Now It’s Ok To Let Them See You Sweat
There is a scene in “A Time to Kill” in which actors Matthew McConaughey and Ashley Judd are having a tete-a-tete one summer’s evening in the living room of their Mississippi home.
She is sitting on the floor, where she seems to be hand-staining the wood. He is off in the corner doing something that requires flexing his brawny arms. Apparently there is no air conditioning, not even a ceiling fan.
The windows must be sealed tightly, too, because they are sweating like nobody’s business.
There’s a big, wet spot on Judd’s slip dress where the fabric is clinging to her chest. Every square inch of McConaughey’s skin is damp, and the reflection lends him a golden halo.
Their sweat is sexy. And their dewy glow is fashionable.
Sweat is omnipresent in “A Time to Kill.” The beautiful people just can’t get cool in director Joel Schumacher’s Mississippi.
Sweat isn’t the result of any on-screen activity. It doesn’t tell audiences anything about the characters. It just looks good. These days perspiration is the accessory that goes with everything.
Sandra Bullock’s face in the same movie is always dewy, as if she’s just come out of a steam room. Remarkably, however, her hair is never flat from humidity, and there are never any underarm stains on her skin-tight T-shirts.
Judd may look like she’s ready for a wet-sundress contest, but her face has been dampened with restraint. Her body may drip, but her face shines just enough so that a few strands of her bottle-blond hair gently cling to her cheeks.
A stylish glow is a byproduct of fashion’s fascination with the ‘70s, when women wore lip gloss and shimmer eye shadow. Sexy, dripping sweatiness comes from the athletic-wear industry, which uses images of hard bodies doing biceps curls and aerobic dancers in neon studios to promote its wares. Think of how much sweat you see in ads these days. It’s no longer the embarrassing problem whispered about in deodorant commercials.
“Open up any fashion magazine, and everyone is glowing,” says Collier Strong, a makeup artist with Cloutier Agency of Los Angeles.
Female models have the sorts of shiny faces that women used to rush to the powder room to repair. Male models look as if they’ve been to the gym and then slipped back into their street clothes without showering. Gucci runway models are made up to look as if they have been out dancing all night at Studio 54.
In the worlds of fashion and movies, sweat is usually created with a spritzing of water and glycerin, which won’t evaporate under hot lights. It makes clothes cling in seductive ways. Rivulets of moisture can roll sensually down the curves of the body. You can virtually smell the pheromones through the celluloid.
But those coursing streams of sweat only look as good as the body they’re streaming down. “We’re not seeing pigs on the street … dripping sweat,” Strong says. “You’re seeing beautiful models, actors and actresses sweating.”