Earlier this month, I wrote a piece here discussing the history of pride flags, along makeup looks that pay tribute to the broad spectrum of queer sexualities and identities. Seeing as it is still Pride month, I figured I’d do a part two. There are so many different Pride flags to choose from and I couldn’t cover all of them in one piece.
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A look for every flag
For the Rainbow flag, I liked this makeup look from @cherryantacidsx on Instagram. The look combines the bright, colorful spectrum with the monotone, dark color palettes of the goth subculture in a very creative way. The pastel goth aesthetic tries to add more color while still keeping it goth, though many examples of this mainly stick with one color on top of the black tones.
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The rainbow flag has a long history. It was first designed by Gilbert Baker in 1978. Baker, after being honorably discharged from the army in 1972, taught himself how to sew. Before the rainbow flag, the flag for the gay community was the Brotherhood flag from in 1938, which featured red, white, brown, yellow, and black stripes. A friend of Baker, independent filmmaker Arthur J. Bressan Jr, pressed him to create a new symbol for the gay community. The original design had two additional stripes of pink and cyan, respectively. Over time, these would be phased out to make the 6-color design we know today. After the assassination of Harvey Milk, the flag began to explode in popularity after the passing of the beloved gay politician sparked a movement in expressing solidarity.
This makeup look by @kevlieeeee using products by Glisten Cosmetics takes inspiration from the Gay Men’s Flag. It makes excellent use of the colors with eyeline decal that makes creative use of mirroring.
The need for a flag representing gay men arose as the previous symbol, the rainbow flag, has since been adopted to represent the greater community around 2010, when our understanding of gender identities and different sexualities began to evolve. For awhile, this left them without a symbol representing their identity. The first iteration of this would appear, ironically, on VK, Russia’s version of Facebook. It was designed by Valentin Belyaev to combat gayphobia and is based on the lesbian flag, with the original design being only shades of blue and white. Eventually, the other colors like green and purple were added to include transgender, intersex, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming mascs. The final design was first posted on Tumblr by its designer, gayflagblog, who is a disabled trans man.
The asexual flag by @delphie_makeup provides a very creative use of the color palette through its own design, incorporating organic shapes, providing a neat space aesthetic, with the eyes resembling galaxies.
The asexual flag has its roots in an advocacy group known as the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN). For a while, AVEN’s logo was an upside-down white triangle with a black tip, designed by David Jay; the top of the triangle represented the Kingsley scale and the black portion asexuality. However, Jay disavowed the symbol in 2004 as being overly simplistic and restrictive. It was replaced in 2005 with a black and white gradient between the points where the tip meets, representing asexuality as a spectrum, and given a purple border. However, asexuals wanted a more general symbol that wasn’t associated with an organization. In the summer of 2010, they began accepting submissions for a design contest to create a flag. The design that won was a horizontal stripe flag that used the color scheme of AVEN’s logo.
@hexfiles on Instagram kills it with this look inspired by the polysexual flag, described as a trad goth-inspired look that incorporates colors from not only the polysexual flag but the trans flag as well. Additionally, their hair color adds to the color combination with the pink being used as eyebrow filler to match with the pink hair, and the choice to use mainly blue while using green and hot-pink sparingly adds to the contrast.
The polysexual flag is one of the more obscure entries on this list, though many sources cite the creation as being in 2012 by Tumblr user Samlin. According to the flag’s description, the pink stripe represents attraction to women, the green to non-binary people, and the blue to men. Many often confuse Polysexuality with polyamory or pansexuality, but what it is, is unlike pansexuality, where you are attracted to people regardless of their gender, polysexuals are attracted to multiple genders, but not necessarily all of them.
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