White clothing adds inches to the hips; it gets along with neither public transportation nor lunch. To wear it is to telegraph confidence. You either believe yourself to be thin enough, rich enough and neat enough to pull it off, or you simply don’t deign to care.

But when worn on the face, white is less a provocation than it is an artful accent. A pearly smudge in the inner corner of the eye has been prescribed by makeup artists for decades as a shortcut to wakefulness. White eye makeup has the generous quality of exaggerating any complexion to its most flattering hue. It aerates the face. And unlike the grade-school siren call of a corrector-fluid manicure, white eyeliner doesn’t chip off, or risk becoming immediately sullied with graphite. If anything, it dissolves, like ice, into the skin. For those who have been dutifully rimming their eyes in soot black since the ninth grade, what could be a more appealing alternative than fresh-fallen snow?

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