I’m in love with an eye shadow. It all started in March: backstage at Rochas in Paris, models milled around with blackberry lips (not so surprising; it had already become, by that point, the hue to beat for fall), and eyes that were hugged—top and bottom—by a wash of a hard-to-place, hazy color. Lucia Pieroni held up a square Clé de Peau compact with a violet-swirled lid and told me, “we’re doing a sort of ‘blown out’ smoky eye, so there are no edges to it—it’s very soft-focus. No liner, no mascara…it’s kind of like shading the eye. To me, that has a real beauty because you get to see people’s lids, which you don’t usually see because when you have loads of mascara or liner on, the lid disappears. Here, you get this really beautiful wide, oval shape.”
I was transfixed. So transfixed that, upon hearing that the shadow in question—the limited edition Bordeaux Amethyst—wasn’t hitting shelves until RIGHT NOW, I started to panic. This way of doing eye shadow is so genius, my brain raced. It’s not in the crease…it’s not “smoky” in the typical way…it’s like a smoke of sexy vampire color. It’s so…fresh. Keep in mind that I was averaging about three hours of sleep a night. The petite, French Clé de Peau PR person backstage must have been telepathic, because, as if on cue, she gave me that drug-dealing sort of glance (you know, the kind you see in movies), slipped a little square into my bag, and walked away. From that point on, not a day goes by that I don’t dip a finger into that shadow, smudge it all over my eyelid, using that little sponge-y guy it comes with that I swear to God I’ve never used under any other circumstance to make a sort of “line” underneath my eye. It can be as subtle or as intense as you want—and the best part is...it’s kind of, sort of, all you need.
Or at least, all I want. For Meghan Collison, the 24-year-old star of the new Proenza campaign, that one necessary item is MAC’s StudioFix compact powder plus foundation (NC-50 in the summer, NC-15 in the winter). “And if I’m going to do a lip, I don’t like that nude thing. I like my lips to look alive,” she told us the other day at our studio, citing Revlon’s Just Bitten lip stains as another go-to. Wearing an Asos floral top with a lace collar, Collison looked markedly different than the one-time pseudo-goth-girl (who got the attention of Steven Meisel and Italian Vogue back in 2007) we were expecting. “I used to wear a lot of black—you know, black skinny jeans, black top. But I got sick of always reaching for the same thing; I went through a kind of style slump, and decided to start brightening up. Now I wear a lot of vintage, and I’m really into things with collars.”
Before taking off to the Poconos with her boyfriend and their ivory Devon Rex cat Penny (peep her Instagram—@omgitsmeg—for a look) for a pre-fashion week getaway, Collison and I had a little dress-up session with my favorite eye shadow and its lip counterpart (not to be overlooked— R10, a fantastic shade for fall). Here it is, the definitive makeup message for fall. You can quote me.
—E.W.
Meghan Collison photographed by Emily Weiss in New York on August 23rd 2012.
