The Met Gala generates a great deal of beauty coverage and almost all of it is focused on celebrity looks that were styled by celebrity makeup artists for the specific lighting of the carpet. The interesting beauty intelligence is happening one row back, in the section of the room where the magazine editors are seated and where the makeup is being done by working editorial artists for the specific aesthetic each editor has built her byline around. Here are the five looks that the major fashion editors were wearing this year.
1. The high-gloss lid with no liner
The dominant editor look this year was a high-gloss lid with no liner at all. The shadow was a deep neutral, the gloss sat on top of the shadow rather than around it, and the eye read as wet and reflective without crossing into the obvious wet-look eye that was everywhere two seasons ago. The artists working the editors named MAC and Pat McGrath gloss products as the typical execution materials.
2. The matte skin with a high blush
The skin direction across the editor section was matte. The contrast against the glowy-skin direction that has dominated for several seasons was striking, and the blush sat higher on the face — closer to the temple than to the apple of the cheek — which is the editorial placement that the major artists have been pushing in their personal work for the past year. The effect reads severe in still photography and softer in motion, which is exactly the inverse of the celebrity-carpet direction.
3. The bold brow, slightly soaped
The brow direction was full but combed up and held with a touch of soap rather than shaped with a precise pencil. The look reads architectural without reading drawn-on, and several of the editors at the Gala had clearly been treating their brows for months in preparation for the look to read at this scale. The references the artists named included nineties Linda Evangelista work and specific Helmut Newton images.
4. The deep burgundy lip with matte finish
The lip was deep burgundy on multiple editors, finished matte rather than satin and applied with a precise rather than blurred edge. The choice was striking because the celebrity carpet was overwhelmingly glossy nude or pale pink, and the editor lip read like an explicit statement of where the magazine taste is going next. Expect deep matte lips to be in editorial work through the rest of the year.
5. The undone hair with extreme precision in placement
The hair direction read undone but the placement was precise. The pieces falling at the temples had been placed there deliberately, the volume in the back was constructed to look unconstructed, and the overall effect was the high-effort version of low-effort hair that working hairstylists know how to produce and Instagram tutorials cannot replicate. Multiple editors were wearing variations of this approach with the small differences telling you which artist was working with which editor.
What the editor section is signaling
The five looks above tell a consistent story. The major fashion editors are moving away from the glossy-skin, soft-eye, nude-lip direction that has dominated beauty for several seasons and toward a more constructed, more contrasted, more editorial register. The shift will work its way through the prestige beauty market over the next eighteen months, with the trade press picking it up first and the broader market following.
The editor beauty looks are an early-warning system for where the industry is going. The celebrity carpet is a snapshot of where the industry currently is. Both are worth reading, but they are different documents. The editor section is the one that tells you what the magazines will be running in their fall pages, which is the direction the rest of the market will be moving toward by next spring. The translation from editor face to magazine page to mass market follows a roughly twelve-to-eighteen-month cycle, and the cycle for the next phase started this May.
