body paint meaning: definition, quotations

body paint

nounalso spelled body-paint

Paint applied directly onto a person's skin, often as a form of body art.

This was part of Ms. Ovalles’s daily routine as a desnuda, a Spanish word meaning naked that has been embraced by the women who strut around the Times Square pedestrian plaza topless and covered in body paint to pose for photos in exchange for tips.2015 August 14, Collen Wright, “The Desnudas of Times Square, Topless but for the Paint”, in The New York Times:
There's still a trace of body paint / On your legs and on your arms and on your face2022, Alex Turner, “Body Paint”, in The Car (album), performed by Arctic Monkeys:

verb

To paint (something) on a person's skin.

At this point, it’s an institution, with a coterie of recurring performers and its own crowd rituals — among them offers of “free hugs” body-painted on people’s chests. For all its clamor and its ritualized, channeled aggression, Warped is pretty wholesome.2012 July 22, Jon Pareles, “Thundering Mosh Pits and All the Free Hugs a Teenager Would Want”, in The New York Times:

To apply body paint onto the skin of (someone).

In front of the fair Nischol, Rekha appeared dark. Such a heroine was considered unacceptable. ‘I was standing for an hour while someone body-painted me from head to toe. Because in those days, heroines were required to be fair. In the north they have this fairness hang-up. They painted all the junior artists white in all of D. Ramanaidu films,’³ Rekha said.2016, Yasser Usman, Rekha: The Untold Story, New Delhi: Juggernaut Books, →ISBN, page 59: