Terminology... Faceup vs makeup

I recall Volks being the first to use it, but didn't recall how/where I had read it. From this thread, it seems they used it for their 1:6 Dollfie fashion dolls, which is how I discovered BJD. Then Korean face up artists kept using the term when writing in Japanese for auctions, or so it seems. You can find more discussion about it here, on a much older DoA thread. (:[font]

 

It definitely seems self-explanatory to me! I understand why someone who hadn't hear the term might need a quick definition... but a face-up definitely is a bit more than makeup, as far as I've perceived! When I go to the bathroom to do my makeup, I'm just putting on extra defining details... whereas the doll faceup can* include adding all the depth and color to their skin, as necessary so they look like they have a whole face!

I think it's kind of like the "is a square a rectangle?" question....

Makeup can be a faceup, but a faceup isn't necessarily just makeup!

*I say "can include," because there are definitely many wonderful face-ups that leave the skin mostly as-is and add only a bit of blushing

 

I'm not familiar with the history of the word, but it always made sense to me. Makeup makes me think of eyeshadow and lipstick, but some dolls have very natural looks to them, so I think faceup is a good term to describe painting the doll's face in a more general sense. Though I have found when trying to describe it to people outside of the doll hobby, there's sometimes a disconnect where they forget that features like eyebrows are, in fact, painted onto the surface of the head, and not just a default part of a doll, so they get confused.

 

I think faceup is just giving a doll a face. If they have a very natural look, I wouldn’t call that makeup. I think of makeup as being face paint or heavy makeup. So technically I guess a doll could have both in a way! Though I have seen some companies use makeup instead of faceup on their sales pages.

 

I had the same question at some point and always wondered about the difference. Now I can’t call it other than face up.

 

I guess in terms of "repaint" not all BJDs come with the face painted by default.
I don't really collect fashion dolls, so I could be completely wrong and it might also be more common now, but I think it's probably more common for a fashion doll to come painted out of the box? So repaint makes much more sense in that you wipe something and then repaint it.

Faceup seems pretty specific to the BJD hobby, though its use has been expanding over the years as people have become more used to the term. Just that I didn't really hear it anywhere else years ago. :: shrugs :: I don't think it's that odd to have hobby specific language. It's kinda fun actually. Just like we have doll size terms that grew organically in the hobby.

 

To me the term "makeup" also brings to mind actual human makeup, and using a different term also differentiates applying a faceup, with materials that are safe to use with resin, from actually applying makeup to the doll.

 

Face-up is a semantic shift that I recall being a shorthand for face-painting/make-up the way Dolpa is shorthand for Dolls Party, but it wasn't coined by Volks.
It has always been a useful description though, one applies both the contours of the face and the make-up on the face when executing a face-up.

 

I feel like the term makes a lot of sense, since makeup would imply a process quite similar to doing human makeup, but humans don't start out with their faces completely blank. Like, humans start out with some kind of natural lip color, usually also eyebrows and eye lashes, whereas dolls need all that drawn/added in, as well as stuff like eye creases, increasing illusion of depth in dertain areas, sometimes painting teeth/inner mouths. Calling that makeup would be odd to me.

 

It's made sense to me as you can buy or make bjd faces blank so they'd need "painting from the face up." Not always the case, but I guess that kind of logic sticks and I never really questioned the term. Nice to see threads about the actual history of terminology.

Makeup to me seems like the doll features are already there and you're just adding to them, the same way you would yourself on a human.