Earlier this year, at New York Fashion Week, Luar designer Raul Lopez—who, before starting his cult-favorite label, was a makeup artist at a Macy’s MAC counter—sent male models down his runway with foundation, contour, and manicured brows. “I feel like everybody wears makeup now,” Lopez said backstage before the show. “I don’t even go to the bodega without putting concealer on.”
Lopez and I have exchanged notes on our beauty regimens in the past; I wanted to replicate his eyebrows, he liked my highlighter. At that show in February, I made a mental note to ask him about the lip color. But I was most of all thinking about how many men—myself included—have been wearing makeup for ages and yet this past January in Paris was the first time I had been guided through a men’s beauty look at a show. Combined with the proliferation of pre-red-carpet posts from celebrity groomers, we seem to have reached an inflection point on how we talk about men wearing makeup.
Look no further than the 19-year-old TikToker Bách Buquen, who commanded the internet’s attention this past year through his Normalizing Men’s Makeup series. The French influencer, whose face is somehow simultaneously baby fresh and chiseled (the wonders of youth!), would apply a full face of makeup in a Métro station in Paris or before he met his girlfriend for Valentine’s Day, interspersing the videos among images of him on a jet ski or the basketball court. If it’s for me, he seems to say, it’s for everyone. Buquen is not alone; more masculine men, straight or not, have started to fold makeup into their Get Ready With Me routines. Tyde Levi, the younger brother of Troye Sivan (currently the global ambassador for Rabanne’s makeup line), recently posted to this effect; last December the Brazilian model Chico Lachowski filmed his wife giving him a makeup tutorial.
It’s not often that commerce appears to be ahead of culture, but Peter Philips, the creative and image director of makeup at Dior who recently created a stunning beauty look for the Dior Men fall 2025 show in Paris, recalls when Jean Paul Gaultier launched a men’s makeup line some two decades ago. “It was beautiful, but it was trying to be masculine,” he recalls. Men who wear lipstick don’t care about packaging. “They’ll wear any kind of product.”
And in 2018 Chanel launched the low-key makeup line Boy de Chanel. “As the technology in men’s makeup advances, so does men’s willingness to experiment with using these products,” says Chanel makeup artist Tasha Reiko Brown, who has touched up Denzel Washington and Michael B. Jordan for various appearances. These products are often first-timer friendly, she notes: an eyebrow pencil that forgives a heavy touch, for example. Her clients’ skin-care routine is often no skin-care routine at all, she says, so the makeup caters to that kind of canvas. Shaving can make skin require a different kind of hydration; Chanel’s moisturizer is lighter, developed for those less accustomed to a multistep regimen. Another dividing line of men’s makeup in 2025: While women may be angling for a dewy complexion, men generally want matte.
In fact, what is of paramount importance is, to borrow a 2024 buzzword, a demure undetectability. The shift among women from angular, contoured sphinx to a softer, cleaner (albeit highly buffed and polished) look has also been reflected in men. Philips argues that this evolution has to do with our camera-ready culture: Filters, for one, have made more people open to makeup to match the image projected online. Wanting to look as good in real life as on social media is a universal affliction.
Thinking about my own routine, much of what I know I picked up from my drag-queen friends and Vogue’s Beauty Secrets video series—Troye Sivan’s and Rihanna’s, in case you were wondering. I don’t wear foundation; I tend to my eyebrows and use concealer sparingly; the main event is blush and highlighter. It’s a routine so inconspicuous that even my editor wasn’t aware I was wearing makeup when we first discussed this story. And while I am, by male standards, a makeup veteran, I recently experimented by taking Philips’s Dior look and Brown’s go-to routine out for a spin.
For my Dior day, I met a group of gay men and women for dinner and was greeted with a round of compliments. The real test, however, came the following evening, when I tried out Boy de Chanel at dinner with a straight, quite masculine college friend I’ve known for over a decade. He said I looked like I had applied the Paris Instagram filter to my skin. I revealed the secret, and he proceeded to order the concealer as we spoke, plus a Glossier skin tint I recommended in lieu of foundation and an Augustinus Bader lip balm. It was a surprising turn, but our conversation ended with a quick and simple affirmation. “I’m down,” he said, shrugging with a smile.
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