BY MONIQUE QUINTANA

As a tiny bruja is the late 80s, I was obsessed with gothic fairy-tale fantasy films. Here I am, in my magick thirties, still playing dress up…

Dark Lily as a Disheveled Rockabilly

The dark Lily scene in Ridley Scott’s 1985 film Legend was unnerving and unforgettable. Mia Sara transforms from a sweet flushed faced princess to a creature of darkness and burgeoning sexual desire, dancing to carnivalesque music with her own prince of darkness.

I did my usually winged eyeliner thing, but this time I rimmed under my eyes with kohl black eyeliner and slicked on black lipstick with some gloss on top. I teased a small section of the front of my hair and pulled the rest back in a ponytail. My hair was wavy from a day-old hot roller set.

Dorothy as a Grunge-Glam Baby Doll

Even though Dorothy is an accidental witch killer, I admire her tenacity. One of Disney’s more interesting ventures, I prefer their 1989 film Return to Oz over the 1939 ‘s Wizard of Oz, mostly because it’s nightmarish and whimsically grotesque. Fairuza Balk as Dorothy is the image of young feminine intellect and wonder.

I traded Dorothy’s severe braids for messy fishtails that I left unsecured at the ends. I used a biscuit colored eye shadow and winged my lids with black eyeliner for some more glam. Thinking I should still offer up a nod to Judy Garland’s Dorothy, I finished with red lipstick and red body glitter that I bought at lingerie shop in Santa Cruz.

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Monique Quintana is a contributing Beauty and Fashion Editor of Luna Luna and blogs at razorhousemagazine.com. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing Fiction from CSU Fresno, and her work has appeared in Huizache, Bordersenses, and The Acentos Review, among others. She is a member of the Central Valley Women Writers of Color collective, the Latinx Authors Collective (LACO), a Squaw Valley Community of Writers Fellow, and this summer, she will be attending the Sundress Academy of the Arts Residency in Knoxville, TN. She is working on a hybrid Chicanx gothic collection entitled, A Little Saw And Other Children Pieces and her first novel, Chola Mona Lisa, which is about a mother who mysteriously loses the ability to smile on her thirtieth birthday and begins an affair with a gang banger- turned- artist after she agrees to pose in his large video art instillation in Fresno, CA. You can find her on Instagram as @quintanadarkling.