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"    Photo: MAC Cosmetics   This October, MAC Cosmetics is celebrating Marilyn Monroe&amp;#039;s iconic beauty look with a limited-edition collection. The bombshell-worthy range includes everything from eyeshadows to nail polish\u2014that come with names like Preferred Blonde and Charmed I&amp;#039;m Sure\u2014and runs $15 to $28. Prior to the line&amp;#039;s launch online tomorrow, September 27 (it hits stores October 4), ELLE.com chatted with MAC&amp;#039;s director of makeup artistry Gregory Arlt, who created some of the collection&amp;#039;s lip and eye shades. ELLE: How did you become involved with the collection? Gregory Arlt: Well, MAC product development approached me last October and said that they were planning on doing a Marilyn Monroe collection in the fall. I asked them, &amp;#039;Why Marilyn? Why now?&amp;#039;   And basically, the answer is, it&amp;#039;s always a good time to celebrate Marilyn Monroe. They know that I work with a lot of celebrities that love red lipstick, and I&amp;#039;m constantly blending and mixing colors. So they said, &amp;#039;Can you please make these beautiful, modern reds for the collection and also consult on the other shades like the shadows and the blush?&amp;#039; So I was really involved from the beginning. ELLE: How did you pick the shades to give that retro modern look? GA: For me, it was about two things\u2014trying to come up with a modern texture, but also coming up with reds that maybe we haven&amp;#039;t seen before in the line. MAC has some amazing, amazing red lip colors, and I find that sometimes I might mix two or three together to get the perfect red for specific clients. So it&amp;#039;s kind of a little bit of filling in blanks. ELLE: What gaps were you aiming to fill? GA: Well, one of my clients is the lovely Dita von Teese, and we all know she wears red lipstick. Whenever I work with her, we pretty much love Russian Red by MAC or Ruby Woo by MAC, but sometimes we want to go a little bit deeper. So I felt like a really beautiful burgundy oxblood was missing\u2014the color I came up for from the line is called Deeply Adored. And then also: a red that had a little hint of berry but also a bit of brick to it\u2014that manifested with a color called Charmed I&amp;#039;m Sure, which I love. And then the one that&amp;#039;s called Love Goddess was sort of made because I thought it would be fun to have more of a fuchsia red. Fuchsias are either really, really bright pink or have a lot of purple in them. It&amp;#039;s hard to get that perfect red with just a little hint of fuchsia to it, so I would mix up colors to come up with that one.    Photo: MAC Cosmetics   ELLE: How would you suggest wearing them? GA: I think the thing about red, I always say it&amp;#039;s your little black dress of makeup. I think everyone needs one in their bag. It can really change your whole look. I always tell women, if you&amp;#039;re a little nervous about it, apply it with a lip brush or swipe it on your bottom lip and rub your two lips together so you get the perfect consistency. Then, you get a little more brave and you wear it fully from the tube. One of my clients likes to take a little lipstick on her ring finger and just kind of dab the center of her mouth so it looks like she&amp;#039;s had a little red wine. So it really depends on skin tone and just your confidence level, really. ELLE: You mentioned using this collection on Dita Von Teese. Is there anyone else you could see using it on?   GA: Oh, definitely. I&amp;#039;ve already used some of the colors on Gwen Stefani, and Love Goddess I actually used on Christina Hendricks. We work together quite a bit, and we wanted to really see that pretty fuchsia red. ELLE: What about the eyeshadows you worked on? GA: When you think Marilyn Monroe, her eyes are always fairly neutral, but we wanted to do something a little bit more modern and we&amp;#039;ve had a really, really big amount of success with frosted shadows. I was thinking, what if Marilyn Monroe were alive today, what would she do? And I was thinking a really neutral, sparkly eye. So I talked to product development about doing a sort of ivory frost color or a really pretty metallic blue silver, which is a little unexpected for Marilyn Monroe, but it kind of works out with the red lip.  ELLE: What do you think it is about Marilyn&amp;#039;s look that&amp;#039;s so timeless and enduring? GA: She&amp;#039;s a really really rare combination of totally sexy and sensual, but she was also really cute. It&amp;#039;s kind of hard to find that blend in a person. I actually think of Gwen Stefani, and I think she can be really sexy and vampy but there&amp;#039;s a cuteness about her\u2014I think Marilyn had that same appeal. She was the ultimate bombshell, the volume was always turned up. Her hair was always a little bigger and whiter, her lips were redder and her dresses were tighter and her hips were curvier. She had this larger than life persona that I think so many people, men and women, were attracted to.  ELLE: Which aspect of her beauty look is most iconic for you? GA: The red lip for sure. I loved the way she shaped her lips\u2014when I was researching this collection and when I was researching her and going in deep about her makeup secrets, I read that she and her makeup artist would collaborate and do like five or six different reds\u2014like one deeper on the outer edge of her mouth, another one in the center just to make her lips look really dimensional. They&amp;#039;d overdraw her lip to make it look more sexy. So her lips really were almost architecture, you know?  ELLE: Did you turn up any more fun facts while researching? GA: I did. I found out she would use Vaseline all over her face, under her makeup, before she went on camera because it gave her a glow that she really liked. She also used this sort of like hormone cream that made her skin tighter, but the hormones in it actually gave her quite a bit of peach fuzz on her face. The director would try to get her to remove it, but she insisted on keeping it because she thought it gave her a nice sort of a fuzzy glow around her face to make her look more ethereal. And it worked! You know, we all think of her using black eyeliner, but she actually used a dark brown eyeliner and used a white pencil on the inside of her eye to make her eye look larger. [She used] a lot of really interesting tricks to get to where she was as a beauty. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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