As someone who has spent years studying faces, applying makeup to countless beautiful women, and building a community around the ritual of beauty, what I've witnessed lately is something similar to a collective exhale. I’m encountering more women, quite desperate to step away from the filter, from online life, from the full-coverage foundation and the constant expectation to look perfect. They are, in the most literal sense, coming back to themselves.
The makeup trends I'm seeing emerge in 2026 are less faddy trends, but they feel a bit more like a recalibration or renaissance. After years of optimising our faces for pixels and screens, we are finally making up for the people sitting across from us at dinner or for the morning light in the bathroom mirror, rather than always photos and videos.
Let me be clear about what this is not. This is not the "no-makeup makeup" or “clean-girl era”, instead it’s something a bit more honest and (hopefully) not a fleeting trend. It’s still makeup and still glam but in a way that acknowledges skin texture should exist. Pores are not flaws to be erased but proof of being an actual, real-life human, the slight crease of an eyelid or the natural shadow beneath the eye tells the story of late girls’ nights, 5am gym sessions, belly laughter, anxiety and just generally, the gorgeous, complicated business of living.
The women I work with as a makeup artist and with Beauty Class, have been leading this charge. They tell me stories of treatment fatigue, trying to keep pace with celebrities who have entire teams and budgets dedicated to their faces and feeling perpetually behind in a race they never signed up for. During our classes, the relief in the room is palpable when I tell women they do not need full coverage or “perfection”, that their skin texture is perfectly acceptable, that makeup can be fun rather than corrective. We’re discovering that makeup can enhance while letting your skin breathe and move. Eye makeup can be soft and slightly undone, lived-in rather than perfectly blended. We’re realising that this version of beauty, this truer version, suits us better than any filter ever did.
The new products arriving now seem to understand this moment. Foundations and skin tints are feeling and looking more like skin, not despite their coverage but because of how intelligently they've been engineered. Korean skincare has reached an apex of sophistication, delivering formulations so advanced they blur the line between treatment and makeup. Cream blushes that melt and move, leaving behind nothing but a flush that could be exertion or excitement or simply good circulation. These are not products that actually enhance what is already there, rather than transforming, which is a very different proposition than what we constantly see on social media.
There is a return to playfulness happening with washes of shadow in unexpected colours, blues and lavenders and mossy greens, applied with fingertips and left slightly imperfect at the edges. The effect is artistic and expressive and suggests you have a personality, interests, perhaps even a sense of humour about yourself.
For me, the Giorgio Armani Eye Tints and Cheek Tints exemplify this sensibility perfectly, delivering rich colours that sheer out beautifully and wear in throughout the day, offering an intelligent and fun approach to colour.
I love that lips have gone decisively stained rather than painted. The heavy matte liquid lipsticks that required geometric precision and never survived a meal have given way to lip tints and stains that sink into the lips, leaving behind just enough colour to suggest intention without demanding maintenance, so you can drink coffee, kiss someone, live your actual life.
The technical innovation happening in beauty right now is kind of staggering, manifesting in sophisticated and tech-forward results. Pigments that respond to your skin's pH, powders that somehow feel like cream, formulas that adapt to every day movement and of course more and more at-home devices that deliver safe and incredible results. (My CurrentBody LED Series 2 continues to be a firm favourite and I’m excited to see more tech-forward beauty in the years to come.)
So, here we are in 2026, at the beginning of what I’d like to be makeup's most honest era. Not because the products are incapable of transformation or coverage, but because we’re collectively deciding that maybe we don’t need transforming. We need products that work with us rather than on us and makeup that acknowledges we have lives to live beyond the camera, faces that move and express and exist in three dimensions.
This is makeup for women who have better things to do than reapply every two hours, for faces that deserve to be seen in natural light and for the revolutionary act of looking, simply and entirely, like yourself.
Makeup by me on Damicka Kiasatina at BMA Models.