4 Truly Mesmerizing Beauty Trends From Milan Fashion Week

Including riffs on the classic red lip, metallic everything and museum-worthy hairstyles.

New York started out the Fall 2020 shows with braids galore, vampire-inspired looks, flashes of neon and a variety of veil-covered faces; then, in London, models wore embellished eye makeup, wet-looking hair, metallic accents and '60s throwbacks. But the backstage beauty trends aren't done rolling in just yet: Not to be outdone, the Milan runways served up a whole bunch of hair and makeup moments worth marveling at.

Ahead, we present four of the most impactful.

Heavy Metals

All things glittery and glimmery usually find a home on the runway — but this season in Milan, they were particularly present in the hair and makeup. For GCDS, makeup artist Erin Parsons created multi-colored foil lips, creating a stunning, oil-spill-like effect. Pat McGrath, too, was inspired by gleaming finishes: For the Prada runway, she used gunmetal-toned pigment to give models pristine floating rectangles of metallic eye makeup that hovered near their eye sockets. The most jaw-dropping iteration, though, was the one Julien d'Ys crafted for the Marni show. The artist went all-out, dousing models' faces and hair in various colors of glitter for a dazzling sparkle-bomb effect.

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Center Parts

This next trend is admittedly a bit less flashy than the previous — and that's why it's so refreshing. Whether clean, sleek and precise or slightly undone and punk-y, center-parted hairstyles had an undeniable moment on the Milan runways. Tod's and Salvatore Ferragamo saw fairly simple takes on this, with ponytails and smooth blowouts rounding out the effect. At Max Mara, hairstylist Sam McKnight roughed things up a bit by incorporating Boy George-inspired braids and rags. What we loved about the center-parted look Anthony Turner created for the Missoni show was that he tailored it to each specific model, giving those with natural curls center-parted braids and those with naturally smooth hair soft blowouts or ponytails.

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Red Lip Riffs

The red lip is easily one of the most iconic and classic beauty staples in existence, but it seemed that makeup artists in Milan challenged themselves to reinvent it or riff on it in new, playful ways for the Fall 2020 shows. Both Jil Sander's and MSGM's looks were bright and warm-toned, but the former's featured a soft satin finish, while the latter's delivered a high-shine gloss. Makeup artist Lynsey Alexander did a monochromatic, blurred-out terra cotta red on models' lips and eyes for Missoni, while Peter Philips chose a deeper, dramatic berry red with a powdery-soft finish for Fendi's show.

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Museum-Worthy Hair

We try not to play favorites, but if we had to choose a favorite beauty trend from the Milan shows, it would be the absolute hair masterpieces we spotted on the runways. From the sculptural to the painterly, these looks put hairstylists' artistry on full display. An obvious standout was the coiled updo look McKnight created for the Fendi show: Sleek in the front, amazingly elaborate in the back — and accented with an array of equally beautiful and interesting headbands that wrapped from ear to ear at the nape of models' necks — this look was about as dreamy as runway beauty gets. Gucci's show featured a broad array of different hairstyles, but several of them, like bejweled headpieces and voluminous, crimped blunt cuts, were particularly impressive. For Jeremy Scott's Marie Antoinette-inspired look at Moschino, Paul Hanlon created a series of towering, campy wigs in bright candy colors, while Jawara spray-painted neon, stenciled shapes onto models' hair at Emilio Pucci — a move inspired by none other than Li'l Kim. Art, indeed.

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