Sunday, September 12, 2010

A POTION TO POISON, AN APPLE TO BITE … MEET M•A•C’S VENOMOUS VILLAINS




Sleeping Beauty got her prince, and Snow White may have been the fairest in the land, but when it comes to classic fairy tales, good girls are so cliché. What really captures our attention are the vampy devilish divas that always manage to cast a spell over everyone they meet. In the spirit of the unabashedly cunning seductress, M·A·C Cosmetics has collaborated with Disney to created four separate colour collections that pay homage to a cast of characters who aren’t shy about being very, very bad. There’s the incomparable Cruella De Vil, the infamous London heiress hell-bent on obtaining one very couture fur coat; the jealous, aging supermodel that is Snow White’s Evil Queen; Maleficent, a snubbed evil fairy whose vengeance put Sleeping Beauty to bed without supper; and the devious Dr. Facilier, a hip, stylish voodoo king with a thing for frogs. Featuring a palette of pearlescent blacks, royal plums and rosy reds, you wouldn’t dare turn them down. It’s absolutely wicked.

ABOUT M·A·C
M·A·C (Make-up Art Cosmetics), a leading brand of professional cosmetics, was created in Toronto, Canada, in 1984 and is part of The Estée Lauder Companies, Inc. The company’s popularity has grown through a tradition of word-of-mouth endorsement from makeup artists, models, photographers and journalists around the world. M·A·C is now sold in over 70 countries worldwide. For M·A·C locations, visit www.maccosmetics.com.

ABOUT DISNEY VILLAINS
The Walt Disney Company has a heritage of creating the most classic, beloved characters of all time, and that includes this cast of unforgettable villains. Cruella De Vil appeared in the 1961 film One Hundred and One Dalmatians, and in 2005 was ranked the #1 Disney villain by the Walt Disney Company. Maleficent is the self-proclaimed “Mistress of All Evil” in the 1959 classic, “Sleeping Beauty;” and the Evil Queen from the 1937 film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is synonymous with the infamous phrase, “Mirror, mirror, on the wall. Who is the fairest one of all?” Most recently, Disney welcomed its newest villain in The Princess and the Frog, the incomparable Dr. Facilier, a voodoo king with “friends on the other side”.

Q&A WITH JAMES GAGER, SVP AND CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Q: How did this partnership with Disney come about?
A: This is actually a collection I’ve had percolating in my brain for at least three years. We were in a meeting and John [Demsey, Estée Lauder Companies Group President] said, “What about that great idea you had about doing a villain collection?” So I was excited to see it come out of the archives.
We approached Disney and they agreed. They have just been really great collaborators in providing such a vast wealth of materials for us. In some cases they’ve redrawn characters, given us access to original sketches and all the specific colours and designs as inspiration.

Q: Usually, it’s the ingénue who reigns as the beauty icon. What is alluring about the villain?
A: Well it’s great to be sweet and lovely and kind, of course, but it’s more interesting to be a little naughty, isn’t it? Everybody loves a villain and wants to take a bite of forbidden fruit from time to time. Disney has always created iconic ingénues, but their counterparts, the villains, are just as memorable.

Q: These villains have different personalities and qualities that make them venomous; do you think that women can identify with that?
A: I’m sure every woman in the world has a little villain in her somewhere, whether she wants to admit it or not! It comes out from time to time in all of us. So I don’t think it will be so difficult to relate to at least one of these characters, if not all of them.

Q: Tell us about the creative direction in terms of the fun, pop packaging.
A: We took the characters and applied them to our components, all coming perfectly together. In some cases we used the symbols, and in others the whole characters. We love that there’s a level of sophistication to the packaging. Sometimes you can put a piece of pop culture iconography on an item, and when it’s been designed in the right way, there’s an element of urbanity to it. 

Q: It’s an interesting, unexpected twist that one of the villains featured in this collection is male. How did Dr. Facilier make the cut?
A: We’re a brand for All Ages, All Races, All Sexes, so why not have a male villain?! I was watching the trailer for The Princess and the Frog and thought the whole New Orleans voodoo vibe was amazing.
He’s also the most recent villain to come on the scene, so he’s very current. We brought it up with Disney and they were totally agreeable to the idea.

Q: Who is your favourite villain from the collection?
A: I could just watch Cruella De Vil forever—I think she’s über glamorous! Of course, she gets her just desserts in the end. She really knows how to enter a room and makes some of best movie diva entrances of all time, and it just so happens she has an ulterior motive, ha!

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