Why the Fashion World Can’t Get Enough of Euphoria Makeup

Model Caroline Trentini takes a page out of the Gen Z style guide in a crystal-encrusted eye by makeup artist Pat McGrath for Pat McGrath Labs and a Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello dress. Hair, Jimmy Paul. Fashion Editor: Jorden Bickham.
Model Caroline Trentini takes a page out of the Gen Z style guide in a crystal-encrusted eye by makeup artist Pat McGrath for Pat McGrath Labs and a Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello dress. Hair, Jimmy Paul. Fashion Editor: Jorden Bickham.
Photographed by Daniel Jackson

ON THE penthouse floor of a downtown hotel, often used for actual bat mitzvahs, I recently participated in a performative version of the Jewish coming-of-age ceremony. As a klezmer band fought to be heard over the crowd’s excited chatter, my friend the designer Susan Korn showed her spring Susan Alexandra collection amid hundreds of pink and white balloons and sparkly fuchsia streamers. Korn had asked me to model—along with other comedians, writers, and artists she cast on Instagram—and so I found myself mingling with the show’s attendees in a rust-colored bouffant wig, a boldly-hued outfit, and bright-green eye shadow that a makeup artist had slathered all the way up to my eyebrows, a peak example of what countless fashion-blog explainers and Instagram Stories might now refer to as “Euphoria makeup.”

Referencing HBO’s Sam Levinson–created hit drama, which follows the lives of a group of teenagers in a nameless California suburb, the term was seemingly ubiquitous at the spring collections in New York, an apt summation of anything resembling the show’s wildly experimental, eminently covetable beauty looks. Despite its focus on people much, much younger than myself, who lead lives infinitely edgier than my own, Euphoria exerted its curious grip on me—a woman in her early 40s, with a husband, a child, and a full-time job—when its first season aired this summer. The characters grapple with unrequited love, parent-child conflicts, lost friendships, pregnancy scares, depression, self-loathing, and other age-old adolescent issues presented for a distinctly Gen Z audience. It’s all there: opioid addiction, gender nonconformity, sexting, catfishing, cam-girling, and trawling for one-night stands via the gay-hookup app Grindr. Teens these days, according to the script, are leading grittier and perhaps freer lives than those of the generations before them. And they’re doing so in messy, dark-purple glitter tears dripping low down their cheeks—or Cubist-style eyeliner stretched almost to the temples, like a latter-day Nina Hagen (a reference for a distinctly Gen X audience). I can’t get enough of it.

“It’s about resisting antiquated notions of gender and using makeup as unbridled self-expression for a powerful statement,” Doniella Davy, Euphoria’s lead makeup artist, explains of the contagious effect of the pearl-adorned brow line worn by Maddy, the bad-girl cheerleader played by Alexa Demie, or the cloud-shaped outlines that the transgender Jules, played by Hunter Schafer, draws around her eyes—not dissimilar to the “expressive, artful lines” the makeup artist James Kaliardos scrawled around lids at Rosie Assoulin, using colored MAC Chromagraphic Pencils, and inspired by Assoulin’s five-year-old daughter’s own scribbles. Sydney Sweeney, the 22-year-old actress who plays Cassie—the conventional hot blonde, who decorates her entire face with Swarovski crystals for a fantasy ice-skating sequence in the show’s eighth episode—understands the appeal on a personal level. For a recent event, she deployed a Euphoria-like dotting of crystals beneath her lower lash line. “I felt like a fierce bitch,” she says, laughing.

One might be forgiven for thinking that the spring beauty looks at Korn’s show—or at Area, where designers Beckett Fogg and Piotrek Panszczyk used crystals and pearls instead of pigments and powders, or perhaps most notably at Marc Jacobs, where Pat McGrath put on a master class in vivid creativity, sweeping purple sequins up to eyebrows and caking gold glitter onto cheeks in lieu of blush—were Euphoria-esque. But acute observers of the annals of runway beauty—once the major source of inspiration for those daring to glue star-shaped sequins beneath a free-form curve of white eyeliner, a design concept McGrath described backstage at Anna Sui as “fresh and naive”—will notice that “Euphoria makeup” isn’t all that new a phenomenon. “In a way, this is what I’ve done my whole career,” says McGrath, the legendary makeup artist who notes that fashion and beauty “always reflect the culture at large.” (McGrath has heard of the show, she tells me, but “hasn’t had a moment to sit down and watch it.”) It’s just that now, our ever-shifting culture is holding up the mirror. The vulnerable, damaged characters on Euphoria feel familiar and recognizably human—even relatable, in a way that serves as a kind of invitation. You, too, can dare to experiment, they seem to say—if not with mind-bending chemicals, then at least with some cosmetics.

I didn’t even bother to scrub off the green eye shadow after the bat mitzvah fashion show ended. I emerged onto Chrystie Street on the Lower East Side on a Saturday afternoon with neon lids that would have made Jules or Maddy proud. I felt young, carefree, a little bit reckless. What’s next, I thought to myself—snorting pharmaceuticals at an all-night rave? That I was actually heading to the grocery store to stock up on school-lunch supplies for the week before sitting down to meet this deadline is a completely inconsequential part of the narrative.

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Originally Appeared on Vogue