seemingly omniscient encyclopedia must surely point to a collective amnesia about this critical urban infrastructure. But then again, the general public is largely ignorant about such things, seeing how we've designed infrastructure to be invisible. Out of sight, out of mind.


(Jardine Water Purification Plant. Map. Public tour availability unknown.)

If Stickney somehow represents one end point of something, then one starting point may be the Jardine Water Purification Plant, the largest capacity water filtration plant in the world.

“It draws raw water from two of the city's water cribs far offshore in Lake Michigan and sends nearly one billion gallons of water per day to consumers in the north and central portions of the city,” says Wikipedia.

Though Jardine is located on a prime lakefront location, unlike Stickney, it couldn't be more peripheral. Nearby is Navy Pier, that collection of kitsch suburban mall attractions. While one is rarely visited, the other is one of the most visited tourist destinations in the city, if not the most popular. Chicago would survive if Navy Pier is leveled to the ground, but it would struggle without Jardine.

Also nearby is Lake Point Tower. Until very recently, i.e., last night, we thought that Oprah Winfrey was domiciled atop this trefoil skyscraper, the only residential structure east of Lake Shore Drive, but apparently not. Still, it was always incredibly exciting to think that when one of the world's most popular, most powerful and wealthiest women gazed out of her palatial windows, the Picturesquely framed views of sublime Lake Michigan included that unrepentant slab of pure post-industrial functionality.

Also very nearby is the future site of Calatrava's Chicago Spire, if it survives the economic crisis.


(Deep Tunnel Project. Public tour availability unknown. Image by the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago.)

And then there's the Deep Tunnel Project, “a large civil engineering project that aims to reduce flooding in the metropolitan Chicago area, and to reduce the harmful effects of flushing raw sewage into Lake Michigan by diverting storm water and sewage into temporary holding reservoirs. The megaproject is one of the largest civil engineering projects ever undertaken in terms of scope, cost and timeframe.”

Digging started in the 1970s, and it's still unfinished. The entire project is expected to be completed in 2019.

You can watch a YouTube video about the construction here.


(Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. Image by The Field Museum. Source.)

Another hydrological megaproject is the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, completed in 1900, when according to landscape historian extraordinaire Jo Guldi, “we used to believe that civil engineering was going to transform civilization.”

The canal reversed the flow of the Chicago River, making it the only tributary besides the St. Lawrence River through which precious Great Lakes freshwater flows out. As an artificial conduit, it's a continuing source of controversy. Calls to re-reverse the river are growing louder, as some fear (perhaps overblown) that this diversion can be used by parched Western states as a wedge argument in their a bid to tap into the Great Lakes.

One good place to see the canal in active mode is at the Lockport Powerhouse. Alternatively, you can simply walk along the canal and then segue into Lockport to explore the urban landscape of a post-industrial, Midwestern suburban town.


(Thorton Quarry. Map. Tour info.)

For some reason, we didn't think there would be a quarry anywhere near the city, but there is one, Thorton Quarry, located just a few miles south. An even greater surprise is the fact that it's one of the largest in the world.

Hundreds of millions of years ago, what is now Illinois was south of the equator, and a warm, shallow sea covered the region. Reefs were formed, and these mineralized remains of corals, algae and sponges are what's being mined. We don't know how much of the construction materials in the city comes out of Thorton, but we like to think of the highways and skyscrapers here are made of this long lost equatorial landscape.

Now what about electricity? One interesting source is the Byron Nuclear Generating Station.


(Byron Nuclear Power Station. Map. Public tour availability unknown.)

To our complete surprise, there are actually several functioning nuclear power stations in Illinois, making it ranked first among the states in nuclear generating capacity. Not all are located near Chicago, but there is a good clustering of them around the city, including decommissioned ones. Beyond the border is a Kuiper belt of sublimely radioactive landscapes, perambulant as though caught in the gravity well of inner city Hyde Park, the site of the world's first artificial nuclear reactor.

As with any tour, there needs to be some side trips, even for one that's already off the beaten track. For instance, one could go to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Before the construction of CERN's Large Hadron Collider, its particle accelerator was the largest in the world. This is where physicists have elucidated (and still continue to do so) nothing less than the fundamental construct of Nature and the landscape architecture of reality.


(Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Map. Tour info.)

We certainly missed a few places, but you'll let us know which ones in the comments, right?