A Weird One

Excuse me if this has been asked before, but my search has not produced an answer.

At a wedding that I photographed well over twenty years ago, a woman in the wedding party wore some sort of makeup that made her face appear as though she wore a mask. It was weird. I noticed nothing different about her appearance before, during, or after the ceremony or the reception, but by golly, when I got the proofs back (these were the film days), her face looked as if she had worn some kind of luminescent foundation. I asked the B&G if the woman had a skin disorder that warranted special makeup, but they said no. They just laughed it off and said that she was weird.

Has anyone come across anything like this?

I would include a photo, but that portfolio is in storage.

I had encountered something like and I think it is in the make-up that the person was wearing. I was using a flash and everyone looked great except for that one lady.

I like the idea of the makeup... something with a glitter content to it. Only showed up in amplified light? Maybe?

I wish I could find the photo. All of that photography is packed away.

If I remember correctly, the woman actually appeared in two photos: one in the formals inside the church and in an informal group outside. The woman's appearance was the same, so the makeup must have reacted to the light of the flash (I used a fill outdoors),

I've never seen anything like it since.

From memory this happens when makeup has titanium dioxide in it. Not many do these days. Interestingly this is a key ingredient in paint.

If the makeup has something which fluorescesce in the presence of UV light, and the flash tube is not coated to filter out UV light output, that might account for what happened.
The same phenomenon affects articles of new clothing, when they have optical brighteners applied by the manufacturer of the material used to make the garment...some lighting comes with UV coated tubes, some with non-UV-coated tubes (Paul Buff gave the choice to the buyer), and pro photographers preferred the UV coated tubes.

Another explanation is that the lady might have a rather distorted view of herself in make-up. Decades ago, there was a 'grand dame' who was also my mother's good friend in a mother's guild associated with a university, and I always thought her makeup to be 'clownish' in its application. In her own eyes, she was probably 'not properly dressed' unless so masked.

This happened 20+ years ago on film using the Vivitar 285 Cockroach (Yay, Al Jacobs). I don't think that the resulting effect was the result of the lighting. It must have been something in the makeup.

My last instance of this happening was in 2012. The room was dark and I was shooting band members using speedlites. All the men looked good, but that one woman had something in her makeup that shined/reflected a lot. I suspect because the makeup has some sun blocking in it, but do not know for sure.