The Paula Knorr Spring 2020 Show Featured Watercolour Makeup
Watercolour Makeup Made Its First Appearance at London Fashion Week in the Prettiest of Ways
Call it tie-dye, call it watercolour, call it whatever you like, but it's officially a beauty look everyone is obsessed with at the moment, be it a celebrity on the red carpet or a makeup artist backstage at London Fashion Week.
For the Paula Knorr Spring 2020 show, Los Angeles-based makeup artist Lottie — you may known her as @lotstar on Instagram — flew across the pond to create the look for the show. What she came up with was a dreamy haze of purple, pink, and peach shadows all around the eyes that continued down onto the cheeks.
Backstage, Lottie used a selection of products from RealHer, a cruelty free, California-based makeup brand with a goal of empowering anyone who wears it (and unfortunately, only available for purchase in the US at the moment). She dipped into the pink and purple shades found in the RealHer Conquer From Within Palette V, and the peach and orange tones from the RealHer Embrace Yourself Palette IV.
"Most of the collection is a bright coral, but there's also white and silver and mustard, so I wanted [the makeup] colours to complement rather than match the clothes," Lottie explained. "These makeup shades work with the entire collection." Using the same four shadows, she created two different looks for the show: The first with purple on the outer corners and orange in the centre of the lids (shown above), the second featuring orange on the outer corners and purple in the centre (shown below).
Once the powders were in place, she then lined the lashes with either the RealHer Lip Liner in I Am Positive (a bold fuchsia) or I Am Persistent (a bright orange), softening the edges with a tapered shadow brush "so you still have the intensity at the lash lines," said Lottie.
One of the things I've wondered since seeing similar watercolour-colour looks is how to keep every single shade looking vibrant and not muddy — a tricky task when applying two very different hues very close to each other. The secret: lots of blending, and using separate brushes. "Basically you lay down your first colour by patting it onto the outer corners and then really blending the edges past the outer corners and up to the brows," explained Lottie. "So you do all those tones first and then, using a separate brush, you press your second colour onto the lids, and then you blend it into the first colour you applied — so whatever is left on the brush kind of blends into the other shade. It's a lot of blending so that it looks really seamless."
To complete the look, Lottie dusted blush along the models' cheekbones and up to the temples, blending the pinky hues into the eye shadow (a technique makeup artists call draping). She then swiped a clear gloss with the tiniest bit of silvery shimmer across the lips (RealHer Lip Gloss in I Am Brave) and, before the models walked the runway, added clear gloss over the eye shadow. "There are tiny sequins on the clothes that almost make them look wet from the runway," said Lottie, "so that's why we're doing the gloss over the eye and the cheek to tie it all together."
Keep reading to see photos of the mesmerising makeup look.
The Makeup at Paula Knorr Spring 2020
The Makeup at Paula Knorr Spring 2020
The Makeup at Paula Knorr Spring 2020
The Makeup at Paula Knorr Spring 2020
The Makeup at Paula Knorr Spring 2020
