In my mind, the ultimate evening glam is a matte red lip paired with a shiny, glossy lid. It’s a tough look to pull off, though — there is so much going on with your eyes and your lips that you need to keep the skin as clean and natural-looking as possible. Usually when I attempt this look, I either end up doing so little to my skin that it looks dull and flat compared to the makeup, or I go overboard and end up looking like I’m wearing a weird skin mask. Which is why, when I saw a picture of my makeup icon Katie Jane Hughes on my Instagram feed with perfectly clean-looking skin, a subtle glossy lid, and a gorgeous crimson lip, I almost fainted. Then I calmed myself down, and messaged her immediately to see if she would tell me exactly what products she had used. Luckily, Our Patron Saint of the Glossy Lid was kind enough to bestow upon us a list of all the things you need to re-create this gorgeous nighttime look at home. It’s startlingly easy to pull off.
Skin
To achieve that dewy-looking skin, Katie used Glossier’s Stretch Concealer as a sort of solid tinted moisturizer. In other words, she took a foundation brush, swirled it in the product, then buffed it into her skin all over. The dewy, creamy consistency of the product works like a dream when it’s used like a foundation, and gives the most radiant, luminous finish.
Then Katie used one of my all time favorite highlighters, Haloscope from Glossier, in the shade Moonstone. Moonstone is a beautiful, subtly prismatic formula that gives the skin an opalescent effect. For this look, she tapped it into the high points of her face — cheekbones, tip of the nose, chin, and brow bone — with her finger.
Lips
Katie used a NARS lipstick in the shade Mysterious Red to achieve her beautiful, bright-red lip. The matte formula is nondrying, she says, and the crayon-esque shape makes it super-easy to precisely line the edges of the lips.
I used my beloved, tried-and-true Power Lip from Make Beauty. Much like the NARS Pencil, this lipstick’s square edges make it super-easy, so you can look put-together without much effort. This is my go-to bold red shade — I’ve seen it on dozens of people with different skin tones, and it always looks killer.
Eyes
On the eyelids, Katie first went in with a combination of chocolatey browns and grayish browns from Rosie for Autograph’s Gold Rush Palette (Rosie Huntington Whiteley’s collaboration with Marks and Spencer), focusing on the crease and lower lash line. Unfortunately, this palette is no longer available, but I noticed (and Katie confirmed) that very similar shades can be found in Urban Decay’s Naked 2 Palette (a major cult favorite: according to the company, one is sold every five seconds).
To top it all off, Katie used her finger to gentle tap some of Make Beauty’s face gloss across her lid. Glosses have a tendency to make your eye makeup move around a bit, but, she says, you shouldn’t worry about it. “That little bit of movement can actually make the eye makeup look dimensional and interesting,” she says.
Brows
Katie finished the look with Ardell’s Stroke a Brow — a fine-tipped pen that creates the illusion of tiny little hairs. She suggested focusing on the front part of the brows (nearest to your nose), to make things look believably, subtly messy.
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