Paris Haute Couture week, the upper echelon of beauty and fashion, just came to a close. From the surreal skin and tight coiffs at Schiaparelli, to shipwreck-inspired beauty at Jean Paul Gaultier, here are all the best beauty looks from this year’s couture season.
The tightly coiffed and equally amusing beauty at Schiaparelli haute couture was a delicate fantasy. Paired with classic, slicked back buns, the show’s surreal skin—which required PAT McGRATH LABS Divine Skin: Rose 001 The Essence and Skin Fetish Highlighter + Balm Duo—presented a moment for contemporary glamour.
“The makeup reflects this balance of innovation and elegance,” said legendary makeup artist Pat McGrath in a press release. “Eyes are sculpted with nude tones, which defined the majority of the looks, accented with shimmering hues of lemon yellow, pink, gold, and blue—drawing inspiration from vintage ribbons Daniel discovered.”
Realism transcended into the unreal at Gaurav Gupta’s couture show, giving beauty a superhuman meaning. “To enhance the natural beauty of models and give them an unrealistic glow,” MAC global senior artist Marieke Thibaut said in a press release. “The beauty essential is to use the Strobe Cream before anything else to amplify the multi-dimensional reflections on the skin.”
To build off of a muted, luminous base and minimal contour, Thibaut used the new MAC Nudes collection to paint on either a cool or neutral lip. While some models were colored blue and others had text written on their face, others had “even more contrast added on the skin,” she said, “as a delicate shimmery white-to-silver veil [is] placed as the third eye on the forehead.”
Hairstylist Guido Palau’s mohawk braids were the soil from which feathered headpieces grew at this year’s Christian Dior couture show. The pieces defied beauty with a punk, yet sophisticated sensibility, while black butterflies and flowers turned the rebellious mohican more delicate.
As stuck up as the hair, makeup artist Peter Philips defined the models’s laminated brows with a gel-tipped brush and tweezers. Soft pink cheeks—enhanced with a 2-toned version of the Diorshow 5 Couleurs palette in Sweet Bouquet—were the antithesis to the architectural hairs. Meanwhile, a subtle shade of Dior Lip Oil completed the flushed out couture look.
Former Gucci creative director, Alessandro Michele, presented his first Valentino couture show since joining the house less than a year ago. To complement the show, which included over 100 pages of show notes titled “Vertigineux: a poetics of the list” left on every seat turned the collection—and its beauty—into a mysterious novel.
“Vertigineux”, meaning “dizzy” in English, translated into lighting which crossed the eyes of models, much like their forehead-spanning braids. Makeup artist Yadim diffused a neutral-toned Valentino Beauty Buttery Matte Lip Color with a tapping technique on the lips and cheeks for their raw beauty to define the show.
Ludovic de Saint Sernin is the latest guest designer to present Jean Paul Gaultier’s haute couture show—and it was a shipwreck (literally). Referencing a 1997 Gaultier look with a model wearing a boat on top of the head, Saint Sernin tapped hairstylist Guido Palau to soak their hair in gel as if drenched by a tumultuous sea.
As a result, strands take rope-like turns at the back and wash up on the face, draped over Karin Westerlund-induced bleached brows and smoky eyes. Prepping the skin with Dr. Barbara Sturn—including their Darker Skin Tones Face Cream and Glow Drops—wet textures were the foundation of the beauty, while Byredo’s smoked out Kajal Pencil in Bhoora Bhoora and Colour Stick in Destroyer added a deep, matte juxtaposition to the look.
