How to Revamp Your Spring Beauty Routine, According to the Pros
Next-Gen Lashes
Eye-catching innovations that completely up your lash game. -Erin Reimel
Top, Cédric Charlier, $460.
Celeste Sloman
Highlights
Lash extensions—individual faux hairs attached to your natural lashes with semi-permanent glue—now come in edgy shades like teal and purple. “Adding color can enhance your natural eye color,” says Envious Lashes founder Clementina Richardson. To highlight green and brown eyes, she recommends adding a few subtle purple lashes to a set of black extensions; to make the whites of your eyes look brighter, opt for blue lashes. Or you can skip the salon and apply your own colorful faux-lash strips at home (try Lashify Prismatic Gossamer Lashes; $25).
Lash Lift
Have super straight eyelashes? Here’s an end to curler cramp. “A lash lift is the modern version of a lash perm,” says Toronto’s Pretty in the City salon founder Veronica Tran. The treatment uses thioglycolate—an ingredient that is safe when handled by a pro—to break keratin bonds at the roots of the hairs so their shape can be molded. A technician applies the solution while lashes are curled over a silicone pad for approximately 10 minutes. The curl can last up to eight weeks, says Andrea Starr, founder of the Boston-based Starr Beauty Studio.
Magnetic Liner
While magnetic falsies—which come in sets of two that connect over your own lashes—are easy to apply (no glue required!), they can be heavy and even slide off. Former pageant queen Laura Hunter came up with a fix: magnetic eyeliner. The liquid liner in Hunter’s LashLiner Los Angeles Magnetic Eyeliner and Lash Kit ($65) contains non-toxic, FDA-approved iron oxide, which attracts a single strip of lashes. Apply the black liner as you normally would (you can even add a cat-eye), then let it dry before attaching individual lash strips.
LE VOLUME DE CHANEL Mascara
CHANEL nordstrom.com
$32.00
Micro-reservoirs in these 3-D-printed bristles apply the perfect amount of color every time. Choose from four new shades or the original Noir.
IMMACULASH 360
This double brush sandwiches lashes with the press of a button for a darker, lusher look.
Unlimited Lash Lifting and Lengthening Washable Mascara
L'Oreal Paris amazon.com
$8.99
Tweak this bendable brush to reach tricky corner and bottom lashes. The formula comes off with just warm water.
Smarter Sun Care
The newest ways to apply SPF go far beyond UV protection. -Hayden Field
Cutout tube top, Victor Glemaud, $255. Bikini bottom, Chromat, $116. Bracelet, Tiffany & Co., $1,900.
Celeste Sloman
Dry Oil Primer
In the wake of its foundation launch last year, makeup sponge giant Beautyblender created a sunscreen soul mate: Selfie Shield SPF 38 ($32). The primer is a fast-absorbing dry oil that leaves an almost indetectable residue after soaking in for about a minute and helps your makeup last throughout the day. Also inside are oil-soluble vitamin C and microalgae, which can protect the skin from damage caused by blue light (the type emitted by your cell phone and laptop screens).
Eye Luminizer
Between 5 and 10 percent of all skin cancers are found on the eyelid, so it’s vital to pay special attention to this area. Supergoop! Shimmershade SPF 30 ($24) does double duty as a subtle eye shadow and a mineral SPF, which, says New York–based dermatologist Dendy Engelman, MD, fills a significant void. The formula also includes antioxidants from plants like rose, Roman chamomile, jasmine, and sunflower that can help counteract the harmful effects of the sun.
Leave-In Conditioner
Exposure to sun and air pollution is higher during the warmer months and can degrade hair. Moroccanoil Protect & PreventSpray ($30) is a leave-in conditioner with sun-shielding and pollution-fighting ingredients that protect colored hair from oxidation, a chemical reaction triggered byUV that can cause fading. Other key ingredients: argan oil for conditioning and sunflower extract, a potent antioxidant.
Mineral SPF
Some dermatologists view mineral sun-screens as more effective—and environ-mentally friendly—than chemical options, but they tend to feel greasy or leave a chalkycast. La Roche-Posay Anthelios SPF 50 Mineral Sunscreen-Gentle Lotion with Cell-OxShield ($30) is the outlier, Engelman says. It’s light and blendable, and the fusion of two sunscreen types with antioxidants protects against both UVA rays (which can lead to wrinkles, dark spots, and DNA damage)and UVB rays (which can cause sunburns as well as DNA damage).
Selfie Shield™ Broad Spectrum SPF 38 Dry Oil Primer
beautyblender sephora.com
$32.00
Supergoop! Shimmershade Illuminating Cream Eyeshadow SPF 30
SUPERGOOP! nordstrom.com
$24.00
Protect & Prevent Spray
Moroccanoil sephora.com
$13.00
Anthelios SPF 50 Mineral Sunscreen - Gentle Lotion (3 fl oz.)
La Roche-Posay dermstore.com
$20.00
Bespoke Hair Care
A new generation of customizable hair products offers countless ways to turn heads. -By Kate Foster
Dress, Dolce & Gabbana, $5,795. Hoop earrings, RobertoCoin, $560. Ear cuffs, Saskia Diez, $282-$554 each.
Celeste Sloman
Everyone is born with a hair texture and hue as unique as their DNA. But most products lump hair into a relatively small number of types. Now the hyper-individualization obsession that has turned services like 23andMe into a cottage industry has reached beauty. A handful of start-ups are using algorithms and AI to create personalized hair-care formulas.
One such disrupter, Function of Beauty, was founded by a team of MIT engineers and data scientists. After clients fill out an online quiz about their hair type and top five goals (from reducing brassiness to soothing the scalp), they choose a color and scent fora custom-made shampoo, conditioner, or leave-in treatment—and can even have their name printed on the bottle. It sounds simpler than it is: Function of Beauty’s proprietary algorithm converts each person’s hair profile into a formula with precise amounts of key ingredients that won’t separate in the bottle or cancel each other out. According to cofounder Zahir Dossa, of the more than a million bottles sold to date, not a single formula has been created twice.
Hair brand Prose offers buyers the option of completing an online questionnaire or visiting a Prose-trained stylist at a salon before purchasing one of its made-to-order products, which start at $25 for shampoo or conditioner. This spring, Prose released the world’s first tailor-made hair oil.
For those seeking DIY hair color, the on-line service eSalon analyzes clients’ answers to more than 20 questions about hair history, target color, and percentage of gray strands(plus a photo) before blending custom dye and developer. The formulas are sent out with personalized instructions, gloves, a tint brush, and a stain guard and remover. The recipe can be tweaked at any time to change color intensity or tone.
Garnier Fructis Sleek Shot In-Shower Styler to Cut Sleeking Time in Half, 5.1 fl. oz.
Garnier walmart.com
$4.94
Turn any shampoo into a smoothing formula by mixing in this argan oil-infused cuticle-smoothing "shot" at a one-to-one ratio.
Perfect hair Day™ Body Builder
LIVING PROOF nordstrom.com
$15.00
This volumizing spray—five years in the making—has an adjustable nozzle for looks ranging from all-natural to full drama.
Mixed Feelings Leave-In Blonde Drops
Add one to five purple drops to your shampoo, conditioner, or styler to nix brassy tones—or up to 10 to go completely icy.
Skincare for All
Professional procedures and intuitive devices are now available at home. -By Hayden Field
Top, Attico, $1,916. Necklace, Cartier, $7,450.
Celeste Sloman
Microneedling Patches
In the popular clinical procedure called microneedling, supershort fine needles puncture the skin to prompt reparative collagen production. Now skin-care companies have given the technique an at-home twist with single-use patches. Dissolvable, needlelike points embedded on one side of a patch break the topmost layer of the skin, and ingredients baked inside the points penetrate deeper. A variety of patches address different concerns: Exuviance HA100 Micro-FillerPatches ($88 for four plus a serum) infuse moisturizing hyaluronic acid (HA) to plump up lines. Shiffa Amuse Dissolvable Patches for Smile Lines ($75 for four) contain HA plus a vitamin C derivative to brighten, while ZitSticka’s KILLA patches ($29 for eight) flood the skin with acne-reducing ingredients like salicylic acid and niacinamide.
Hypersmart Tools
“Customized treatments are the future of skin care,” says dermatologist Anna Guanche, MD, who’s based in Calabasas, California. One extremely precise skin tool is Opté ($599), a handheld device that was created in a Procter & Gamble incubator. The Opté scans the skin with blue LED light and takes 200 photos per second with a high-definition camera. Then it uses an AI algorithm to instantly calculate how much corrective serum and makeup to dispense in order to conceal pigment issues, like spots and scars, while improving them long term (unblemished skin stays makeup-free). Upping the ante in sheet masks, Neutrogena will introduce MaskiD this fall, which personalizes masks for your face shape and skin issues. After you take a selfie with the Skin360 scanner, which attaches to and syncs with your smart phone, an app determines which ingredients are needed on which zones of the face. A 3-D printer at a Neutrogena plant creates hydrogel masks to these specifications, which are then mailed to your doorstep. Coming to the U.S. in a few years, the Olay Face Navi Smart Wand uses electro-magnetic technology to boost skin-care absorption. Because specific wavelengths can repel certain ingredients (just as when you hold two opposing magnets near each other, they’re pushed apart), the wand uses this principle to push ingredients in the opposite direction—deep-er into the skin—when it’s held above a target area. For example, when it’s hovering over your crow’s-feet, it adjusts the wavelength to speed absorption of your Olay eye cream.
Red-Light Therapy
Light therapy is a hot subject of beauty research, and findings suggest it can improve wrinkles, collagen density, acne, and more. Formerly confined to dermatologists’ and facialists’ offices, light treatments have caught on for home use with devices from Neutrogena and LightStim. This year, Joovv introduced Joovv Go ($295), a wireless, handheld version of its FDA-cleared red-light devices, including its popular full-body system. As Guanche explains, red light works by disabling certain enzymes that degrade collagen. She estimates it would take 30 treatments to see a difference with an over-the-counter device like Joovv, versus 12 in a clinic, where practitioners use stronger light panels that are more densely packed with bulbs. But at about $45 or more per in-office treatment, Joovv Go could save you a pretty penny in the long run.
Styled by Dania Ortiz; hair by Leonardo Manetti at Ion Studio NYC; makeup by Deanna Melluso for Chanel Beauty; manicure by Nori for Dior; casting by Richardo Blandino; model: Maggie Laine at IMG.
This article originally appeared in the May 2019 issue of ELLE.
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