Learn new vocabulary about beauty and fashion. Just like fashion trends, the words we use in English to talk about makeup, clothing, hair, and style, change quickly. The words that are used today are not the same as five years ago. There is a whole world of beauty vloggers and fashion hauls on YouTube. If you’re into fashion, you’ll want to look en point when wearing items from your most recent haul. If makeup is your thing, you’ll be wearing a red lip or using a palette to get a smoky eye. You’ll be sporting balayage or ombre hair (don’t worry — I’ll teach you how to pronounce those new French-origin words too!). Watch and never forget the boyfriends of Instagram. Then take the quiz at https://www.engvid.com/english-slang-15-trendy-fashion-words/
TRANSCRIPT
Hi, everyone. In this lesson we’re going to look at trendy fashion words. These are words that I’m hearing used a lot now around our times, so let’s have a look through the words and learn them one-by-one so we can sound really cool and fashionable.
Let’s start with: „en pointe”. If something is en pointe, it means perfect, it looks so good. What you’re wearing today, that dress, your dress is en pointe. It’s so fashionable, it’s so, so hot right now. Very similar meaning to something being „on-trend”. If we think about the word „trendy”, it means fashionable. But to say something is trendy isn’t fashionable enough anymore, we have to change it and say: „on-trend”. We could also change it and say: „bang-on-trend”. If it’s bang-on-trend, it’s even more now, happening right this minute.
Next, if we’re talking about makeup… When I was younger we used to talk about wearing lipstick or wearing red lipstick, or a pink lipstick, but now instead of saying the word „lipstick”, it’s described as: „I’m wearing a red lip today.” And the same thing, instead of saying: „eye shadow”, „Oh, I bought this eye shadow. It’s blue. Look at it on my eyes”, you don’t say that because it doesn’t… Doesn’t sound… Doesn’t sound fashionable enough, it doesn’t sound like you know about makeup. So, what people who know about makeup say is they say: „Oh, today I’m wearing a smokey eye.” I’m not wearing a smokey eye, I haven’t got anything on, but a smokey eye is when the eye shadow looks grey or dark, and it’s most often worn at night when you’re going out. You get your eye shadow these days in „palettes”. And instead of wearing just one eye shadow, like, wearing a pink eye shadow, the eye shadow palette comes with about… Well, as many as you want I suppose, but from 4 to 12 eye shadows, and what they do is they put on the different eye shadows from the palette. So, they will talk about creating the smokey eye from palette number three, or whatever.
Next is a makeup term that’s been around for a few years. This makeup term came from when the Kardashians got famous because the kind of makeup Kim Kardashian would use was a kind of makeup that shades her face to give it a certain… To make it look like there’s more shadow on the face and a more dramatic kind of foundation, which is done with different brushes. It’s a kind of makeup technique called „contouring”. Apparently it comes… Apparently it’s a makeup technique that’s been around for ages, but before, drag queens used to use it, men who… Men who were still men, but dressed up as women mostly for performance and being in shows and things like that. So it originally comes from there. And I did experiment with contouring. I once watched a few too many YouTube videos, and it all went terribly wrong, so moving on from contouring.
Next we have „drugstore makeup”. In England we don’t have drugstores, we have pharmacies where you go and buy your medicine, and you can buy toiletries, but we don’t have drugstores. We have chains of drugstores, for example, Boots or Superdrug, and you can go in there and buy makeup, but we never call those places drugstores. Yet, when people talk about makeup now, the younger generation, they will… They will talk about buying drugstore makeup, which means the kind of makeup that only… Only costs you a few pounds to buy, it’s not the really, really expensive makeup, and you can… You can buy it easily, close… Close… Close where you live. So, drugstore makeup is the kind of makeup you can do that doesn’t cost you so much money as the really expensive brands. So that’s an American term, but it’s being used a lot here now in England.
The next… The next two terms are about hair. These are newer fashionable techniques for dying your hair, and the two words come from French. In the English pronunciation we’d say: „balayage”.
