Wallpaper* Design Awards 2025: the make-up collections defining contemporary beauty

One of the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2025 winners includes a recent collection of eye and lip pencils from Hermès Beauty, named Trait d’Hermès. ‘I vividly remember that I was one of those kids who loved stationery and having a huge palette of colours in front of me,’ Hermès Beauty’s creative director Gregoris Pyrpylis said of the collection upon its launch in October 2024.

Conceived in collaboration with the brand’s packaging creator Pierre Hardy, it reflects on these childhood memories and is designed to resemble a kaleidoscopic set of new crayons. ‘Make-up has become even more joyful and more playful than ever,’ he continued. ‘And Trait d’Hermès is an invitation to explore this to its fullest.’

Wallpaper* Design Awards 2025: make-up collections by Hermès, Dior, Celine, Chanel and Prada selected by beauty editor Hannah Tindle

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A grown-up invitation to play with make-up application has felt like a running theme over the past year in beauty. Peter Philips, Dior’s creative and image director of make-up, channelled a similar line of thought into the reimagined Diorshow Mono Couleur eyeshadows and Stylo eyeliners, encouraging spontaneity and experimentation with an array of colours and textures. In the accompanying Diorshow ad campaign, Philips drew abstract black and pastel-toned stripes across model Deva Cassel’s eyes – paying homage to Serge Lutens, whose radically illustrative work for Dior creative director Marc Bohan used every inch of the face as a surface for painting and drawing with make-up.

During his tenure at Celine, Hedi Slimane mined the modernist archives of its founder Céline Vipiana. (Besides clothing, Vipiana produced the brand’s first perfume, Vent Fou, in 1963, alongside accessories and lifestyle objects.) Before announcing his departure last October (2024) Slimane marked a new chapter, launching Celine Beauté with a single product: a satin lipstick in an effortless red dubbed Rouge Triomphe. As quintessential as a piece from Slimane’s ready-to-wear collections, it’s a lipstick so universal that the individual ways it can be worn seem almost endless.

Back in 2022, Chanel set up its Cometes Collective, a group of emerging make-up stars hand-picked by the brand to formulate a seasonal, limited-edition collection – ‘independent thinkers united, above all, by the conviction that beauty comes from the freedom to be and to become yourself in all your richness, complexity and nuance,’ says the house.

The first make-up artists selected were Ammy Drammeh, Cécile Paravina and Valentina Li, with the collective’s debut launching in 2024, courtesy of Li. A painter before she turned her hand to make-up, she sports a blue bob (Li considers the colour to be a ‘reflection of her inner world’). As a result, her Spring 2024 collection traversed a range of blues from cobalt to pale azure in a Les 4 Ombres eyeshadow quad, Stylo Yeux eyeliner and Lumière de L’Océan illuminating powder.

Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons described their vision for Prada’s S/S 2025 collection as ‘rallying call against the internet algorithm’ and a rejection of the ‘derivative and expected’. Casting director Ashley Brokaw assembled a roster of new and eclectic looks for the runway show, with Prada’s global creative make-up artist Lynsey Alexander taking an equally tailored approach to beauty. Using products from the brand’s namesake make-up line – including the Memphis Milano-esque Dimensions eyeshadow palettes, which Alexander described as a ‘juxtaposition of ugly and beautiful, coming together to create something quite extraordinary’ in a 2023 interview with Wallpaper* – each model received a unique look, corresponding to their facial structures and personalities.

As artist Cindy Sherman once said, ‘I’m good at using my face as a canvas. I’ll see a photograph of a character and try to copy them on to my face.’ It’s a statement that speaks to the current mood in contemporary make-up and beauty, where the face becomes a canvas in every sense of the word.

Models: Mouy Onak at IMG, Essoye Mombot at Oui Mangement, Marie Loridan at Women Management. Casting: Ikki Casting at WSM. Hair: Rimi Ura at Calliste Agency. Digital assistant: Farouk at Dope Paris. Photography assistant: Theophile Parat. Make-up assistants: Toma Marandeau, Ekaterina Mignery.

Find all the Wallpaper* Design Awards winners in the February 2025 issue of Wallpaper* is available in print on newsstands from 9 January 2025, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today