Summer is no friend to makeup, which is liberating or boring depending where you stand. If you want excitement then salvation comes via one of the two trends which are ostensibly wintry but have become fixtures this season: dark lips and red eyes. The logic is plain – you haven’t got anything else on your face so you can go mad with eyeshadow and lips. Probably not both though. Here is an argument for each:
Red eyes
Kristen Stewart is contractually obliged to work with red: blood or via Lucia Pica’s make-up collection for Chanel, fronted by Stewart. It is part tomato, part goth but (crucially) shifts red from nails and lips to eyes. “I love red, as did Coco Chanel, and it’s the colour your face goes naturally when you flush,” says Pica in a convincing three-point argument for the colour. The real key is eye colour. Stewart’s are green and the red highlights that, although the same could be said for dark brown. Curiously, red sort of wakes eyes up, too.
Dark lips
Think of your face like a print. “It’s all about contradictions,” said Dior’s makeup director, Peter Philips, about the label’s autumn/winter 2016 dark-lipped look. It either means contradict your palette (colour-wise) or buck the season by wearing dark shades (like Tom Ford’s Jasmine) to the seaside. This is like dipping your toes in emo, noncommittally, because it’s Wednesday and, well, YOLO and so on. The catwalk isn’t always a convincing platform for trends, but Candice from the Great British Bake Off might sway you with her iris-dark lips which sound weird but somehow aren’t.
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