HOW TO WEAR CREAM BLUSH

Go with the glow

For sculpting, for brightening and for general prettifying, there’s nothing more useful or more beautiful than blush. Even the most blush averse (though there are none of those on Red’s beauty desk) can get behind one of summer’s loveliest looks. For the Hermès S/S 20 show, make-up artist Dick Page mixed cream blush with satiny lipstick to create a transparent cheek polish, blending it out into a lightweight, peachy sheen. The effect was less Pre-raphaelite flush and more outdoorsy freshness – perfect at a time of year when many of us like a barer face than usual, and certainly a less powdered one.

While not custom-blended, the creams, gels and barely there balms on these pages are just as sheer as Page’s see-through patina, and though they may lack the staying power of powder blush, they make up for it with gleaming real-skin finishes, melting in seamlessly without showing up dryness or fine lines.

Every make-up artist has their signature trick. Page applies blush with a large fluffy brush over minimal base (‘keep the skin as bare as possible, with just a light wash of foundation or concealer to even out the tone’, he says). For Kenneth Soh, a make-up artist known for creating a covetable soft-focus glow, it’s all about buffing on blush in two distinct layers: one underneath and another over the top of your foundation for a ‘soft, edgeless finish’. He also prefers a fluffy brush, and likes to place cream and liquid colours not high on the apples but a little lower and further in. ‘Try the lower and inner parts of the cheeks, closer to the nose and down towards the sides of mouth. It’s a ruddiness I associate with healthy, Scandinavian living,’ he says. MAC director of make-up artistry Terry Barber