Vogue USA - 12.2019

181

YOU TH D O

O

n 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 min-

gling 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, cat-

fishing, 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 daugh-

ter’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 beau-

ty 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 con-

cept 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 after-

noon 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. @

“Euphoria

makeup” has hit

the runways. But

what is it about

the HBO show’s

embrace of

Gen Z beauty

mores that

we can’t get

enough of? asks

Naom i Fr y.

Photographed by

Daniel Jackson.

EXPERIMENTAL PHASE

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
PRODUCED BY PRODN Paul. Details, see In This Issue. Fashion Editor: Jorden Bickham.