How-To: Get GP’s Easy Everyday Makeup

Don’t talk about faces being canvases to be primed with Dick Page; one of the top makeup artists working today and the artistic director at Shiseido, Page comes at the “natural,” “just-woke-up-like-this,” “office everyday” look from the opposite direction, starting with eyes, moving to cheek and lip color, and only then addressing the skin. “You get a little definition at the eye, and a little color in the lip and cheek—then you go in and see if you need anything else,” he says. “Not the other way around.”

At one of our goop Label shoots at GP’s beach house, Page showed us precisely how easy—and how gorgeous—this approach is. “It’s sort of the opposite of those pile-everything-on YouTube videos,” he says. “I love to watch them—they’re sort of a like reverse autopsy, you know? But the volume of material going on those faces, my god. This…well, it’s definitely not that.”

Page doesn’t so much have a particular aesthetic as he does a sense of adventure and curiosity that plays out in his work and his life (here’s a cooking lesson he gave us last year; check his Instagram @dickpageface for brilliant recipes, travel inspiration, makeup of course, and the cutest dogs on earth).

Like an outfit that can be dressed up or down, this makeup is flexible. “Ask yourself, what’s my day like?” says Page. “I have a friend who talks about makeup on a sliding scale—it goes from ‘Don’t leave the house,’ to ‘You’ll do,’ to ‘Presentable,’ to ‘Okay, then!’ and so on. No matter where you are on that scale, it’s not about a lot of edges, or anything graphic, it’s about softening, no stress.” Below, the beyond-easy elements, and how to approach them.

Eyes

As you see above on GP, Page doesn’t always recommend mascara. “Maybe I missed the meeting, maybe the pages of my manual were stuck together…but I don’t think you always need mascara,” he says. “It shouldn’t be this ‘have to,’ desert-island thing. Instead of mascara, you can go in with a dark brown/chocolate or black eyeliner pencil, like Shiseido Smoothing Pencil, and just muscle it into the base of the lashes. It’s about definition and setting a tone—it might be all you need. You could also use a cream liner and a brush (rather than a pencil). I love to work with brushes, but lots of people love a pencil—either works. Wipe any extra off, and then you’ve got it: A little definition and tone, and you might just stop there.”

“If you want to go further, then maybe put a gentle curl in the lashes—not a full-on bent angle in the lash, just a little soft curl. Then if you want mascara, great: You’ve already got the liner, so you don’t need to layer on coats and coats of mascara to get definition. A single coat of Shiseido Full Lash is perfection.”

Lips + Cheeks

Page loves color—vibrant, red-based color, in sheer or super-pigmented shades. “Somehow we lost sight of real color in makeup,” he says. “It became all about mud colors. I did the Victoria’s Secret show three years in a row, and I was like, these girls need real pigment in their skin. People have gone crazy for all the mud shades, the stripes of contouring—it’s got to be simpler than that.”

“People have this fear of red,” Page says. “But used in a transparent way, it makes anyone look good. Use a pinkier one for paler skin, a plummier one for darker skin. I love to use a lipstick, for both lip and cheek—I like cream colors, and when you’ve got the same color on lips and cheeks, it just gives you a little tone. My favorite is Shiseido Rouge Rouge Lipstick in Red Queen. A colored balm works, too—just smudge it on and pack it in. Either way, it takes ten seconds. If you want a little more, use a quick nude-ish pencil underneath. People say, ‘What if my lipstick fades?!?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, you put a little more on.'”

Face

It’s only post eye, lip, and cheek that Page works on the skin. “You do the definition and the pigment, and then you have a look: How does the face look? Do you want more pulled-together, or just presentable? You could just stop with the eyes and the color, but if you want to even out the skin a bit, I like concealer. I like to have maybe two shades of concealer, because even if you’re diligent about sunblock, your skin tone shifts with the season—we shot this out in Amagansett, so Gwyneth has a little color—just from being outside, being alive by the beach!”

Page says, “When you’re covering up the nasties, you don’t want to go too light, or you’re essentially putting highlighter on them—there should be concealer warnings on concealer boxes: It draws attention to the problem if your shade is too light. You want something malleable like Shiseido Perfecting Stick Concealer, and pick something pretty close to your skin color. Blend a little out at the corners of your mouth, and think about softening around the corners of your eyes, and where it can tend to get red, like your nose.”

“Remember that if you start to get into full erasure, though, your face ends up looking half done,” says Page. “You just want to get a little of the red out: Think of doing a light-handed grooming, not getting your face on, you know? People get into this fanaticism, they want to get rid of any trace of red near the eyes. And then there’s the mythical horror of the dark circle. It’s always less than you think it is!”

Extra

Page is not adverse to gilding the lily—if you’re in the mood. “Highlighting—just a dot of it at the inner corner of the eye is a trick we do for photography all the time, but it works in real life, too. I like just a dot of a gold-ish cream highlighter. If you’re really feeling it, you can do a dot at the outer corner of the eyes, just underneath the brow, too.”

How much is too much? “It’s really about how you feel,” says Page. “I mean, back in the day, for my mother, a day look was about wearing only a single pair of eyelashes! If you’re looking to survive a brutal meeting, you might want a full face of compact foundation that day, but otherwise—minimize!”