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“I always feel like the first step to beauty is definitely feeling beautiful,” Kali Uchis says from her home in Hollywood, where she is pulling back the curtain on her skin-care and makeup routine. Earlier this month, the 26-year-old Colombian American singer-songwriter, dressed in Technicolor wigs and high-impact pops of pigment, pulled out all the stops in the video for her new single “Aquí Yo Mando.” On a daily basis, however, Uchis takes a slightly subtler above-the-neck approach, inspired by ’90s glam.
It all begins with not one but two sheet masks—the first Hello Kitty–themed, the next heart-stamped—which she glides over with a circulation-boosting jade roller and then tops with a pair of serums and a dollop of Dior’s ultra-luxe Le Micro-Caviar de Rose gel-textured cream. “I started becoming obsessed with trying different types of skin care when I got cystic acne,” she explains as she reaches for Benefit’s Hydrating Primer. “This is just gonna lock in everything that we did and make the ultimate barrier between our face and the makeup.”
After razoring off the ends of her arches, Uchis creates a custom “concoction” with three shades of Huda Beauty’s full-coverage foundation and a pump of Kevyn Aucoin’s glittering bronze highlighter. “This is literally art,” she says, as she dabs a color-coated brush over her face, eyebrows included. “It’s okay if you cover your eyebrows a little bit because we’re gonna draw those hoes on anyway.” Next she turns to a setting powder, applied in an upside-down triangle shape and around her mouth to lip-popping effect. Here she pauses to let it bake. “Maybe you could take this time to really feel yourself, appreciate the work that you’ve done, and how far you’ve come on this face,” she suggests.
Picking up the pace, she reaches for cheek contour, lengthening mascara and, in a surprising turn of events, Scotch tape. “Like I said, we’re doing art here…very serious artista work,” she says, as she sticks the curved adhesive strips onto her eyelids, brushing over each with a neutral-hued powder for a cut-crease shadow look. Moving onto her mouth, she turns to a brown lip liner, with, importantly, zero red undertones. “Don’t do too much,” she cautions. “Just use what you have ’cause everybody’s beautiful in their own way.” And she’s not done yet: A creamy chocolate bullet followed by a trifecta of glosses comes before one final high-shine step—a shimmering body oil that she brushes over her décolletage and shoulders. “Thank you guys for watching my ’90s meets modern tutorial,” she says, blowing a kiss. “I hope you feel like a glowing goddess.”
Above, watch Kali Uchis reveal her beauty secrets.
