When I was a child I used to really worry about old style actresses.  

In all their black and white ethereal beauty, with their dark pouty lips and small slender hands that were almost painfully female and breakable.
 
I used to worry and ponder while admiring their shimmering perfectly coiffured hair and amazing hour glass figures that fit into exquisitely coutured garments as if they were not made for them, but were part of them, grown by them.

Vivien Leigh, Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Barbara Stanwyck, Lauren  Bacall, Bette Davis, I worried about them all.  

You see, in a wide shot they tended to look normal.  Perfect, but normal.  But when the close ups came, you know, the ones where there was no talking, where a league of tumultuous emotions were conveyed by no more than a tremble of a lip, the arc of an eyebrow or an intake of breath, it was then that I would stare in awe but feel somewhat confused and a little concerned.

When they closed in on that perfect face with those sparkling eyes just on the verge of tears yet stalwartly managing to hold back the waves of feeling rippling through that tortured soul, then suddenly those pools of pained grey would become misty, clouded over, enveloped in softness as if seen through a veil.  Then I would wonder, and worry and maybe wish a little.

And I remember saying to my mum, “Why do all the beautiful ladies have misty eyes?”

I don’t think she had an answer.  She probably just smiled at her funny kid who sat for hours watching old films and sighing to herself over the doe eyed heroines.  

What she didn’t know is how I would sometimes study my face in the mirror in the hopes of seeing a little of that magic haze in my own baby blues.  A slight blurring around the edges, a smoky depth that softened and thickened my lashes.

If only I’d known.

Mascara, the right lighting and a soft focus lens, the first steps in cosmetic enhancement.

 
Et voila!