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"  Before a night of partying\u2014and for her that often meant 10 different fetes between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. on the average Wednesday\u2014Edie Sedgwick would reportedly disappear into her bathroom for two, sometimes three, hours. When she went in, she looked like a fairly average, if remarkably pretty, dimple-cheeked all-American girl, but when she emerged\u2014her eyes dark with dense black kohl and thickets of false lashes, her body shimmering with gold glitter as if she&amp;#039;d rolled in pixie dust\u2014she was, well, Edie Sedgwick, that magnificent and indelible creature we all recognize as Warhol&amp;#039;s first superstar. She wasn&amp;#039;t the only woman in history to recognize the transformative power of makeup (it&amp;#039;s safe to say Cleopatra knew a trick or two), but she certainly tripped a switch to light the way for many a future party girl.  Until recently, going over the top to prepare for going out seemed to have fallen out of favor. It was cooler to appear fresh-faced and understated; there was a presiding fear of looking, God forbid, like you had tried too hard. But just as daytime makeup has gotten bolder in the past couple of years\u2014thanks in part to the scrupulously shellacked likes of Dita Von Teese and Gwen Stefani\u2014more intense nighttime looks have followed. Think of Agyness Deyn, dropping into London clubs looking like some kind of superhuman futuristic punk, in smears of pink-and-orange neon eye shadow and bright vermilion lipstick, or Kate Moss, arriving at her thirty-fourth birthday party in a spangled Chanel dress with a David Bowie\u2013esque star painted over her left eye. There&amp;#039;s a new spirit of fearlessness afoot. And it&amp;#039;s about time.  The Art of Parties In the years just after I graduated from college, I was one who adhered to the Sedgwick principle of excess: the more effort devoted to dolling myself up for special occasions (which, in those unjaded days, happened pretty much every night), the better. I enjoyed getting ready the way some people enjoy cooking. I loved the process, the slow art of it, the feeling that I could, with a fleck of blue here or a bold stripe of black there, become anyone I wanted to be. I peppered my cheeks with heart-shaped, kohl-drawn freckles, painted my lips Rita Hayworth red, and dabbed eye shadow the color of a peacock&amp;#039;s plume just under my brows. Sometimes I would while away so many hours in front of the bathroom mirror goofing around with lip gloss and lash glue that by the time I reached my destination, most people had gone home. I didn&amp;#039;t mind\u2014I&amp;#039;d already had plenty of fun. I was a freelance writer then, so I had the leisure for such shenanigans, but once I took on my first office job, I quickly learned that one of my favorite reassuring lines of poetry, &amp;quot;there will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet,&amp;quot; (thank you, T. S. Eliot) was a gigantic lie. Now, after working all day, I inevitably feel wilted and wrinkly, like a neglected houseplant or an old hot dog, and the only thing I can think to do is slap some red gloss over my cracked lips and be done with it. Evidently, I&amp;#039;m not alone. &amp;quot;One of the biggest complaints I hear from people is that they don&amp;#039;t have the time to do something exciting with their makeup, or that they&amp;#039;re stuck in a rut with their day-to-day look and don&amp;#039;t know what to do at night,&amp;quot; says Lanc\u00F4me makeup artist Sandy Linter, who has been working with famous faces since she was a regular at Studio 54 in the &amp;#039;70s. &amp;quot;But,&amp;quot; she asserts, &amp;quot;there&amp;#039;s plenty of inspiration out there. Right now is an amazing time for makeup, because it&amp;#039;s so freed up. Anything goes.&amp;quot;  The New Provocateurs As with many things, it&amp;#039;s the music crowd who are leading the way, with a profusion of female musicians exhibiting a fondness for the more flamboyant possibilities of cosmetics. Bat For Lashes&amp;#039; Natasha Khan regularly draws Nefertiti-style gold streaks and rainbows across her cheeks; M.I.A. steps out in bold Bollywood-inspired multicolor eye shadow and fluorescent nail polish; Lily Allen and Kelly Osbourne are both big fans of nearly black lipstick and cotton-candy pink wigs; and Amy Winehouse\u2014despite, one would think, having unsteady hands\u2014manages never to misapply her signature liquid liner. DJ/bass player Harley Viera-Newton, who was recently signed by Dior Beauty to be the brand&amp;#039;s first-ever &amp;quot;House DJ&amp;quot; (and who had a party-purse-size palette created in her honor), says, &amp;quot;At night, especially when I&amp;#039;m deejaying, I&amp;#039;ll do things with my makeup I would never do during the day. I usually do a Brigitte Bardot cat eye, and I think next I&amp;#039;m going to start doing it in metallics.&amp;quot; Katy Perry\u2014who, with her Lolita-esque rompers, Vargas girl makeup, and controversial tongue-in-cheek chart-toppers (&amp;quot;I Kissed a Girl,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Ur So Gay&amp;quot;), straddles the line between Silver Lake hipster and fullblown MTV-approved pop star\u2014also believes wilder is better. &amp;quot;Wear lots and lots of colors,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Draw designs on your face. Do anything you feel like doing. I&amp;#039;ve recently learned how to use bronzer, too, which for me was as big a deal as hearing a Queen record for the first time: I&amp;#039;m like, Wow, I can shade off half of my chin; this is amazing!&amp;quot;  According to founder of Pop Beauty (and moonlighting singer) Sara Strand, it&amp;#039;s largely thanks to ladies like Perry that &amp;quot;you can now go to a party with rhinestones in your eyebrows or glue gold flakes to your lids, and no one&amp;#039;s going to look at you funny.&amp;quot; Indeed, embellishments that would make most people look like demented clowns during the day can be embraced after dark without judgment. We can roleplay: Am I the sort of person who can rock purple lips and badass black panda eyes? Tonight, yes. Or we can just be bolder versions of our best selves. Makeup imparts confidence\u2014a valuable commodity at any social gathering\u2014and its transformative power (it is a mascara wand, after all) is not something to be taken lightly.  Soft Rock Of course, not everyone has a Bianca Jagger-turning-up-at-Studio-54-on-a-whitehorse flair for the dramatic, and there&amp;#039;s as much inspiration to be found in the classic as there is in the kooky: vintage photos of the relatively understated Sophia Loren and Audrey Hepburn telegraph just as much showstopping glamour as those of more outr\u00E9 Sedgwick disciples. If the idea of stenciling sunflowers onto your cheeks sounds a little too Cirque du Soleil, you can still ratchet up the wow factor. One of the best ways is simply to turn incandescent lighting to your advantage. &amp;quot;In low light, a sweep of a golden or amber highlighter across the cheekbones will give more radiance to the skin,&amp;quot; says makeup artist Troy Surratt. &amp;quot;And if you use a single shade of shimmer on your eyes, you can get a multidimensional effect without having to blend a bunch of colors together.&amp;quot; Yet statement-making elements need not be put aside entirely, even when the desired effect is subtlety. The vivid turquoise eye shadow that Kate Bosworth wore to the Met Costume Gala this year, for example, looked crazy pretty, not crazy crazy, because she wore it on an otherwise neutral face. Even glitter can (and should) be taken down a notch. As Surratt says, &amp;quot;Too much glitter can look like you&amp;#039;re going to a preteen dance recital, but if you dust it on your shoulders or d\u00E9colletage, it can be lovely.&amp;quot; Makeup artist Jorjee Douglass, who is also a founding member of New York cabaret act the Citizen&amp;#039;s Band, advocates the prudent use of individual lashes: &amp;quot;If you just put three individual lashes on the outer edges of your top lid, then you have way bigger eyes than you had five minutes ago,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;And if you don&amp;#039;t put mascara on them, they don&amp;#039;t look drag queeny.&amp;quot; When in doubt, a red lipstick, which Surratt calls &amp;quot;the little black dress of the makeup bag,&amp;quot; is every girl&amp;#039;s best friend. &amp;quot;If you&amp;#039;re at work, feeling gross, and you&amp;#039;re going out, just put on the brightest red lipstick you can find,&amp;quot; Douglass suggests. &amp;quot;But you have to put it on thick. You can&amp;#039;t screw around. Do it like you think you&amp;#039;re in a 1950s spy movie.&amp;quot;   Making It Stick Back in my more carefree days, I didn&amp;#039;t mind when my makeup started to run. If it streamed down my face in sweaty rivulets after dancing, I just wore it that way like a badge of honor. But now that&amp;#039;s not so cute. After a few drinks my lipstick somehow gets so smeared I could be mistaken for the Joker. In that sense, at least, a lackluster neutral face has advantages over a dazzling high-maintenance one: After you&amp;#039;ve done so much primping and powdering, it&amp;#039;s intensely frustrating when the makeup you looked so hot-to-trot in at the beginning of the night starts to slide off into an unruly, coagulated mess. (Hence, the witching hour\u2014when you catch sight of yourself in the bathroom mirror and...troll ! Time to get a taxi.) &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s a certain rock star look that you see on people like Kate Moss. It doesn&amp;#039;t matter if her eye makeup is bleeding\u2014she just looks better and better. But not everyone can pull it off,&amp;quot; says Linter, who recommends layering the same shade in multiple textures to make any look last. &amp;quot;Put a pencil under your liquid liner, for example.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You can always do what Elizabeth Taylor used to do,&amp;quot; Strand suggests, &amp;quot;which was to pile on loads of makeup and then lie in the bath so that the steam would kind of lock the pigments onto her face. But maybe it&amp;#039;s better to use a nice mist\u2014like one by Evian or Caudalie\u2014to spritz and set your makeup before you go out.&amp;quot;  At a party, anything can happen, and quite often does, which is why the prospect of going to one should never fail to stir feelings of hopeful anticipation. Mix a group of people with free-flowing booze, and it&amp;#039;s going to be a place where romances begin, friendships are born\u2014and sometimes, even, where history is made. If one can read a touch of the zeitgeist into makeup, then maybe the bolder, brighter, more creatively applied faces going out these days are a big &amp;quot;screw you&amp;quot; to the recession, the war, and all the other downers that bedevil us on a daily basis. Even if the world around us isn&amp;#039;t looking good, we are. And so, with the tireless likes of Agyness and Kate leading the way, my New Year&amp;#039;s resolution is to Have More Fun. I never want to be someone who forgets what a sharp thrill it is to look in the mirror with a night of unknown possibilities ahead and think, Blue mascara or black? We might not know exactly what it looks like yet\u2014but it&amp;#039;s time to party like it&amp;#039;s 2009.  Read on: See ELLE editors&amp;#039; favorite party makeup&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;  PARTY STARTERS What ELLE editors are putting on when we go out  Bright Liquid Liner Save the black liquid liner for next year, and try M.A.C. Liquidlast Liner in Powerplum, Aqualine, Molten Sol, Greenplay, Blue Herizon, and Visionaire or Urban Decay Heavy Metal Glitter Eyeliner in Stage Dive, Spandex, and Metalhead.  Metallic Eyes A little metal goes a long way. Chrome your lids with Shu Uemura Eye Shadow in Me Gold, Nars Eye Shadow in Silent Night and Nightlife, and Dior Style Liner Intense Liquid Eyel iner in Silver Light.  Red Lipstick These king crimsons work with every skin tone: Est\u00E9e Lauder Signature Lipstick in Ruby, Guerlain KissKiss in Rouge Infini, Benefit Lipstick in Flirt Alert, and DVF Lipstick in Foreign Affair.  Rainbow Connection We plan on being late for cocktail hour due to the combined 190 shades in the Sephora and Tarte holiday megapalettes. 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