Watch RuPaul’s Drag Race Star Trixie Mattel Do Her 33-Step Beauty Transformation
“I wanted to show you guys an easy look,” says Trixie Mattel, the drag persona of Milwaukee-born Brian Firkus. “Well, easy for me, difficult for you.”
Needless to say, the * RuPaul’s Drag Race* alum and rising country star has plenty of makeup secrets, having cut her teeth at beauty school and as a one-time employee of Sephora before forging her own path. “It’s kind of apparent that no one ever taught me how to do anything, because I kind of just do my own version of everything,” confesses Mattel.
After meticulously prepping her skin (“The devil’s in the details!” she insists), Mattel begins by gluing down her brows with an Elmer’s purple glue stick. “This is New York; people do this all the time,” she laughs. After layering on liquid foundation, she blends on a gradient of shades from the Too Faced Sweet Peach Eyeshadow Palette, going from lightest to darkest. “My brows are never even,” she says, drawing on hyper-exaggerated arches with a few different brown shades and highlighting the area with a bright white concealer. Since she is creating entirely new angles on her face, deft sculpting is super important to Mattel: “When you look at the Trixie makeup, you see the contour, but the highlight is the part that really makes it three-dimensional,” she explains. To set her trompe l’oeil brows, she uses a custom, homemade face powder, which she mixes up in an IKEA plastic food container. Then, she extends her eyes with saturated strokes of black liner and stacks of false lashes. “I hate when people wear lashes and no mascara—go home, don’t even go out!” she says. Finishing up her makeup, she overlines her lips with a dusty pink liner, then adds a thick coat of matching liquid lipstick. “Everybody should wear blush, I don’t care who you are,” she says while swirling rosy pigment on the apples of the cheeks and defining her cheekbones with a “45-year-old highlighter” to razor-sharp effect.
“Most people’s favorite thing about drag is wigs,” she says, whipping out a larger-than-life ’60s-era platinum blonde mane. After throwing it on, she mists on perfume—a special “burnt marshmallow and leather jacket” bouquet—and waves goodbye. Who else but Mattel could make a 33-step routine look so extraordinarily uncomplicated?
Trixie in a Agent Provocateur robe.
Originally Appeared on Vogue
