What happened at the MAC A/W2015 Trends Presentation

Beauty is diversity. It seems makeup will be going through a transition this coming season, as we no longer expect trends to follow a common thread. Yes, it seems we’ll be getting a wider range of trends to suit every makeup inspiration. Dark vs light, hard vs soft, color vs muted tones, texture vs technique–makeup artists came up with a varied mash-up of eras and ideas to compose this season’s trends presentation.

I couldn’t be more excited about this. Finally, we have license to explore and experiment with makeup, combining trends that seem like they’re from opposite ends of the spectrum. We can be strong, dynamic and creative, to the point of reconsidering and reinventing beauty classics. I have never been one to go dangerously against convention, but it is good to know that we can play around with trends so freely. It’s refreshing to be able to do our own thing and let our personal style shine through, and not let makeup rules define us. The best description of A/W2015’s trends is this: Makeup is polarized between dark anarchy and light romance, with the challenge being that of how to play with tough and tender beauty in one makeup.

Lets go through MAC’s four makeup trends for A/W2015, shall we?

1.) Beautiful and damned. How to breathe new life into the color black? By way of victorians-meets-punk-meets-couture levels of elegance. This makeup trend infuses the toughest attitudes of monochrome with a heritage of extreme elegance, providing an entirely modern vision of powerful femininity. Black lipstick, hell yes.

2.) Strength of beauty. Elegance gets a re-think in the wake of the reality explored in the last few seasons: dressing the face in subtly beautifying makeup that strengthens the features (see blush pink, bronzer, straight brows and mascara get modernized) results in a new beauty. This is as natural as we get this season.

3.) Love worn. It suddenly feels right to redefine the idea of sexiness and come to the realization that it’s moved far and away from cliche; this makeup plays with a translucent grey-scale that reinvents the smoky eye. Think makeup that has been worn all day–or night–and is all the better for it.

4.) Red 70s. Red lips are reworked, with a deep red contemporary twist on the classic that is a crimson mouth. It’s retro-inspired, but not as we know it: these unconventional reds stem from the rusty haze of the 70s, stopping to pay reference everywhere from romantic pre-Raphaelite auburn tones to the brick shades of the 80s and 90s.

Yes, this season diversity is for all and we have free reign to play around with these trends. We can go as light or as dark as we like, for as long as it suits our personal style. Here are more photos from MAC’s Autumn/Winter 2015 Trends Presentation.