I have just left a face-shaped spot on my gingham linen pillowcase. My husband is asking me not to hug him for fear I’ll do the same to his shirt.
How did I find myself here, a human Slip ’N Slide, coated in more lotions, primers, and face oils than I knew existed? In my time writing for Vogue, I’ve tried a lot of beauty moves, both trendy and classic. But never have I taken on an assignment with such academic focus as this one: attempting to understand the growing obsession with dewy, gleaming skin.
Over the last few years, the Gen Z passion for skin that glows, glistens, and glitters has gone by many names: glazed-doughnut skin (Hailey Bieber’s raison d’être) is a little bit different from dolphin skin (which employs mermaid-ish blue micro-glitter), and should not be confused with honey skin, Jell-O skin, vampire skin, or the not-so-subtly named celeb skin. Cloud skin (dewy without being reflective) is not the same as cloudless skin (which seems simply to be a euphemism for perfect skin). Some of these trends are about sheen, some about sparkle, while others are about a natural, youthful glow meant to look like it involved no products at all. But whether you subscribe to glass skin (the K-beauty import redefining our skin-care process) or status skin (the name speaks for itself ), the common denominator is clear: gone are the days of skin so matte that it resembles a coat of Farrow & Ball paint on a patio floor. Skin, once robbed of its character, has come alive again.
This story is from the September 2024 edition of Vogue US.
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This story is from the September 2024 edition of Vogue US.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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Canvas the City - Martha Diamond captured the brisk energy of Manhattan.
How do you capture a city as frenetic as New York? For the late artist Martha Diamond, it meant looking up. In her soulful paintings of New York City’s skyscrapers, Diamond used loose ropes of color that land somewhere between abstraction and figuration. Though sparse in detail, her buildings teem, as the city does, with life. Diamond made most of her paintings in her loft on the Bowery, where she lived from 1969 until her death last December, at age 79. Throughout her five-decade career, she didn’t so much re-create what she saw as channel its slippery essence. “I know the city has straight lines or edges,” she said in 1989, “but as I walk around, the ending or beginning of substance becomes less absolute.” Her buildings sway in the wind and glisten in the light. “I think her work is still startling,” says poet Eileen Myles, who was a longtime friend of Diamond’s. “It’s there to wake people up.”
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Are you in pain?” Cadence Dubus, a Brooklyn-based fitness instructor who has developed a program for “fascia release,” asks, sending me spiraling before our session begins. There’s that twinge in my shoulder and the carpal tunnel at night—but aren’t such annoyances simply the conditions of modern life, of getting older? “Some,” I answer, shy to cop to any of it. Dubus then has me walk back and forth, squinting at my gait.
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It was late in the summer in Los Angeles, with all the dry heat and burnished sunlight that implies, and Billie Eilish was sitting in a dark room, busy changing her mind. The singer was halfway through editing the music video she had directed for “Birds of a Feather,” her latest astronomically successful hit song (nearly 1 billion streams) off her latest astronomically successful hit album (nearly 4 billion streams at the time), when she encountered a problem: She realized she hated it. Well, not hated. “I was like, this ain’t it,” she says.
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If the eyes are the window to the soul, then our cheeks are the back door. What other part of the body so readily reveals our hidden emotions? Embarrassment, exuberance, delight, desire, all instantly communicated with a rush of blood. It's no wonder that blush has been a mainstay of makeup bags for decades: Ancient Egyptians used ground ochre to heighten their color; Queen Elizabeth I dabbed her cheeks with red dye and mercuric sulfide (which, combined with the vinegar and lead concoction she used to achieve her ivory pallor, is believed to have given her blood poisoning); flappers applied blush in dramatic circles to achieve a doll-like complexion, even adding it to their knees to draw attention to their shorter hemlines
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Simon Porte Jacquemus, much like his label, resonates with the sunny, breezy French South-but behind the good life, as Nathan Heller discovers, is a laser focus and a shoulder-to-the-wheel work ethic.
