Permanent makeup is here to stay
00.0.00 12:00 AM
Monday, 02/20/06
Permanent makeup is here to stay
Cost and convenience make it among the fastest-growing cosmetic trends
By SYLVIA SLAUGHTER
Staff Writer
Newlywed Stephanie Rochelle lay last week on a gurney-like bed while her sister applied permanent eyeliner on her upper lid.
"I guess there will be no butterfly kisses for my husband for a while," Rochelle says.
Her sister, Missy Kerpan, a medical aesthetician at Skin R.N. in the Music Row area, answers, "No, at least not today."
Kerpan completed the procedure in less time than her sister could have chased a bagel with a latte.
"It was pain free," Rochelle says. "Absolutely. . . . Tonight, my husband and I are celebrating a belated Valentine's Day evening. . . . Missy says I'll just have a little swelling and tender lids. I'll take an ibuprofen, and go out tonight."
Rochelle had just undergone perhaps the fastest-growing makeup trend — permanent eye makeup, applied by someone with a deft touch and a hand tool chock-full with a dozen tiny needles.
Permanent makeup isn't new — Cleopatra wore permanent makeup during her Nile River floats — but it has suddenly seen a second life.
Mary Lynn Oliver, who engages in the same artistry at Gold's Skin Care in Green Hills, has seen her business grow to the point that she's even had men as clients.
"I've recently had an actor and a gay man," Oliver says. Missy Kerpan's co-worker at Skin R.N. did an eyeliner on a member of a rock band.
The majority of the artists' clients, however, are women.
Kerpan has done all ages of women, from a 17-year-old (with the teen's parents' permission, of course) to an 87-year-old.
Women in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s are the majority of her business, though.
"I stay booked," Kerpan says. "Some nights, I don't leave until maybe 7 or 8 at night. But I'm doing the career I always wanted to do. In college, I studied art and psychology. I finally begged my parents to allow me to study aesthetics."
Kerpan studied makeup artistry and permanent makeup artistry at various schools, then she interned at Belle Meade Dermatology.
She's never looked back.
"What woman doesn't like to wake up with her eyes on?" she says. "It's just so convenient."
Her sister wanted the lid liner because she doesn't like to wear much makeup, and no makeup at all on weekends.
"Now," she says, as she lies relaxed at Skin R.N., her skin numbed by a topical ointment, "I'll be able to splash my face, jump in my joggers and go."
Convenience, Kerpan says, and cost are the reasons most of her clients get permanent makeup.
First off, she says, a woman's eyeliner is on even if she's swimming, sweating or golfing. If her lips have been permanently lined and filled, she doesn't leave behind lipstick on any lover's collar, either.
Most permanent makeup, from lid liners to lip liners to permanent brows, lasts for an average of 3 to 5 years. In rare cases, Kerpan even has seen it last as long as 10 years before it begins to fade.
"Think of the money we save on permanent lipsticks and liners," she says. "Over the long term, permanent makeup is cost effective even if it takes a small chunk to get the initial liners or brows."
Some don't seek out the liner for either convenience or savings or even beauty.
Vickie Jackson had her upper and lower lids done two years ago.
Now, she says, she can cry in sad movies without her eye makeup running in dark rivulets down her face.
Another Nashvillian, who asks that she not be identified, spent a day having her lids, brows and lips made up permanently to celebrate her divorce.
Whatever the reason, Kerpan believes permanent makeup is one of the safest "treats" a woman can give herself, provided she chooses an aesthetician affiliated with a medical director and an artist who has kept current with the advances in the makeup.
She so believes in permanent makeup that one evening she climbed up on her bathroom counter at home, pricked her lips, outlined them with permanent pigment, then filled them in so she wouldn't have to wear lipstick unless she wanted to.
Because Kerpan didn't want her sister to risk the possibility of infection on Rochelle's V-Day evening out with her husband, she told her not to wear any eye makeup.
But then, with Stephanie Rochelle's naturally thick lashes and her new lid liner, she didn't need it. •
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