WHAT CHEEK

From full-flush blush to frills and flounces on the runway, a romantic aesthetic is blooming.

- By Alice Robb

QUEEN OF HEARTS Perennial icon of romantic beauty Marie Antoinette is inspiring a new generation to adopt bows, lace, and slippers.

The first wedding I ever took part in featured thunderous trombone music and a procession of dancing maidens. The groom was a dashing prince, the bride a beautiful princess. I was 12 and I sashayed across the stage, carrying a platter of inedible cake, in the opulent wedding scene in Firebird-a Russian fairy-tale ballet of moonlit forests and enchanted feathers. I wore an orange wig as well as several layers of Covergirl foundation, bright red lipstick, and in a concession to harsh stage lights and my ballet teacher's expectations-a heavy-handed smear of Maybelline blush.

Leaving ballet a few years later was bittersweet, but I was uncomplicatedly relieved to throw away that pink powder compact. Offstage, I have never been able to wear blush without looking like a Victorian consumptive, or a clown.

I successfully avoided blush for approximately the next two decades. But as I prepared for my wedding last year, I had to concede that pink cheeks were practically mandatory in bridal makeup-a remnant, maybe, of the long-standing associations with romance and feminine virtue. In Victorian novels, turning red suggested that a woman was aware of, but appropriately embarrassed by, sex. A blushing woman occupied "that period between innocence and erotic experience that marks the modest heroine's entrance in the world," literary critic Ruth Bernard Yeazell has written. "There was scarcely a tribute to the modest woman that did not mention blushing."