The WNBA just held its All-Star Weekend, and there was no shortage of amazing Orange Carpet looks. From stunning outfits to picture-perfect makeup and hair looks—there was so much to enjoy besides the game and skills competition.

This summer's complexion launches all point the same way, and for once it's the way a working set artist has wanted for years. Patrick Ta's summer push is soft, sculpted glow, cream and powder blush doing the shaping instead of heavy contour, dewy skin over matte. Rare Beauty and the rest of the July wave are selling the same idea, radiant and skin-like…

It's the end of July, which means half the crews I know are shooting exteriors in heat that turns a locked beauty look into a maintenance problem by the second take. Sweat, sunscreen, and skin oil are all working against the makeup at once, and the lead is usually the one standing in direct sun the longest. Beauty makeup on a hot day isn't a different c…

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The Lost Boys hit theaters July 31, 1987, so it turns 39 this week, and it's still the movie I point young artists to when they think creature work is only about making something ugly. Joel Schumacher cast a run of very pretty young men as the vampires and then told the makeup department the monsters still had to be sexy. Attractive and rotten in the sa…

I’ve always felt that less is more when it comes to makeup. Probably because I grew up with my mom rarely wearing makeup. Both my mom and grandparents always said a little mascara and lipstick should do the trick.

Robert Zemeckis put Death Becomes Her in theaters on July 31, 1992, which makes this its 34th anniversary week. It's the movie this whole newsletter is named after without me ever saying so. Two women drink a potion for eternal youth and spend the back half of the film as beautifully lit corpses, so the makeup crew had to make beauty and death the same …

The final season of Stranger Things gave the beauty and prosthetics press a number to chew on: Vecna, this year, is roughly eleven silicone pieces, Applied like a technical jigsaw against templates marked specifically to the actor’s face and body. Some accounts put the piece count higher once you fold in the foam latex and rubber. Either way, the headli…

L'Officiel ran a piece this week on the bare-lash moment, mascara going quietly optional from the runways to the red carpet, Zendaya turning up to a premiere with her own lashes and nothing else. As a trend it is real and I like it. As a set instruction it is one of the most misunderstood things a young artist can hear, because on camera bare lashes are…

The 2026 trend lists have crowned color-drenched lashes and cosmic highlighters the looks of the year, and both are built for a phone screen, not a cinema camera. On a selfie, a blue or oxblood lash reads as a clean pop of color. On a 4K close-up, colored mascara on a moving lash tends to read as a muddy smudge near the waterline, because the camera res…

YSL Beauty put out the Skin Affair Soft Glow Cushion Foundation at the end of May, built on Korean cushion technology, Thirty-one shades, a serum-infused formula with squalane and polyglutamic acid, finishing to a soft radiant glow. The beauty press is reviewing it as a handbag product. I want to talk about the format itself, because a cushion compact d…

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The women with the best style aren’t the ones who never change.

Barrie Gower's shop built Skeletor as a real suit, not a render, and the movie still opened to 29.3 million dollars domestic on a budget north of 200 million. I want to keep those two facts apart before anyone in a greenlight meeting welds them together, because the people who pay for that mistake are usually the ones who did the best work in the pictur…

Silicone won the creature and old-age business because it moves like skin and takes light like skin, translucent in a way foam latex never quite manages. It also has one flaw that drives every new artist crazy. You can't blend its edge into real skin. Cured silicone doesn't dissolve and doesn't thin, so the edge of a raw silicone piece sits on the face …

There's a document called the Industry Experience Roster that most people outside union crew work have never heard of, and it decides who gets first crack at a union job on the West Coast. Grips, plumbers, makeup artists, about 47,000 people total across IATSE and a couple of Teamsters and LiUNA locals. The deal has always been simple: work one union da…

There is a film in post-production called Pacifico, billed as the largest science-fiction production in Latin American history, and the thing that got my attention is not the budget or the cast. It is that the creature is Practical. Director Gonzalo Gutierrez, who made El Conde and The Exorcism of God, shot it in Bogota and built the monster as a tactil…

The Bay opened in theaters and on demand on July 17. Phil Volken wrote and directed it, the setup is a tourist boat going down inside a designated shark sanctuary and two people trying to swim out of infested water. I haven't seen it and I'm not reviewing it. What got my attention is the build. The production skipped CGI for the animal and had Bischoff'…

I don’t think women are lacking confidence.

Every July 29, the beauty and media industries observe National Lipstick Day as a massive sales opp. Brands like Ulta are extending the promotion through August 1 on select lip products. And while the deals are real, we thought, “What about the brands Latinas have been building for over two decades…

I Am Frankelda landed globally on Netflix on June 12 — Mexico’s first feature-length stop-motion film, made by brothers Arturo and Roy Ambriz at their Mexico City studio Cinema Fantasma, with Guillermo del Toro guiding the production. It already played theaters in Mexico last fall and earned an Annie nomination. Now it is in front of everyone.

L’Argent is a conversation about aging, beauty, and the value time gives. In each installment, a woman reflects on identity, ritual, and self-image — and on what it means, now, to take care of herself.

…which is a huge win for yours truly, given I’m a Prada Beauty and Zendaya enthusiast. I think she is one of the greatest actors of all time—not just her generation—and I’m often reminded of how far she’s come from her start as a child actor. The woman has range! This year, she starred in one of my favorite films,

Murdering the Velar Plosive