High street beauty is booming, ensuring that covetable makeup and purse-friendly prices can happily coexist. Now H&M Beauty has joined the conversation with a collection that is designed to be easy to use and coax out your creative side.
“The new collection is bringing backstage expertise to the masses but it’s also great for artists,” declares Raoúl Alejandre, the makeup artist the Swedish high street brand has enlisted to bring its new line to life. “These are things that I use in my own kit and the formulas are made in Italy so the standard of the actual product is really high. If you’re spending $8 on a product it should have colour payoff. It should be high performing. We’re in a space now where having something that’s not pigmented or something that’s not going to last is just not an excuse anymore.”
The 32-piece collection of vegan makeup products includes bronzers, lipsticks that are refillable as well as cream and powder iterations of highlighter and blusher. Notably, all are pleasingly priced under £10 and are formulated with a roster of skin-loving ingredients including hyaluronic acid and vitamin E.
When I caught up with Raoúl at the global launch in London, he told me that draping is his signature technique and one that he uses on his celebrity clients – an impressive roster that includes Zendaya, Nicola Peltz-Brooklyn and GLAMOUR cover star Willow Smith.
“For a long time it was just with blusher, draping with a pinkier colour on the lids or using a transitional colour that moved onto the temple and the cheek,” he says, adding that he loves a monochromatic look using cream blusher first on the eyes and cheeks before going in with a powder blusher and a big fluffy brush to set it.
“But now, it’s all about bronzer,” he says. Raoúl prefers to place bronzer high on the cheekbone rather than in the hollow as it doesn’t look so harsh or drag the face down. “If you don’t have anything transitioning from the eye or the temple, it just feels like a line. If you want that contoured effect, use a brush that’s a little bit more tapered to create that definition. But it’s also nice to use those old-school big fluffy brushes and just start buffing what’s left over from the cheekbone upwards so that it starts creating this beautiful grading effect.”
As well as doing your draping before applying brow gel or mascara – “you don’t want any dustiness” – he also recommends taking what’s left on the brush down the neck and behind the ears to keep the colour consistent.
A key feature of the new H&M Beauty offering is a mascara wardrobe comprising four different products, whether you’re looking for a full-volume flutter to mimic falsies or your fallback position is separated and lengthened lashes.