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I’m slick as an otter. I’m greased up like a Thanksgiving turkey. I have just left a face-shaped spot on my gingham linen pillowcase. My husband is asking me not to hug him for fear I’ll do the same to his shirt.
How did I find myself here, a human Slip ’N Slide, coated in more lotions, primers, and face oils than I knew existed? In my time writing for Vogue, I’ve tried a lot of beauty moves, both trendy and classic. But never have I taken on an assignment with such academic focus as this one: attempting to understand the growing obsession with dewy, gleaming skin.
Over the last few years, the Gen Z passion for skin that glows, glistens, and glitters has gone by many names: glazed-doughnut skin (Hailey Bieber’s raison d’être) is a little bit different from dolphin skin (which employs mermaid-ish blue micro-glitter), and should not be confused with honey skin, Jell-O skin, vampire skin, or the not-so-subtly named celeb skin. Cloud skin (dewy without being reflective) is not the same as cloudless skin (which seems simply to be a euphemism for perfect skin). Some of these trends are about sheen, some about sparkle, while others are about a natural, youthful glow meant to look like it involved no products at all. But whether you subscribe to glass skin (the K-beauty import redefining our skin-care process) or status skin (the name speaks for itself), the common denominator is clear: gone are the days of skin so matte that it resembles a coat of Farrow Ball paint on a patio floor. Skin, once robbed of its character, has come alive again.
I’ve always had a theory that, no matter how much we transform ourselves with age, we can never quite shed the baggage of our high school beauty rules. Even if we define ourselves against them, they stay with us like ghosts. As a rapidly aging millennial, the look that spoke status when I was a teen was flawless and powdered. We layered concealer, foundation, and multiple powders so heavily that a sander was needed to detect natural texture. As a high school acne-sufferer with an “oily T-zone” (thank you, Sephora lady in 2002, for letting me know), I committed to a regimen of stripping my skin dry with Proactiv before laying an unflattering shade of beige CoverGirl over the top like I was spackling a wall. To shine, even a little, was a humiliation we spent all our bathroom breaks avoiding. Oil was a dirty word—quite literally.
Members of Generation Z, however, are freeing themselves from the tyranny of makeup as subterfuge. While there is a faction of beauty influencers doing things with powder that compel yet confound me (what is “baking” your undereye?), an inspiring array of young faces is celebrating textures—even when they are freckled or “flawed.”
While the glass skin trend (let’s pick a name and stick with it) has steadily risen in popularity since its import in about 2017, it reached a new height in early 2024, when legendary makeup artist Pat McGrath sent a parade of models down the Maison Margiela Artisanal runway with glass skin on steroids. The look—slick but firm, both full coverage and ethereal—set the internet ablaze as TikTok sleuths tried to figure out how McGrath had turned regular old human beings into porcelain dolls. (Of course, in McGrath’s world, where diversity is a cornerstone of beauty, porcelain doesn’t mean white, but rather a finish that allows models of any shade to look like children’s playthings run amok.)
McGrath has long been a proponent of “aliengelic” skin—natural, but better—rejecting the hypercontoured look of the last 10 years in both her work on the runway and her namesake beauty products. (If an otherworldly glow is what you seek, Pat McGrath Labs’ Divine Skin: Rose 001 The Essence will get you there.) But the viral Margiela moment was not, she tells us, simply a response to a trend. It had, in fact, been “years in the making.”
“I’ve honestly been a huge skin person from such an early age, probably because my mother took such amazing care of her skin,” McGrath says. “She would do a full face of makeup—which, at the time, due to limitations in technology, was very matte and powdery—and then sit in a warm bath. The steam would give the makeup a gorgeous, dewy finish.”
John Galliano’s vision for his models at Margiela, which, McGrath says, was “deeply rooted in the allure of 1930s porcelain dolls,” gave her the chance to “push” herself—and that she did. The result was something so fresh and compelling that social media has been overrun with (largely unconvincing) imitators. (Pat was made a dame for a reason, kids.)
So, how would McGrath advise an oldie like me, who still experiences bumps and splotches in my visage with the same anxiety as I did in 10th grade? “Glass skin works on any skin tone, gender, and skin type,” she urges. “For those who feel they can’t pull off the look because they don’t feel confident about their skin, I’d remind them that beauty is about enhancing your unique features, not conforming to a singular ideal.”
With that wisdom duly noted, next I wanted to understand the tricks behind the tricks—the skin prep that allows the pop girlies and tiny-purse influencers, who wouldn’t dare leave home without a lewk, to go confidently bare-faced.
And so I turned to David Kim, MD, of Idriss Dermatology in New York City, who is known for his focus on cutting-edge skin care that doesn’t overcomplicate the issue. Please, I begged, break it down for those of us who long relied on harsh exfoliants, stinging serums, and avoiding oils while slathering toothpaste on our zits. “In order to look truly glowy and radiant, your skin has to be smooth and healthy. You can achieve that with really good drugstore brands,” Dr. Kim says—a reminder that you can look like a doughnut without a caviar budget. The steps are as follows: gentle cleanser, hydrating serum, a lightweight moisturizer in the evening (he loves The Inkey List, which I recently bought in a crunch at an airport and bragged about for weeks), and “SPF, SPF, SPF.” Finally, once-a-week exfoliation, which can be done with L’Oréal’s 10 percent glycolic acid serum for the price of a couple of matcha lattes.
So, getting “status skin” does not need to mean working with status time and budget. But if Dr. Kim were to recommend one treatment most likely to take skin from dull to dolphin? That would be “very diluted botulinum toxin,” which is to say, Botox, “throughout the face—including in the forehead, cheeks, and upper lips,” every three months. This treatment is the norm in Korea, which is, after all, the home of glass skin.
Needle-shy, and with the makeup application skills of a four-year-old, I determined it was time to get my hands dirty. Not just dirty, but so slick that I was dropping brushes and unable to properly work my iPhone’s touchscreen. As I waded through a box of glow-getter products, I decided to put each one to a very specific test. Do I feel like myself when it’s on? Can I give a hug without leaving a mark? And, finally, do I look age-appropriate, or am I giving “I’m not a regular mom, I’m a cool mom” vibes?
I drew recklessly with Victoria Beckham highlighters. I made a mess of a Chanel blush palette. I tried La Mer for the first time, and was actually enraged to find out that a nearly $400 tub of face cream did, in fact, garner me bouquets of compliments as it resurfaced my skin. I watched my favorite beauty influencer, Janelle Zharmenova, a.k.a. @janelthebear on TikTok, try to re-create the Margiela magic, and quickly concluded I would not be painting over my hard-earned eyebrows with the Dior Forever Skin Glow foundation, no matter how beautifully it slid across my skin. All I saw was a mess of pinky beige until I hit upon the product that seemed to make my skin sing: L’Oréal Lumi Glotion in shade 901, a moisturizing primer with an almost 3D iridescence. Once that settled, I slashed some Dior Forever Glow Maximizer across my cheeks and eyelids, with a little bit on the tip of my nose for good measure. And then, the quiet star—Guerlain’s Météorites, an enamel tub of pastel balls of crystalline powder, which I patted under my eyes and in the groove above my lip. I finished the look with a touch of brow tamer, a nude Charlotte Tilbury lip contour, and some Carmex. (You can take the girl out of the pharmacy, but you can’t take the pharmacy out of the girl.) I sent a photo to the various supporters of my mission: “You look 12,” one texted. “PRINCESS,” cooed another. “Are you going to a costume party?” asked a third, but from now on most men are banned from this process unless they have skin in the game.
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By foregoing foundation in favor of deep moisture, then highlighting my cheeks’ natural—dare I say it—glow, I was catwalking on to my next Zoom like the queen of angel skin herself, Sabrina Carpenter, at Coachella. Hello, everyone. What a dream come true to be here. My name is Lena Dunham, and I am an alien dolphin vampire cloud. And if they thought they saw a pimple sprouting on my cheek? I won’t deny it. But what’s one zit when you’re shining so bright?
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