Modern Colored Mascara Is About Subtlety
I am what you could call an early adopter of the colored mascara trend. In junior high, I started wearing a royal blue Maybelline shade from the Texas grocery store H-E-B. (My dad would comment on it as we drove to go fishing in his silver pickup.) Before I left for college, even the church camp counselors commented on a turquoise shade I batted around the cafeteria. In 2016, I wrote about YSL Beauté’s collection of super-vivid Vinyl Couture mascaras and continued to apply hoarded samples of the cerulean shade years after it was quietly discontinued (an ill-conceived act no ophthalmologist would recommend).
But if the colored mascara of yesterday was about the shock of the unexpected, today’s is about a subtle shift, moving beyond the default black to bring out the high- and low-lights of your eyes. This isn’t exactly new; purportedly Princess Di wore a shade of navy to augment her baby blues. But it is newly everywhere. Backstage at Hermès Fall 2024 show, model AmĂ©rica González along with dozens of other horse-girls-gone-wild blinked a cherry-brown shade of Trait d’Hermès Revitalizing Care Mascara down the runway. “I love it—it’s like a very soft red, almost like a burgundy or terracotta, and it makes your eyes look very elegant,” González said. At Cannes, Lily Gladstone wore a navy lash tint from Le Rouge Français that makeup artist Nick Barose commended for “making brown eyes pop without having to smoke it out too much.” Meanwhile, the “most replayed” moment of Millie Bobby Brown’s recent Vogue Beauty Secrets tutorial lands 8 minutes in, when she calls dark burgundy L’Oreal Paris mascara a favorite for what “it brings out in my eyes.” Reportedly, the iris-enhancing optical effect of maroon mascaras has caused drugstore brands to sell out.
People also aren’t wearing as much on their faces, makeup artist Sam Visser tells me, assessing the New York streets: “A lot of people don’t want to feel like they’re wearing a viral makeup look; they want to feel beautiful.” He just painted Dua Lipa’s eyelashes brown (brown is a color, he says) and likes Diorshow’s new blue shade of Iconic Overcurl in chunky layers. After the norms of quiet luxury seeped into beauty, only products like mascara in shades that feel a little distinctive can encourage many to play. “People are literally shaking in their boots when they think about winged liner,” Visser jokes. Colored mascara, on the other hand, lets people experiment without having to hone their fine motor skills.
When I run into makeup artist Cécile Paravina at a Chanel event at the company’s New York headquarters, she confirms she designed the brand’s new lilac Noir Allure mascara (which also comes in a tomato red and rusty orange) as a “semitone” shade—an allusion to the minor musical interval between two adjacent notes—that’s “bold but chic.” The shades “live between two worlds,” she says, “you feel the tension.” Before a birthday celebration for musician Johnny Jewel, whose sparkling synth work has soundtracked Karl Lagerfeld’s collections and David Lynch’s scenes, I apply Rabanne’s near-impercetible Famous Topcoat, which casts my lashes in the faintest golden sheen. Under mirrored disco globes on a dancefloor lit up by flashbulbs, I am hardly the most sparkling belle of this ball, but I feel the difference, and that’s what counts.
