1 week Ago
It's natural for a mother of the bride to want to look her best on her daughter’s big day. However, for Jan Rippy, a joyous occasion took a stressful turn when she suffered a serious fall days before her daughter’s wedding in March. On an otherwise routine day, Jan Rippy was walking home from visiting a neighbor when the incident occurred.
Distracted by the deer in her neighborhood, she didn’t notice that she'd caught her toe on the edge of the driveway and proceeded to fall face first onto the ground. “She didn’t break anything, for which we were so, so grateful because nothing serious happened,” Jan Rippy's daughter, Jordan Rippy, who was getting married, tells TODAY.com.
However, the fall left Jan Rippy with extensive bruises on her face. “As bruises do, it just kept getting worse and worse,” her daughter recalls. The bride then informed her , about the fall.
"I said, 'Plot twist, my mom is fine, but she did fall and she has a black eye,'" she says. Fraser wasn't too fazed at first, especially since she'd previously covered up a black eye for a groom. But when she saw the photos of Jan Rippy's wounds, she was taken aback.
“I had an audible response when I saw (the picture) on the phone," she recalls. Luckily, Fraser has been in her field for 25 years, so she's picked up a few tricks along the way. “I just pulled out anything that I’ve ever heard, learned, listened to, seen about color theory, and I applied it to Miss Jan, and it worked well," she says.
That's a pretty big understatement from the wildly talented makeup artist. After filming a video of the transformation, Fraser posted it to Instagram and it's since been viewed more than 2.5 million times.
In the , which was posted on March 6, Fraser shared some tricks of the trade for covering up the bruises that occurred from the "devastating" fall. She explained that she used warm tones for the eye shadow to counteract the bruising on Jan Rippy's upper eye. She then used a mix of yellow and peach, almost orange, underneath her eyes.
In addition to a few layers of powder, Fraser used an aerosol foundation so as not to disturb the color correctors, and opted for a bright concealer to provide lift. Blending was key, and she used soft brushes on Jan Rippy's mature skin. “I wanted her to feel beautiful, cover the bruises, but not feel self-conscious about the amount of makeup that she was wearing as well,” Fraser says.
This is why the makeup artist opted to take a light, layered approach to the look. “If you're using light layers of the right colors, you can achieve that seamless kind of finish without piling it on or making it feel thick or heavy or cakey,” she explains. While doing Jan Rippy's makeup, Fraser made sure to ask how she was planning to wear her hair and if she was wearing a hat, since she had a hematoma on her forehead that was too tender to cover up with makeup.
The end result was nothing short of spectacular. “You could not tell one bit. Even people who were right up close to my mom, you know, chatting with her at the reception or whatever, had no idea,” Jordan Rippy recalls.
The viral reaction to the video surprised both Fraser and Jordan Rippy, but Jan Rippy was the most astonished. “My mom is 76 years old. She does know what Instagram is, but not really, and she was like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s fine (if you post the video),” Jordan Rippy explains.
When she told her mom she’d gone viral, Jan Rippy had the perfect response. “She’s like, 'Oh my gosh, what does that mean?'” Jordan Rippy recounts. The bride says she feels like she "hit the jackpot" by finding Fraser.
“She was so nice and spent so much time with my mom,” she says. Meanwhile, it's all in a day's work for the makeup artist, whose Instagram following quickly skyrocketed from around 8,000 followers to now, nearly 60,000. "I just didn’t want it to be such a topic of conversation (at the wedding), her bruises, because they were pretty unsightly and that would have been a thing," she explains.
"I just really wanted to make that go away for a few hours." At the end of the day, Fraser is just thrilled that Jan Rippy felt her best on her daughter's big day. "She felt really beautiful and really special, and that’s the most important thing for me.
Whether someone has bruises or not, you know, it’s just for them to feel beautiful," she says. The makeup artist is also tickled pink that so many people have now watched her video and seen Jan Rippy's transformation. "It just takes one (moment like this) for people to recognize how much you’ve given to something that you love doing for so long," she says.
As for Jan Rippy, she's doing well and her bruises are long gone. She's also become somewhat of a local celebrity back home. “People who she didn’t even know came up to her in the grocery store to say, ‘Are you the lady on the video?’ My mom was like, ‘Yes, but also, who are you?’” Jordan Rippy muses.
Seeing how the story panned out is somewhat poetic for Fraser, who describes makeup as her "love language." "It’s more than just makeup. It’s really an opportunity to just connect with someone," she says.
Chrissy Callahan is a writer for Today.com..
