I am someone who believes olive green can serve as a “pop of color” and that a full face of makeup takes blush, mascara, brow gel, and three minutes. I have not owned a bottle of foundation since I was 22. The idea of having to double-cleanse fills me with dread. I have never even streamed the Brat album in full.
So when I realize that the club-kid makeup aesthetic I most associate with Paris Hilton circa 2002 (silver dress, smudged black shadow—you know the photo) seems to have captured the divided attention of the TikTok generation, and that brands like Christian Dior, Alexander McQueen, and Christian Siriano have championed the look at recent shows, I almost panic. But then I shrug.
How nice, I think. For them.
I’m 33. I have a child. Trends—low-rise jeans, Labubu dolls—come and go as I observe at a Buddhist-like remove! Let Gen Z tear up while attempting to ink their waterlines. Let them stain their hand towels with the remnants of YSL Extreme Volume mascara and dip their faces in shallow pools of crushed mica. I had a turn. Now it’s theirs.
That serene posture holds until I’m seated at dinner in the East Village in New York City and notice two women with shellacked, maroon-colored lips gossiping over a plate of lasagna. The effect is vampy and captivating. I instantly resent the peach-colored salve I have on. It seems dutiful. Anemic. I resist the urge to throw it out in the restaurant bathroom.
After more than a decade of no-makeup makeup, the revolt has set in. Charli XCX fans are decked out in Care Bears–colored lids and smudged liner. Lips are as frosted as a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. The DJ Kristine Barilli tells me in no uncertain terms that contouring is over. (She sends me an email at 1:20 a.m.—her work hours.) Before parties, she pats on face oil from a brand called Yana Skincare to keep her skin “pornographically dewy” and chooses between MAC lip combos and pencils, which she prizes for their refusal to budge. She takes her cues from the girls she sees on the dance floor, all of them glowing, gleaming, and shimmer-dusted.
“The pendulum is swinging back toward bold color, texture, and fun,” says the makeup artist Danessa Myricks, whose pigment-rich Danessa Myricks Beauty line produces the cultish Colorfix Stix duos. She has long been drawn to makeup designed for a scene and a celebration. Parties have reportedly suffered in the post-pandemic world, but at least their signifiers are back. “It’s nostalgic, yes, but it’s also fresh and empowering,” she says. “There’s freedom in sparkle.”
Freedom sounds nice. I look at the calendar. In a week, I have to be in Chinatown to send off my friend Erin, who is moving to Paris. After, I have been invited to join seasoned karaoke enthusiasts for a session at Boho Karaoke on Orchard Street. It isn’t House of Yes, but it’s as close as I will get to a reasonable excuse to wear glitter within the next month. I tell them I’ll be there.
A few hours before I am due to venture forth, Dior global makeup artist Benoit Dumont arrives to school me in the art of lived-in liner and prove that I can survive the night in silver shadow. The lesson goes faster than I expect. “You don’t have to be precious,” Dumont says, while he scribbles and blends Dior On Stage Crayon in 099 Black like he’s filling in an oval on an election ballot. “It’s not about precision.”
In an email, Bobbi Brown Cosmetics global artistic director Hannah Murray echoes him. “It’s the imperfection of it all that is hot and sensual and feels so right for now,” she writes. It’s a reprieve from 15-step “underpainting” routines and social media videos extolling the virtues of foundation “baking.” This is makeup meant to be applied with fingers and shadow sticks. In the 10 minutes before the Uber comes. In the line for the bathroom.
It takes Dumont closer to 40 focused minutes to transform me, but when I open a mirrored compact to sneak a peek, a Margaret Keane painting stares back at me. I’m terrified, but also awed. Every single feature—brows, eyes, lips—looks supersized and arresting. I feel taller, sharper, and scared to let even one person see me like this. I overhear my husband whispering to our nine-month-old son, “You’re probably wondering who that woman is!”
“That woman” is running late, so I pull on a top from One Of—maker of the most covetable party ensembles on the planet—and slip into a pair of black Kallmeyer jeans and rush downtown to meet my friend Monica, who is visiting from Los Angeles.
Emboldened and wearing more lip liner than I ever have before, I grab us a last-minute dinner reservation at The Corner Store—a restaurant so sought-after that Taylor Swift has visited twice. Still, I leave the apartment and slink past the doormen downstairs like I’ve just had plastic surgery. I wear sunglasses on the train. I wear sunglasses walking into the restaurant. It’s overcast outside, and the sidewalk is wet, and I am wearing sunglasses. I remove them with a drumroll, and Monica gasps when she sees me, but of course the room is full of women at least as iridescent as I am.
At the bar, I count three people in dark, glistening lipstick and two wearing Creamsicle-colored shadows that look like opalescent sunburns. I’m about to order a glass of wine when Monica stops me. “You’re in cocktail face,” she insists. We order martinis.
An hour later, I’m too deep into conversation to dwell on the fact that I am a walking sequin. I remember that I have been here before—not to The Corner Store, but to Glitterland. For my very own engagement party, I let makeup artist Suzy Gerstein wield a nub of metallic cobalt blue liner like a Sharpie and wore a Prabal Gurung dress so encrusted in paillettes and beads that it clanged when I stood. People marveled, and I floated all night, feeling special and a little famous. Another time, for a party in Los Angeles, the makeup artist Liz Lash took one look at the backless dress I had laid out for the evening and swiped on a shimmering mauve shadow before I could protest. I loved it. At The Corner Store, I stop slouching. Two nights of dress-up and pleasure. Do I not deserve another? Later, MAC global senior artist Deney Adam tells me that “makeup is a feeling—not just a product you put on yourself.” I feel dazzling.
The check comes, and I take off for the farewell celebration in Chinatown, where I am greeted with a shower of compliments. But I can see in a wall of mirrors that Dumont’s application has started to migrate in the late-summer heat, and several other guests have come out in sundresses and ChapStick. I mill around, feeling like a human disco ball. I tell my friend Erin how much I will miss her when she leaves. I do fear she will remember me best for looking like a Dickens character set loose in the Boom Boom Room. I decide there are worse fates.
Karaoke beckons. I race over to Boho, pleased to find that at least the mascara I’m test-driving hasn’t budged. (It’s Dior Overvolume Mascara in 090 Overblack, and I have on three coats of it.) The makeup deludes me into thinking I am capable of singing Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone.” I sound horrible, but I feel a kinship when I see Clarkson’s music video onscreen. We’re both sporting metallic shadow from our lids to our brows.
I last 90 minutes before I start to wilt. On the ride back uptown, I take about 47 selfies and fantasize about clean skin. Once, I might have woken up to fossilized mascara on the duvet cover, but I’m a grown-up now. Fourteen cotton rounds and a bottle of Osea Ocean Wave Cleanser later, I climb into bed, restored.
It’s not even 11 p.m. Party down.
