Makeup by Alexandra Highcrest

Forget today’s anemic, vanilla sex teenage vampires, and campy zombies, this time of year my memory conjures up Snoopy and his ongoing battle with the Red Baron, popularized in the Peanuts comic strip and in the TV special It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown. Sn...

At this time of year everybody gushes over nature’s colour palette; brilliant yellows and golds, every conceivable shade of brown, but above all—reds; bright reds, deep reds, regular old Canadian maple leaf reds. I love fall colours but I’m most excited about the return of red lipstick. I ne...

My first cell phone would’ve been a perfect fit for a thug who wanted to pitch something through the nearest store window prior to making a no-cash, no-credit “purchase” of a TV or stereo. The phone was big and grey and doubled the weight of my purse every time I carried it. I hated the [...]

Western European women’s clothing changed dramatically in the first half of the 12th century, during the First Crusade, when noble ladies accompanied their crusading lords to cities such as Constantinople, Palermo, and Venice—all centres of silk manufacture. Th...

Over the years I’ve had the pleasure of working with many local photographers, some good, some adequate, none bad. Because of my experiences our intern Paddy has been bugging me to take up snapping myself. “It’s not like you’ve never worked behind a camera,” he said. “Why not...

The Legend Most of us have heard the legend of Lady Godiva’s ride, naked, through the streets of Coventry. According to the earliest surviving source for the legend, the Chronica of Roger of Wendover (d. ...

The Gibson Girl was the personification of the feminine ideal as portrayed in the satirical pen and ink illustrated stories created by Charles Dana Gibson during a twenty-year period spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the United States...

When the team and I got together to begin brainstorming the concept behind Alexandra Highcrest Magazine the first thing we decided was that magazine would not be about me. The ‘net is filled to overflowing with diary journals (I hate the word “blog”) and most that we’ve read are so boring. Why sh...

On the morning of 2nd June 1917, Canadian air ace William Avery “Billy” Bishop flew his Nieuport 17 on a solo mission behind enemy lines to attack a German aerodrome. After the attack Bishop claimed he shot down three enemy aircraft and destroyed several more on the ground. Fo...

Today is the 12th Anniversary of the death of Lady Diana Spencer, who died as a result of injuries sustained in a car wreck in the Pont de l’Alma road tunnel in Paris. Her companion Dodi Fayed and the driver of the car, Henri Paul, were pronounced dead at the scene of the accident. Fayed’s [...]

We all know how good new clothes make us feel. Ralph, a bald Humboldt penguin, is enjoying a new lease of life at a Hampshire wildlife park - after being fitted with his own tailor-made wetsuit. Unlike most Humboldt penguins, who molt their feathers gradually, Ralph’s always fall out in one day. ...

Over the last two months a debate has been going on over the ethics of retouching photos used in beauty and fashion advertisements. During the same period the food industry spent approximately 1.7 billion USD on fast food ads aimed at children ($10 billion a year)...

Ever since pilots started painting pictures of women on their airplanes they’ve been inspired by the great pin-up artists of their times. World War II era nose art painters for instance regularly copied the work of Alberto Vargas and George Petty. ...

Days after heavily photoshopped photos of Twiggy appeared in the British press the UK’s Liberal Democrats called for a ban on the use of retouched photos in advertising aimed at the under-16 market. ...