I’m slick as an otter. I’m greased up like a Thanksgiving turkey. I have just left a face-shaped spot on my gingham linen pillowcase. My husband is asking me not to hug him for fear I’ll do the same to his shirt.
How did I find myself here, a human Slip ’N Slide, coated in more lotions, primers, and face oils than I knew existed? In my time writing for Vogue, I’ve tried a lot of beauty moves, both trendy and classic. But never have I taken on an assignment with such academic focus as this one: attempting to understand the growing obsession with dewy, gleaming skin.
Over the last few years, the Gen Z passion for skin that glows, glistens, and glitters has gone by many names: glazed-doughnut skin (Hailey Bieber’s raison d’être) is a little bit different from dolphin skin (which employs mermaid-ish blue micro-glitter), and should not be confused with honey skin, Jell-O skin, vampire skin, or the not-so-subtly named celeb skin. Cloud skin (dewy without being reflective) is not the same as cloudless skin (which seems simply to be a euphemism for perfect skin). Some of these trends are about sheen, some about sparkle, while others are about a natural, youthful glow meant to look like it involved no products at all. But whether you subscribe to glass skin (the K-beauty import redefining our skin-care process) or status skin (the name speaks for itself), the common denominator is clear: gone are the days of skin so matte that it resembles a coat of Farrow & Ball paint on a patio floor. Skin, once robbed of its character, has come alive again.
I’ve always had a theory that, no matter how much we transform ourselves with age, we can never quite shed the baggage of our high school beauty rules. Even if we define ourselves against them, they stay with us like ghosts. As a rapidly aging millennial, the look that spoke status when I was a teen was flawless and powdered. We layered concealer, foundation, and multiple powders so heavily that a sander was needed to detect natural texture. As a high school acne-sufferer with an “oily T-zone” (thank you, Sephora lady in 2002, for letting me know), I committed to a regimen of stripping my skin dry with Proactiv before laying an unflattering shade of beige CoverGirl over the top like I was spackling a wall. To shine, even a little, was a humiliation we spent all our bathroom breaks avoiding. Oil was a dirty word—quite literally.
Members of Generation Z, however, are freeing themselves from the tyranny of makeup as subterfuge. While there is a faction of beauty influencers doing things with powder that compel yet confound me (what is “baking” your undereye?), an inspiring array of young faces is celebrating textures—even when they are freckled or “flawed.”
While the glass skin trend (let’s pick a name and stick with it) has steadily risen in popularity since its import in about 2017, it reached a new height in early 2024, when legendary makeup artist Pat McGrath sent a parade of models down the Maison Margiela Artisanal runway with glass skin on steroids. The look—slick but firm, both full coverage and ethereal—set the internet ablaze as TikTok sleuths tried to figure out how McGrath had turned regular old human beings into porcelain dolls. (Of course, in McGrath’s world, where diversity is a cornerstone of beauty, porcelain doesn’t mean white, but rather a finish that allows models of any shade to look like children’s playthings run amok.)
McGrath has long been a proponent of “aliengelic” skin—natural, but better—rejecting the hypercontoured look of the last 10 years in both her work on the runway and her namesake beauty products. (If an otherworldly glow is what you seek, Pat McGrath Labs’ Divine Skin: Rose 001 The Essence will get you there.) But the viral Margiela moment was not, she tells us, simply a response to a trend. It had, in fact, been “years in the making.”
