It was all about luminous, royal skin at the Macgraw Resort Collection 2017, where Bobbi Brown’s lead makeup artist, Alfie Sadsad, created faux freckles to enhance the youthfulness even further.
The look for the Macgraw show this Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week was inspired by young royalty – the royalty that gets up to a bit of mischief, that is.
“The look is all about rich and royal, but very naughty at the same time,” says Alfie Sadsad, lead artist at Bobbi Brown. “It’s like she has been kissing in the field all day.”
Sadsad says the key is pristine, real skin that has been pared back to the bare basics so that it still “looks like skin”.
This was done with the help of the Bobbi Brown Skin Nourishing Mask before touching up imperfections with the Bobbi Brown Corrector, the Bobbi Brown Concealer and the brand’s Skin Foundation Stick where needed. A retouching powder kept everything satiny beautiful, while still letting skin shine through.
Eyes were pared back to the basics – a gel eyeliner on the lop lashes, cream shadow stick on the lids and a few coats of mascara – which left room for pretty doses colour on the cheeks and lips.
“Cheeks are rosy and there is a very bitten lip,” says Sadsad, which came from dabs of Bobbi Brown Pot Rouge for Lip & Cheeks in Pale Pink.
To keep from making this look just too perfectly pretty to bare (or perhaps to make it even sweeter), Sadsad added faux freckles to models’ pristine faces.
“We are using two techniques to apply the freckles,” says Sadsad. “We are doing one with the toothbrush and then flicking it onto the skin. For the other technique we’re paining random dots with a gel liner.”
If you’re thinking of emulating the look, Sadsad enlisted a concoction of the brand’s Face Mist and Brow Shaper, before dipping a toothbrush into it, then gently flicking it onto the face before “diffusing the freckles with a tinted moisturiser to soften the edges.” For a more restrained technique, Sadsad used a Gel Liner in brown and dotted freckles haphazardly over the nose and cheek bones.
The nails followed a similarly royal theme. Karon McKendrick Taylor for FABY Nail Lacquer created perfectly polished pink manicures that were fit for a princess.
“The show is channelling Grace Kelly, so we wanted refined perfection. It’s a clean, classical look,” says McKendrick Taylor. “The nail polish we used is called Soft Pink, and it really is what is says it is; really soft, beautiful pastel look.”