This Make-Up Artist Wants You to Ditch Your Cat-Eye for a ‘Blue Fade’
It will take you out of your beauty comfort zone, but is remarkably easy to pull off.
18 September 2019
All Credtis: PA
Unless you’re a member of Gen Z and have been raised on YouTube beauty tutorials, creating the perfect eye make-up look is tricky. For most of us, a black cat-eye is our go-to, but London Fashion Week provides ample inspiration for mixing up your beauty look.
Designer Richard Quinn is known for his avant-garde florals, and he needs a colourful beauty look to match. Enter make-up guru Miranda Joyce, who has the perfect solution to cat-eye fatigue: Electric blue eyes.
It sounds out-there but is surprisingly easy to pull off, and is definitely preferable to painstakingly trying to apply the perfect swoop. It uses a beautiful blue eyeshadow, and the trick to creating this look is to build up the colour using a brush on your eyelids slowly, until you get the shade you want.
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The colour “looks quite navy in the palette, but we’ve done a wash of white before we’ve put the blue on,” explains Joyce. “It looks very dark, but we’re blending it out, so you can intensify it when you want to.”
The whole look is inspired by Seventies glamour – particularly one of Twiggy’s Vogue covers from that era – and luckily you don’t need a steady hand to nail it. The blue eyeshadow is “fanned out to the outside corner – we’ve kept the fan quite low so it’s not a wing at all, it’s quite low and straight,” says Joyce.
Joyce explains how the look is topped off with “mascara top and bottom” and “a bit of white eye pencil for definition”. For that extra Seventies touch, you can apply Lipglass Clear (£16/AED73.16, MAC) on top for a glossy sheen.
It’s an ideal antidote to the perfect, cookie-cutter make-up looks you see all over Instagram. Joyce wanted to create a look for the type of women with “something quite interesting and dark about them”.
For the show, Joyce clashed the blue eyes with equally shiny orange lips. This was done with Chromaline in orange (£17.50/AED34.29, MAC) and again, used Lipglass on top, for that extra sheen. Admittedly, the blue eyeshadow will probably be enough of a look for most of us in our day-to-day lives, but the orange gloss is more subtle than you might think, and really completes the Seventies vibe.
According to Joyce, this is for “slightly more interesting girls – we didn’t want them ‘pretty’,” – and Richard Quinn’s show really reflected that with voluminous dresses mixing latex, floral patterns, feathers and a whole lot of drama.
If you’re in an eye make-up rut, applying blue eyeshadow like this could be a simple but effective way to mix up your look.
